[{"id":"9277","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S2E1, Deep Curation – Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice, 5 October 2020, du Plessis and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/ "],"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 2"],"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":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2e2272f2-55cd-4126-9504-959fca8bda69/audio/ea743428-b8dd-4aa5-b204-c8d72da6416b/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:56:13\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,035,897 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print Recordings:\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nBourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009.\\n\\nBrown, Lee Ann. In the Laurels, Caught. Albany: Fence Books, 2013.\\n\\nChristakos, Margaret. charger. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2020.\\n\\ndu Plessis, Klara. “Santa Cova Muscles.” Unpublished.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019.\\n\\nLongair, Sarah. “Cultures of Curating: the Limits of Authority.” Museum History Journal 8.1 (2015): 1-7.\\n\\nMiddleton, Peter. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (March 2005): 7-34. Web. 25 December 2016.\\n\\nNakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.\\n\\nObrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.\\n\\nRadford, Deanna. Poems. Unpublished.\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. Rag Cosmology. Toronto: Book*Hug, 2017.\\n\\nRogoff, Irit. “Curating/Curatorial.” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 19-38.\\n\\nVidokle, Anton. “Art without Artists?” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 216-226.\\n\\nWheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.\\n\\nPoetry Recordings:\\n\\nDeep Curation 4th Space. Feat. Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Deanna Radford. 7 November 2019. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Boston University. Feat. Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Sawako Nakayasu. 30 January 2020. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Mile End Poets’ Festival. Feat. Aaron Boothby, Klara du Plessis, Canisia Lubrin, Erin Robinsong. 24 November 2018. Personal archive.\\n\\nSir George Williams Reading Series. Feat. Jackson Mac Low. 26 March 1971. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1\\n\\nFour Horsemen. Two Nights. 9 and 10 October 1987. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/4-\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549464547328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Who chooses what words will be heard at a poetry reading, in what order, and why? Since 2018, Montreal-based poet and researcher Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation.\n\nThis episode – the “Season Two” premiere of The SpokenWeb Podcast – chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form, with excerpted and intertwined works creating a thematic, cohesive arc. The eventual collaborative, choral, and sometimes improvisational nature of this project raises questions about authority and authorship. As such, this episode conceptualizes shifting degrees of responsibility between curator and authors, and the dynamic space created as a result of this shared and mobile agency. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio, include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong.\n\n00:03\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitch Voice Ends] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Picture yourself at your local arts cafe for a poetry reading with some of your favourite artists and writers. You settle into a nearby seat and the hum of idle chatter around you begins to fade as the poet’s ready to take the stage. Now ask yourself: who chooses which artist reads first? Who chooses what words will be heard at the poetry reading and in what order and why? Since 2018 Montreal based poet and researcher, Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation. This podcast episode chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form with excerpted and intertwined works, creating a thematic cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong. Here is Klara du Plessis with season two episode one of the SpokenWeb Podcast “Deep Curation: Experiments with the Poetry Reading as Practice.” [Theme Music].\n02:18\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m Klara du Plessis. A poet and PhD student in English at Concordia University. I’m doing research on the history and practice of the curation of poetry and performance. [Instrumental Strings] About three years ago, I saw a friend in Toronto and we sat on a terrace with our drinks. Our conversation felt energetic and I shared a new idea that I was excited about. So excited about that I continued not only thinking about it, but doing it. I call this doing Deep Curation.\n03:00\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I developed and theorized over the past few years. Through it, I deliberately heightened the curator’s role while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are.\n03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices as sample of Deep Curation performance]\n03:29\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the initial phase of experimentation and in my role as a Deep Curation curator, I would choose the poems read by the authors and the order of the presentation.\n03:41\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices]\n03:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the later phases and in Deep Curation’s more robust form, I worked to create a thematic arc, to re-contextualize the poet’s work, to place poems in conversation with each other through proximity, but also excerpting and formal experimentation.\n04:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Voices]\n04:06\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Strings] The idea for Deep Curation hit me after almost six years of field work organizing the monthly Montreal-based Résonance Reading Series. [Music: Strings increases volume, includes overlapping audio of background event chatter] While this series precedes Deep Curation, it forms the foundation of my experience in thinking about curation. It was a big deal for me to wrap up that series. [End Music: Strings] It was such an ongoing, almost durational part of my curational life. I’ll never forget the final closing event of the series, held on 7, August 2018. [Audio Recording: Background Chatter]\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Klara du Plessis] Can everyone hear me? Amazing. It’s a really huge turnout, which is amazing and I’m so, so happy to see all of you. There are some extra fold up chairs kind of by the front door, on the right-hand side, opposite the counter. So, if anyone wants one, they’re there. Please help yourself. Or ask me to help you. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, welcome to the final Résonance reading! [Cheering and Clapping] Yeah, it’s been six years of plus minus 10 readings per year, which makes that give or take 60 meetings right here on this stage. So, I’m gonna allow myself to be nostalgic for a moment because Résonance kind of started by accident in a way, like I just finished my Master’s and decided that I was going to take some time to do my own writing. And that led to me actually working here at Résonance Cafe in different capacities. But then of course I noticed the stage. I was like, okay, well it’s a perfect venue, let’s organize one reading. And so, I invited some friends to read and it was a huge success. It was super fun. And it kind of, then we decided that, “Oh, well, we can just as well start doing it again and again.” And I started organizing events on a monthly basis, but like one month by one month. And if I can give any aspiring curator advice, never organize month to month because it’s incredibly stressful. Like every couple of weeks, “Oh my gosh, I still need three readers, where am I going to find them.” And it just feels like you’re constantly organizing. [Mechanical Sound]. So, there was a point that I realized I needed to step up. And I started organizing the readings way in advance, like up to a year in advance. And this shift in attitude also kind of became a shift in who it was booking. So, I started inviting people who I thought wouldn’t say yes, you know, so I can be like, “who do I want to see on stage?” “Who do I really, really admire?” And then I’ll just reach out. And like the amazing thing was that pretty much everyone I’ve ever invited has said yes. With a few exceptions, with very legitimate reasons that they can’t come. And yeah, so I just realized that people [Metal Clanging] need a platform, people want to share their work. And yeah, that felt like a major kind of shift in what Résonance became. [Mechanical Sound] And then people started asking me to read people —agents and publicists started contacting me — and Résonance became larger, kind of like national in scope. It felt more serious and it felt like  way more responsibility. This is maybe like three, four years in. And then I very slowly started thinking that Résonance had become a form of authority in the sense of being able to offer or withhold opportunity. Those high standards are one of the reasons that I ended up deciding after six years that this kind of like the end of an era, in a sense that if Résonance were to continue, I would want to keep doing better and doing more. And as like one woman doing this, I don’t have the time or the resources to do that. But I do want to say that curating Résonance has been an absolute joy. It has been fun. It has been fulfilling. It has been challenging, energizing, and I’ve learned so much and I’ve met such great people [Audience Member: Woo!] So, thank you. [Clapping] That’s like the longest speech I’ve ever given here. [Instrumental Strings]\n09:01\tKlara du Plessis:\tI had heaps of experience organizing and hosting literary events, but Deep Curation was somehow different. I wanted to curate a poetry reading. I wanted to really curate a poetry reading. I wanted to invite poets whose work I love to read. And then I wanted to tell those poets which poems to read and in what order. “Oh”, my friend said, “yes”, my friend said. “That is a good idea.” [Instrumental Strings with Percussion]\n09:33\tKlara du Plessis:\tWhenever I chat with art historians or exhibition curators about the research that I’m doing, they always have one of two reactions. They either insist that curation in the visual arts is grossly under theorized and not thought about critically at all, or that the word curatorial has been overused and they couldn’t stand hearing it one more time. Coming from a literary perspective, though, it seems to me that the visual arts has done a tremendous job of sussing out critical vocabulary surrounding the presentation, dissemination, and structures of collaboration inherent to curating. For starters, practitioners of the visual arts and museum studies have theorized a very useful division between the terms of curating and curatorial. I’d like to quote scholar and curator Irit Rogoff on this rift. Rogoff suggests quote: [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “the distinction is of curating as professional practice, which involves a whole set of skills and practices, materials, and institutional and infrastructural conditions. Developing the concept of the curatorial has been about getting away from representation and trying to see within this activity, a set of possibilities for much larger agendas in the art world. The curatorial then defines the larger frame” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumental] When I think of most poetry readings that I have been involved in, and especially those that precede Deep Curation, I interpret curating versus the curatorial as a division of labour. Often the poetry reading organizer takes on the work of curating. I mean that the organizer invites the poets, they book a venue, promote the event on social media, they check the microphone and adopt a responsibility of care towards presenters and audience. They ensure that everyone is having a good time. In contrast the poets themselves enact the curatorial role. The poets choose which poems they will share, how these poems will be framed by anecdote and preamble, and in which order they will be performed. As critic Peter Middleton says, choosing which poems to read is quote, [Click] [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “a fiercely held prerogative of the poet.” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] [Click] All of this implies that the organizer of the event has little to no input into the work performed at the poetry reading. They don’t know whether they will like the specific works chosen by the poet. They also don’t know whether the works by different poets will enter into relevant dialogue with each other, [Audio Recording: Echoes of chatter at an event] or whether there will be a thematic or conceptual arc to the event as a whole. Differently put the literary curator has little agency to shape or mediate the event as a cohesive relational platform for the presentation of art. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this division of curating and curatorial and how it impacts the organization of literary events. I became obsessed with trying to shift this dynamic, to play with it, and to get material answers to theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s pivotal question: [Begin Music: Intermittent Strings] what does a form become when it is plunged into a dimension of dialogue? This isn’t a new question. As Bourriaud historicizes in terms of the visual arts, a paradigm shift occurred after cubism resulting in a radical turn away from human deity and human object dialectics and a turn towards human to human relationality. Starting mid-century and swelling through the ‘70s, into the ‘90s, happenings, gatherings and participation-focused art, place sociability and the relationships between human experience center stage. [End Music: Intermittent Strings] At the same time, collaboration and interactivity became a source for exploration in the literary world.\n13:19\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\t[Inaudible/Multiple voices reciting poetry over one another] Opening quotations number. Open quotations. [Inaudible] Closed quotations. Semi-colon. [Inaudible]\n13:30\tKlara du Plessis:\tA good example [Audio Recording from above continues faintly] is Jackson Mac Low’s communal readings using volunteers from the audience to perform elaborate scriptings of his poems.\n13:37\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tSemi-colon. Evan. [Inaudible]\n13:43\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Audio Recording continues faintly] These readings often resulted in cacophonous chaos. This audio clip is from Mac Low’s appearance at the Sir George Williams reading series on 26, March 1971.\n13:54\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tX [inaudible] capital E. A. V [Inaudible] R.Q. comma. semi-colon. period. K. N. Apostrophe. P. 6. D. [Inaudible] Dash. Dash. Dash. Dash. Semi-colon.\n14:14\tKlara du Plessis:\tAnother relevant example is the so called Four Horseman: BP Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. [Begin: Audio recording, inaudible] These four poets exploded the potential of sound in their polyvocall joint compositions. This audio clip is taken from the 1988 record, Two Nights.\n14:51\tAudio Recording, Four Hourseman\t[Various Vocal Sounds, inaudible]\n14:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation clearly stems from a rich tradition of experimental collaborative poetry performance. It is also engaging though with contemporary vocabulary from the visual arts and importing it to explore literary potentials. I want to listen to some audio clips from three Deep Curation poetry readings curated between late 2018 and early 2020. But I also want to linger on the shift that is activated when some of these theoretical questions come into play. The division of labor between curating and curatorial with poets themselves often deciding how to present their work upholds the familiar concept that poets perform their own roles as authors on stage. Contemporary authors voice their own work as a display of authority and authenticity. [Sound Effect: Box Opening] As scholar Leslie Wheeler suggests [Sound Effect: Box Closing] poetry readings are manifestations [Begin Music: Instrumental] of authentic authorial presence. There is of course also the opposite danger of tipping the scale of authority away from the author to the curator. This is something that curator Anton Vidokle relevantly critiques in terms of the visual arts. He says, curators have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics. Vidokle warns that curators can easily usurp credit from the artists or poets and rob the voice of their creative work. [End Music: Instrumental] One of Deep Curation’s key points of investigation is to trouble the notion of static authorial authority by distributing curatorial agency between author and curator alike. The curator of a Deep Curation poetry reading aims to direct the presentation of poetry by facilitating polyvocal dialogues between poets and between the works of those poets. Yet poets always retain authorship over the poetic output. Poems and excerpts of poems are placed deliberately alongside each other to create thematic narrative and conceptual arcs and arguments. The poetry reading is no longer a series of random poems placed side by side. Rather, the poetry reading presents a cohesive entity of combined poems that collaborate towards a larger sonic event. By directing, scripting, but also working together to design the poetry reading in this way, agency circulates from the poets to the curator, and back to the poets. Poets and curator constantly navigate a dynamic balance between control and freedom, individual authorship and collaboration.\n17:07\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m going to share audio clips from three phases of my Deep Curation experiments, narrating the project’s development, and illustrating shifting approaches in my practice. [Begin Music: Instrumental] The audio clips will further inspire a discussion on this relationship between control and freedom. [Music Intensifies] Deep Curation: Phase One: Resonance. [Music Continues] One of the first Deep Curation experiments I curated, I invited poets Aaron Boothby, Canisia Lubrin, and Erin Robinsong to participate. I knew that their poetry would form a relevant conversation and I could imagine a reading that centered ecology, language, and loss. In hindsight, my tentative curatorial strategy was just a buffed-up version of a normal poetry reading. And of course, I realized how fraught the word ‘normal’ sounds. For the most part, I scripted the order and interlay of poems by the different authors, but I rarely excerpted or initiated any kind of material intervention into the structure of the poems and their coexistence. I also included some of my own writing. And so, the four of us read together at the vegan jazz bar Résonance Café during the Mile End Poets Festival on 24, November 2018. Here is a short audio clip from this reading. Erin’s poem “Cortes” is deliberately positioned beside a section from an early version of my long poem, “Santa Cova Muscles”.\n18:49\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong\tThe mountain told my eye / its sparkling name / and in return, I answered / from the ashes/ and green /gathered round/ and echoed /along the windy heights/ O my friends/ if you are alone / stretch out both brains / and lash together a middle one/ thus three-way / we waited for the dawn/ fresh and rosy fingered / as the backs of animals/ when evening falls / nobody / yet saved his skin/ so we ourselves untie / the ship took places at the oars/ and seek again / an island where /with burning clouds / and loyal dark / we soon rouse\n19:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis\tDespite density a kind of stupidity crushing words/ into a pulp of intelligence /no /air /allowance/ Instead, a breakage into sight /breakwater from words, hieroglyphic impotence / gathering light through the eyes, tearing it out/ salt, water, ocean writing, / organic prismatic/ I stumble over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains/ I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants of headstones/ The soft jagged edge of the mountain range / where I walk daily for three weeks, then leave/ encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder/ This mountain intelligence, reasoning beyond the usual kind. I reject truth, but fixate on beauty/This might imply a material privilege, visual impulse, / but this banal state of mind is reversed to a vibration, the vibratory / relation exceeds the eye, yet enters everything through the surface of the eye/  to inoculate everything/ Heading towards the garden, which is the museum, / this ontological greenness…\n21:13\tKlara du Plessis:\tI love how green and eyes weave a connecting thread. When Erin says [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Stretch out both brains and lash together a middle one] I respond [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder, this mountain intelligence reasoning beyond the usual kind] thematic coherence and a similar affective register bind these independent poems together. They become perceived as a unit, or at least as a conversation. Despite Erin and myself each composing our poem separately at different times and with different intents. They merge here in this reading through adjacency to create a temporarily shared authorship. In this case, I am both an author sharing my writing beside other authors, and I am the curator of the event as a whole. This implies that my authorship oscillates between a kind of directive stance towards the event as a combined performative entity and the embodiment of intimate listening in proximity to other poets while collectively sharing our poetry. I returned to Résonance Café, the venue for this Deep Curation event in order to jog my memory about the reading, but also to record myself in a less formal, more journal-like way. One could say that I’m [Begin: Echo Effect] Deep Curating my voice through time [End: Echo Effect] as I collage archival material from 2018, formal narration for this podcast, and soundscape audio from the field.\n22:36\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\t[Background Noise] So here I am in Résonance Café, the venue of many, a poetry reading over the course of six years. All kinds of background noises: [Microwave Beep] cleaning the fridge, pots [Coffee Grinder] the coffee machine. Many readings were ambiently disrupted by the coffee grinder. [Background Noise] With me is Isis Giraldo. She’s one of the co-owners of Résonance Café.\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHello!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDo you want to say hi?\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHi!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tAs already mentioned the second Deep Curation event with Canisia, Erin, and Aaron, also happened here in Résonance Café. And, this is really one of the spaces where I’ve listened the most deeply I’ve ever listened on the stage being in such close proximity to the people around me on stage. Because we hadn’t rehearsed very much and because we had such minimal scripting for the reading we were very attuned to what the other readers were doing to make sure that we didn’t miss a cue or forget where and when to start reading. And so just the degree of listening between the four of us on stage was very acute. I remember in particular that Canisia was reading a lot slower than me and that as the event progressed I kind of matched my pace to hers  — it was an element of kind of like empathetic performance where we really tried to listen and adapt to what was happening sonically and collaboratively.\n24:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe four of us were in this together. We were on the stage together. But perhaps counter-intuitively, our togetherness came at the cost of remaining separate. Each poet’s reading is extremely clear and articulated in solitude. Each poet’s words remain their own words and as fellow performers we each respect the sonic space needed for another poet to project their work into the room. The images of Erin’s poem make eye contact with the images in my poem, but they don’t overlap or resolve into chaos.\n25:15\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong:\t[Inaudible]…and seek again an island where with burning clouds and loyal dark, we soon rouse\n25:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tPoems touch, but don’t merge.\n25:31\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDespite density, a kind of stupidity/ Crushing words into a pulp of intelligence /No air allowance.\n25:36\tKlara du Plessis:\tAs the curator of this event, my intention was to create a dialogue between the different poetries presented, but I was also clearly hesitant to overstep my own adopted authority. I felt strange to excerpt poems that I had not authored or to demand borders between poems to be blurred. This is of course symptomatic of the fact that this reading was only the second experiment in a series of Deep Curation poetry readings. I was still figuring out my own project of taking control of the poetry reading’s form. I was trying to strike a balance between directing the reading and maintaining the authorial integrity of the authors and of their works. Here is another excerpt from my audio journal, now seated on Resonance’s patio.\n26:17\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tI’m sitting on the patio outside now. And I’m still thinking about this Deep Curation event that I did with Aaron, Erin, and Canisia. And I’m thinking back and reflecting on the extreme release of energy that happened directly after we performed together that night. And just this like real recognition of the potential of what the project held and what we could feel it, the project could still develop into. And I remember kind of talking to Aaron, Erin and Canisia and, you know, asking how that felt about the very small instances of excerpting, you know, whether they felt comfortable with that after the fact. And they really made it clear to me that while I was being very tentative about excerpting and intertwining, those are really the moments that were the most valuable. And that going, moving forward with the project what I really needed to do was to be less careful, be less tentative and be more dramatic with the process of putting poems in conversation with each other and that this approach would really define, should really define what Deep Curation was and how it made it different from other poetry reading events.\n27:35\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] Our conversation excited me and I felt inspired to design stranger, more exploratory Deep Curation scripts. Deep Curation: Phase Two: Fourth Space. [End Music: Instrumental] With a green light go ahead from Erin Robinsong, Aaron Boothby, and Canisia Lubrin, I started formally experimenting with what I now call refrains. These are longer, highly excerpted sections that combine lines and a theme from different poets and different poems into a new whole. Conversations with friends occasionally introduce the words, remix, or cento in relation to these refrains. Borrowed, poetic language repurposed as a new creative body of work. I often fantasize about creating an entire Deep Curation poetry reading using this technique. The following audio clip illustrates this refrain style. It is taken from a Deep Curation poetry reading featuring poets, Kaie Kellough [Audio Recording, Kai Kellough: The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.], Margaret Christakos [Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: Listen, they’re not listening], and Deanna Radford [Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: Voices everywhere, talk talk]. Most of the text is from Kaie’s book Magnetic Equator, Margaret’s Charger, and Deanna’s still unpublished work. The event took place on 7, November 2019 at Concordia University’s Fourth Space, a venue dedicated to the sharing of new scholarly research.\n29:05\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:08\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tListen, you’’re not listening.\n29:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tTongu, words. Sibilant chorus.\n29:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:26\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n29:29\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:44\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n29:50\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:53\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n29:57\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am listening\n30:02\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back, is this a beginning? Is it preferable to be erased, to have a voice that does not know the chorus\n30:10\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tvoices mime rooms\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry to listen.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us, ears\n30:27\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country and ear facing upward and listening,  listening, receiving signals from the world.\n30:37\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whisper. Lip to ear. Through glass. Walls. Plastic. Light scope.\n30:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n31:10\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n31:12\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am. Listening.\n31:14\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back. Is this a listening? Is it preferable to be beginning? To have a voice that does not know the chorus?\n31:22\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tRooms mime voices.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry. To listen.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us. Ears.\n31:35\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear, facing upward and listening/ listening, receiving signals from the world.\n31:47\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA speech act for ears / speech acts for ears.\n31:50\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tEars would be like metal or dreams of hallucinatoria.\n31:58\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whispered lip to ear through glass, walls, plastic, light scope.\n32:04\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tVaricose, inner ear exorcism.\n32:09\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear facing upward and listening/ Listening, receiving signals from the world.\n32:16\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tSignal whistling for us chorally / come into my arms, darlings / come soft into this cloud.\n32:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tComposing these excerpted refrains on shared topics of listening and poetic articulation clearly took a high degree of familiarity with the author’s work. I needed to recall relevant lines in order to place them in thematic conversations. At first, my process was to mark up hard copies of authors’ books, but in time I realized that searchable PDFs hugely facilitated the process. A PDF allows quicker access to lines and the ability to copy paste excerpts into the refrain. Creating these refrains took a poet’s mind and an eye for composition. Lines were extracted from the original works. They were recombined into a new context and new conversation with lines from other poems and from the minds of other poets. This is a good example of the curator adopting the role of the author. As a curator, I was doing more than mediating the creative performance. I was also molding, creating and literally authoring a new script. Although I always worked with the consent of the invited poets, I was possibly also overstepping my role. My role as directive curator was productively challenged working with [Begin: Background Chatter] Kaie, Margaret, and Deanna, skilled performers and formal experimenters themselves. Kaie had graciously welcomed us into his home serving coffee and warm croissants as we settled into work on the script of our design. We discussed the arc of the event, performance cues and logistics. My memory of our discussion has Margaret questioning the possibility [End: Background Chatter] of opening up the script. She was curious about more organic instances of interjecting into another poet’s words, supporting them with echoes, or drowning them out with overlay. Margaret, Kaie, Deanna and I were all excited about this possibility of opening up the script and worked to integrate new strategies into the performance outline. Some poems needed to be read solo, to maintain the impact of the words’ meaning. But some sections were begging to be choral, to maximize the potential of three voices in performance. In the following audio clip, the three poets’ voices are organically interspersed. The poets borrow each other’s words and insert them into their own poems to create a dynamic and playful conversation.\n34:34\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tI never cared to be a pastoral poet wrote poetry, a small flatland  longings, a poet of evangelical strictures\n34:43\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors.\n34:45\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tRevolutions, oceanic futures written in the veins of the vegetal/ Tenements of Babel dense with voices/ Languages spilling out the summer windows.\n34:56\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors, nor errs/ Nor ers /Nor ors. But ore\n35:08\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tEarthen oar. Earthen tongue. [inaudible] speechless under death. Oar. Air. Weightless volume of big sky.\n35:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors /nor errors, not ers, nor ors but ore /for roses, for eros in decision making/ if edgewise among tongue that propriety.\n35:27\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tErrors, airs, URS, oars, or roses/ name or summon arrows/ muse or crave savour moan or receive conceive arise or arouse.\n35:41\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLike her name was inland/ a corpus yours/ Tongue yours and corp yours.\n35:51\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tEarthen tongues ripple speechless under yours/ Air weightless volume of big sky.\n35:57\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLaps and licks and skirmishes.\n36:00\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tWriters circumnavigate the question with smiles and gestures that dismiss/They write from everywhere at once.\n36:07\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tThe a-ha of poetic inspiration.\n36:12\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe only places the a-ha/ The immediate port at which the next letter a-ha.\n36:18\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\t— a-ha!.\n36:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t— is detained, arrives, or vanishes. [Overlapping Voices] Thank God it exists. A-ha! The ah-a exists either here nor there/ Is every weather, where? / Which is here, which is nowhere.\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tA-ha. A-ha. The a-ha a poetic inspiration, shifted to an a-ha reflex of thank God it exists a-ha more is a-ha now I can have this and this to this a-ha this works.\n36:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tA-ha! The poets are taking a-ha! authorship directing the a-ha! performance, developing it and initiating exchange. They’re also leaving audile space for the semantic soundscape of different voices to be heard alongside each other. This is not always the case.\n37:11\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t[inaudible, voices reciting poetry overlapping one another] Press down to form home print that scattered over future service, entrusted. disclosed. incidental behavioural derived body unsettled my reaches organic my past and now my scaped spread evenly over my spaces my means of speech my body my body my personal info invisible presence a proxy my body my body is measured is measured is filled with water scattered future interested disclosed incidental my reach is organic my past image spread evenly over my face [inaudible] stretch. [inaudible]\n38:32\tKlara du Plessis:\tHarmony transgresses into cacophony. Deanna and Kaie read briskly over each other, while Margaret doubles words standing out to her and adds a third layer to the mashup. This is a true merging of voices. Separate strands are no longer clearly audible. Rather, an assembly of voices, tones, and timbres swell chaotically into a shared ownership of poetry.\n38:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tHere I am, again, reminiscing on my audio journal almost a year after the Deep Curation event. I traveled down to Fourth Space, the venue of this Deep Curation event and imagined that I could see the event replaying itself through the glass walls almost photographically. So, today has been quite an odyssey. I’m now down by Concordia University’s Fourth Space, which, is of course closed. And I can — the most I can do is peer through the big glass windows and try and imagine again how this Deep Curation event happened with Kaie, Margaret and Deanna. And so, I’m kind of envisioning again the large screen that had a PowerPoint presentation projected onto it and the chairs that I had reconfigured into a circle so that the three poets and I kind of sat at the four cardinal points of the circle with the audience members interspersed in between. This really created the sense that audience was part of the performance, that they were inside the sound and you know that the sound was emanating from three different directions. Also, that the three poets could really make eye contact with each other. They weren’t standing in a line on a stage.\n40:15\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin: Instrumental Strings] There was strength in collaboration. Working with Margaret, Kaie, and Deanna on the design of this Deep Curation poetry reading developed it into an expansive, dynamic, and engaged performance. It also generated methods that I continue to use for Deep Curation as an ongoing project. [Instrumental Strings increase].\n40:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation: Phase Three: Boston University. [End: Instrumental String] Preparing for my first PhD field exam I stress-dreamed that I had to create a Deep Curation script in 10 minutes. “Oh no!”, I thought. “This is an impossible task.” “I haven’t spent months reading. In fact, I’m not familiar with the poetry at all!” Luckily in a happy turn of the nightmare variety, I solved the conundrum. In my dream, I created a set of performative cues for improvisation. In my dream, the poets had to choose their own poems, but they had to read them according to my design. The real life, non-dream Deep Curation event that took place at Boston University on 30 January 2020, definitely wasn’t limited to 10 minutes of preparation. But it did function as a broad structure with signals for the authors to move more freely. In other words, my authorship of the outline demanded reauthorship from the poets as they played and reworked their words collectively on stage. This reading included prerecorded audio of Fanny Howe’s poetry and the following audio clip features live performance by Sawako Nakayasu —\n42:22\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tSo, where’s my werewolf pillow.\n42:24\tKlara du Plessis:\t— and Lee Ann Brown.\n42:27\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tBlockade.\n42:27\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis clip extracts poetry from Sawako’s book, Texture Notes, and Lee Ann’s In the Laurels Caught.\n42:36\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Blockade is pink lemonade made from strawberry library books. The Totoro house hums a deep song in yonder glen. You’re a fragment of my imagination. Experience wafts its checkered travelers in with a thumbprint. Vexed then fixed. Seeing signs shaped like huge shoes Fox church road sprang up on her left. Bright blue-green beetle vale under a rock. Keats’ favourite letter was V. She spins it like a tiny DJ on her alphabet box. Wendy Mandy over the wall straggles in with beeping shoes, lit up like a kite.  The leaves are out of pollen or soon will be. Who are you calling a verdant lush. Here, mommy, hold this moss. Hold this mess. Don’t say to me. I don’t like to. Blap is my friend. He’s a boy. He’s a ghost who lives in New York. He painted with me. His hair is yellow.\n43:46\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis section of the Deep Curation script is constructed as a series of wave formations. Lee Ann begins by reading a poem up until the word yellow. Yellow serves as a cue for Sawako to begin reading her poem, “Texture of Needing Yellow”, in the background.\n44:09\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Yellow! He painted. He painted pink hair. His hair is red. I am blap. Here are some pieces of puzzles for you. I will make some more for you. Are you a cat bus? We’re getting married. I married this train. We’re getting married. Cheeky Dickie married a Chickadee. You’re dead, Chuck with yourself. Scraping together, scraping away at a bleeding book and you should be too. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. Where is my werewolf pillow? Sawako.\n44:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tLee Ann improvises. She fixates on the weirdness of the werewolf pillow and transforms this poetic image into a direct question, addressing Sawako head on.\n44:51\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tSawako. Where is it?\n44:53\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tWhere is your werewolf pillow?\n45:02\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tWhere’s my Totoro house that I want on the hill so I can go up there and see all those little puffballs.\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tIt’s down the old [inaudible] stomping in the Ramsey cemetery?\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t[inaudible].\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s where you’re gonna find your werewolf pillow.\n45:22\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tIt’s up in the house. I love my pillow. That deep pillow song. That deep pillow collaboration and curation.\n45:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat deep pillow collaboration and curation? Ha! Reality is ousting any kind of script.\n45:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices, Improvisation] That deep pillow collaboration and curation. [Inaudible]. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies. Where are we now. 5 million years old. What happens to the yellow you had here? Appalachians. 500 million. The texture of yellow. [Inaudible]. Which are plentiful here, like overgrown version of some families, private [Inaudible]. And the position.\n45:59\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe positions have reversed. The poets have exchanged words so that Sawako performs Lee Ann’s words, and vice versa.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Voices Overlapping] The positions reverse. Raised from [inaudible]. Yellow is a light that contains a friendly sort of heat. I am drawn to a newer [inaudible]. Maybe yellow is light which massages. [Inaudible] Carved. Straight path. Thus transmitting. Bumpy road to heaven. And then at a later moment. Existence for a straight arrow. Transposed. It’s an altogether different, similar. The way your friends are different, similar. That way. Here. The point of meeting yellow and it’s specific geography. Down on the bypass where someone wept. Maybe yellow as a geography that grows and shifts. Otherwise, known as now. The now of needing yellow. I need more yellow. That comes lower forth like an angel, the angel needing yellow. Needing yellow without needing yellow. Missing without being missed. Being close to needing yellow is close to not needing yellow. Needing yellow is all —it shows up becomes less being yellow becomes more needing yellow. Near being yellow from the distance or after or close at hand. More, more needing yellow. And more and more and more and more and more needing yellow in result of an explosion, which is yellow and is not needed. That’s enough.\n47:43\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako interjects. Self-reflectivity of both Sawako and Lee Ann’s performance amplifies their authority over the poetry reading at hand. By commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it, they showcase their awareness of their words. They actively take authorship of their poetic presentation by manipulating and reworking the words at their disposal. This is no passive replay of a script, but an engaged and playful [Audio Recording, Overlapping Voices] public display of fluid and fun authorial control.\n48:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] [Inaudible] Five. Million. Years. Old. Yellow that you had here. The texture of being yellow. The permutation of being yellow.\n48:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the Q&A discussion after the Deep Curation performance, Kate Lilley, poet and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney queried the relationship between improvisation and script.\n48:40\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThe script [inaudible] opened some doors and then we opened some more doors in the moment.\n48:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Sawako.\n48:53\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tYeah, we just read through it a little bit yesterday. We had the script before, but we didn’t really do any of this yesterday at all.\n48:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Lee Ann.\n49:04\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tYeah it was very — but I think we were just interested in listening to each other and —\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t— Playing.\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\t— Playing. Yeah. And Lee Ann and I have known each other for many, many years, which I don’t think Klara knew when she curated us. But there is a feeling of friendship that also contributed to the way it felt to be in conversation through our poetry in this particular moment. That was like a gift that Klara gave us.\n49:27\tAudio Recording, Kate Lilley:\tThat certainly came across.\n49:35\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako’s metaphor of the door is apt. As the curator, I initiated gestures that opened doors between the writing of Sawako, Lee Ann, and Fanny Howe. But gestures are never static. The doors kept swinging open and shut as the poets themselves move through doorways and opened other entries and exits that I didn’t even know existed. I’d like the sense of play and improvisation as impetus for the poets to author their own work again, recurrently. I want to extend Charles Bernstein’s claim that each performance of a poem adds to its “fundamentally plural existence”. Not only is the poem multiplying into variant forms, but each performance allows the author to rewrite that poem in performance. By restructuring the conditions in which a poem was being presented and by placing that poem in new proximities to other poems, Deep Curation instigates a radical potential for dynamic and organic re-authorship. [Begin: Instrumental Strings] As the curator of a Deep Curation poetry event, I author the possibility for the poets to re-author their own poetry. [Instrumental Strings continues]\n50:56\tKlara du Plessis:\tDifferent curators have different approaches to curating and to the curatorial. Whether they’re working in visual arts or literary fields. Critic, Sarah Longair’s notion of curatorial authority, [End: Instrumental Strings] for example, imagines the curator’s role as that of resident scholar. The curator is someone who dedicates her life to the preservation and dissemination of a body of work. For her, the curator embodies expertise about a certain collection and thereby gains authority to define and control its public representation. Thinking along very different lines, celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist supports an organic model, providing a space in which experiences are generated according to the individuals displaying or interacting with artworks. Obrist is more interested in connections that may form when a curator comes temporarily into contact with a set of art or literary works. The curator never defines the work, never becomes a spokesperson for the work, but rather supports the audience in creating their own experience and understanding of the work. I want to quote Obrist on his curatorial practice. He says, quote, [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumental] “curating is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other. The task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements, to touch.” End quote. Deep Curation allows different elements to touch. I like that. Thinking back to the performative work of Jackson Mac Low, and the Four Horsemen, their experiments also allowed elements to touch, even to merge. But I wonder if they would have liked the term curation. [End: Upbeat Instrumental] I doubt it. Thinking of Deep Curation in terms of curation, as the name, obviously underscores, initiates a methodology at odds with past modes of collaborative poetry performance. Curation has a hipness to it, which some find off-putting. Curation also derives its concepts of collectivity, proximity, and relationality from the exhibition, the gallery space, rather than from performance practice. Curation projects the visual onto the literary, and then waits to see what kind of performance will erupt. Yet, Deep Curation is still in flux [Begin: Instrumental Strings] as a curatorial practice it keeps developing and transforming as my own interests as a curator change. But also as the work comes into contact with various poets and audiences and the world of expertise these individuals bring to the project.\n53:23\tKlara du Plessis:\tDue to COVID-19 Deep Curation has been on a break for six months and once life reconfigures itself, who knows how the project will have changed. I can see Deep Curation taking on gentler forms that are less labour intensive while still embodying the core tenet of creating conversations between poets and poems. I’ve also fantasized about ways of expanding the project, having more time and resources to work with poets for more extended periods of time to progress past the first draft of a performance and to create a truly integrated and rehearsed experimental poetry reading experience. In contrast, I’ve considered ways of creating a solo show. This might be limited to my own poetry, or it might be a way to include other poet’s work, but without their physical presence and performance. It might also be a re-curation of archival audio material from past Deep Curation poetry readings. Hang on to that thought. [Echo effect] Hang on to that thought. [Theme Music]\n54:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. For more work from Klara du Plessis check out their freshly released second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh from Palimpsest Press, available now. A special thank you to Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin: Overlapping Choral Voices] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand-new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, bringing us mini-stories about how literature sounds. [End Overlapping Choral Voices]"],"score":2.4307246},{"id":"9278","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E2, Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening, 2 November 2020, Tayler, Aubin, and Girouard"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lesbian-liberation-across-media-a-sonic-screening/"],"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 2"],"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":["Felicity Tayler","Mathieu Aubin","Scott Girouard"],"creator_names_search":["Felicity Tayler","Mathieu Aubin","Scott Girouard"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/135137837\",\"name\":\"Felicity Tayler\",\"dates\":\"1977-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Scott Girouard\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/64f51444-cc3f-4556-93d0-59fbbe9bb06e/audio/b2b367e4-113c-462c-a30d-aa1822303fd9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e2-lesbian-liberation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:11\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"55,928,416 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e2-lesbian-liberation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lesbian-liberation-across-media-a-sonic-screening/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Ottawa Hamelin Hall\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"70 Laurier Avenue E, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5\",\"latitude\":\"45.42380315\",\"longitude\":\"-75.68588224885067\"}]"],"Address":["70 Laurier Avenue E, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5"],"Venue":["University of Ottawa Hamelin Hall"],"City":["Ottawa, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Anger, Kenneth, director. Scorpio Rising. Ruban VHS, 1964.\\n\\nButler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge, 1993.\\n\\nGodard, Baraba. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing. ECW P, 1987.\\n\\nMedia Mothers, directors. A Working Women’s Collective. 1974.\\n\\nMoores, Margaret, director. Labyris Rising. V Tape, 1980.\\n\\nNavas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Ambra Verlag, 2014.\\n\\nNicol, Nancy, director. Proud Lives: Chris Bearchell. V Tape, 2007.\\n\\nRoss, Becki. The House that Jill Built. U of Toronto P, 1995.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549473984512,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different than episodes you’ve heard from us before. It is a kind of “feminist memory-work” – An audio collage, a method, an approach to community building which aims to honor lesbian-feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture.\n\nSpokenWeb network members Felicity Tayler and Mathieu Aubin originally guided a SpokenWeb listening practice session in which they led a discussion of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds in clips from three queer films: A Working Women’s Collective (1974), Labyris Rising (1980), and Scorpio Rising (1963). After the event, participants in the Listening Practice enthusiastically desired an expanded event where we would collectively watch, listen to, and discuss these films in their entirety. This led to the organization of a second event “Lesbian Liberation Across Media” sponsored by multiple institutions of queer cultural history and community, such as Labo de données en sciences humaines/The Humanities Data Lab, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, and the ArQuives.\n\nEpisode producers – Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin and Scott Girouard – cordially invite you into their feminist sonic memory world: A three-part audio collage of “Lesbian Liberation Across Media”. A virtual film screening and discussion held Summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb, and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: “A Working Women’s Collective” (1974), “Labyris Rising” (1980), and “Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell”(2007). Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips and more – we ask, how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic-related time of crisis.\n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice] What 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.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different from episodes you’ve heard from us before. What you’re about to hear is a kind of feminist memory work, an audio collage, a method, an approach to community building that aims to honor lesbian feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture. In this episode, producers Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin, and Scott Girouard cordially invite you into their sonic memory world: a three-part audio collage of lesbian liberation across media, a virtual film screening and discussion held in summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips, and more we ask: how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film, or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic related time of crisis. Here is Felicity, Mathieu, and Scott with Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening.\n02:35\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tOn June 10th, 2020, following the extreme social isolation of the first pandemic winter, over 70 people gathered over Zoom to watch three lesbian liberation films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. In this podcast, we’ve created an audio collage record of the sounds of watching these films together.\n03:04\tMay Ning:\t[Zoom Entry Chime] I’m excited to see like what it’s going to look like with a hundred people.\n03:07\tUnknown speaker:\tI know. Yeah. [Instrumental Music] So when we were watching Bound and there was one person who hadn’t seen the movie before and she had her camera on, so everybody was like getting more, like they’re more excited about watching her reactions. I mean, they were excited about the movie too. But it was like her reactions for like the best version of the show.\n03:28\tRachel E. Beattie:\tAnd it’s so different when you’re doing an online thing, because if you’re at a talk or something, like you can see people smiling at you and like responding to stuff that you’d say. And I just feel like doing Zoom stuff is like speaking into the void. For the trivia night that I’ve been doing for the archives we had to turn off the comments and also video, like the people’s videos, because we had like, Zoom bombing and people doing offensive stuff. So, it’s like, I’m literally speaking into the void. I have no idea if people are enjoying the material that like, if they’re laughing at my jokes or like anything.\n04:03\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWhat time is it?\n04:06\tRachel E. Beattie:\t8:26.\n04:06\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWhen should I start letting people in? [Instrumental, Drums] I just let them in at 8:30 or earlier?\n04:12\tFelicity Tayler:\tI’d let them at 8:30.\n04:14\tMichelle Schwartz:\tYeah.\n04:15\tRachel E. Beattie:\tHow many people are in the waiting room?\n04:17\tMichelle Schwartz:\t17.\n04:20\tRachel E Beattie:\tCool. How’s it going May?\n04:24\tMay Ning:\tGood. I’m excited. I haven’t seen the films yet.\n04:27\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah. I saw Mathieu sent me the Press Gang one, but I haven’t seen the other two. So, I’m really looking forward to watching.\n04:34\tMay Ning:\tI know, I wanted to save them to watch it with everyone.\n04:36\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah.\n04:36\tFelicity Tayler:\tIt’s 8:30. I guess we can —\n04:41\tFelicity Tayler:\tYay.\n04:42\tVarious voices.\t— open the doors. (in unison)\n04:44\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s funny because I imagine when you would open the door and in a real office and then 36 people coming in at once, it’d be like —.\n04:52\tMichelle Schwartz:\tMuch louder.\n04:58\tUnknown speaker (masc voice):\tYeah. \n04:58\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd also like more visually obvious [laughs].\n05:01\tMathieu Aubin:\tAll the bodies.\n05:05\tConstance Crompton:\tOh, it is sort of wonderful watching like everyone arrive and role in —\n05:08\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah.\n05:08\tConstance Crompton:\t— I haven’t [inaudible] a lot of Zoom meetings, so I don’t get the waiting room feature very often. It’s just a very nice.\n05:15\tElspeth Brown:\tNice to see many friendly faces and the names in the list of participants, even if a lot of people don’t have their video on or their audio.\n05:25\tConstance Crompton:\tIt’s so true. Yes. Hi, to everyone who is sort of disembodied at the moment.\n05:29\tVarious voices:\t[collective laughter]\n05:31\tMichelle Schwartz:\tHi, to everyone who we might’ve usually seen in the summer conference season that we’ve missed.\n05:37\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n05:37\tMichelle Schwartz:\tOur annual hangouts canceled.\n05:42\tConstance Crompton:\tAnd now with the combination of theaters being closed and bars being closed, I think this would be the kind of event that could blend both of those things, even if everyone’s in their own living room.\n05:51\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah, totally.\n05:52\tConstance Crompton:\tThat’s great. Also, too. I think we had been expecting a much sort of smaller event and we can be like, “Oh, we can like, go around”.\n06:00\tConstance Crompton:\tWell, shall we dive in with official programming?\n06:06\tFelicity Tayler:\tZoom says you’re the host so I guess you got to make the decisions.\n06:09\tConstance Crompton:\tYes indeed. In which case I would say, take it away Michelle.\n06:17\tMichelle Schwartz:\tOh no, you’re first Connie. You’re supposed to welcome everybody.\n06:20\tConstance Crompton:\tAh! Welcome everybody. We are definitely touched by how many people have taken up the screening and just from the last week and a half. It was put together by several organizations, the Humanities Data Lab at Ottawa U, The SpokenWeb, the University of Toronto Media Archives, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project which Michelle and I co-direct together, and the ArQuives.\n06:46\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWe as the organizers of this event are participating from Toronto. So, we have the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, from the University of Ottawa and from Concordia in Montreal. And we acknowledge that our respective institutions are located on the traditional lands of many Indigenous nations, including the Algonquian, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Just as Toronto has been a gathering place for many people for thousands of years, we are grateful to be able to provide a space for people to gather together tonight. And we ask you to think about the land that you are on and how you can show solidarity with the Indigenous caretakers of that land, by talking about what traditional people are from the land that they are on. So, if anyone wants to share their traditional land with us, we would love to know where you’re all coming in from.\n07:38\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThis screening of 1970s, lesbian liberation films was organized in response to a clamorous demand to watch these films from the audience of an earlier event. We wanted to ask an intergenerational question: are we doomed to have these same fights forever?\n07:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat I would love to do is to stop — me stop talking and if anyone, like Connie’s suggesting and trying to get people to that we’ve been wanting to hear from to chat then go ahead.\n08:06\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n08:07\tRachel E. Beattie:\tHey, did you see that Ontario had a plan about like students going back to school today, but I couldn’t find anything in it about libraries. Like we’re not important. Nobody gives a shit about us. So, like the press release for the Ontario government said nothing about university libraries, like…\n08:29\tFelicity Tayler:\tUh, talk a little bit, just go back to the listening session that Mathieu and I led with these films about — well in April for a kind of an audience of around 30 people. So, we kind of knew more or less who was going to be there that we’re able to put on this other event that is reaching a much wider audience. So, for me, this kind of comes back to this question of gaining access to media that was seen in the first film, and that we’ll see continuing through in the, in the other films.\n08:59\tMichelle Schwartz:\tThe screening was based on an event that Matthew and Felicity hosted. A SpokenWeb event and where, where they showed clips of Labyris Rising, which is a film that we’re going to watch tonight. And I’ve never seen a sort of 1970 lesbian, a short film that I haven’t wanted to see the entirety of. So, there was a great sort of clamor in the chat of that Zoom asking to see the whole movie instead of just the short clips. And that was sort of the birth of this, of this screening tonight where we get to watch the whole movie as well as two other movies. So, we have three short films to watch and we have a few panelists who will take turns introducing each one. And we’ll have a time for discussion and questions at the end. So, you can use the chat at any time. But at the end, we’ll hold for the questions.\n09:56\tBaylee Woodley:\tI just have read an email from Connie from earlier. I would love to hear about Michelle’s experience visiting the installation, Killjoys Kastle, if you’re willing to talk about it and your thoughts on how it engages with this lesbian feminist history. And also, maybe it’s another way to facilitate these sort of intergenerational conversations.\n10:15\tMichelle Schwartz:\tI just went as an attendee and it was a huge amount of fun. You, you went into this house, there was the graveyard of lesbian organizations past, which were like all these kinds of gravestones painted with all these kinds of like lesbian organizations that had sort of broken up due to in fighting or the cause getting, well, I don’t know, you know, potentially they solved the cause. They had, I believe there was like a menstrual cup reading with, you know, like, kind of a diviner of menstrual blood. And there was, smashing truck nuts — [Sound Effect: Campfire Crackling]\n10:50\tRachel E. Beattie:\tThere was a lesbian sing along in that campfire room with all the little wood stools.\n10:55\tMichelle Schwartz:\t— Yeah. And it was, it was, it was a really wonderful experience and it sort of did kind of provide another version of, of sort of watching these films for me as, as, someone who didn’t live through the time period of sort of having a nostalgia for something that I missed, but also, you know, like feeling, not really like fully part of it and, and just having a lot of – being able to experience the history, the history in a certain way, and also feeling very strongly the gaps between the, between the generations. So, I loved Killjoys Kastle. I don’t know if anyone else was there.\n11:30\tRachel E. Beattie:\tAnd cause I went on opening night, actually it was with Michelle and a bunch of other people —\n11:34\tRachel E. Beattie:\t[Inaudible] and some other people.\n11:37\tRachel E. Beattie:\t— yeah, some other people on this call. Like Stark [Inaudible]. But so for opening night they had all of these lesbian feminists theorists, or I don’t know how everyone identified, but and so cause it’s the last room in Killjoy’s Kastle was the processing room. So, like after you’ve gone through this whole experience, of course lesbians have to process so they had like, literally you could not leave without talking to like famous feminist theorists. It was amazing.\n12:09\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut what I do remember is that there was kind of this like double narrative of like, oh that’s just like white feminism.\n12:15\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n12:15\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd then there was actually like an inside the Killjoy Kastle there was kind of this like trying to atone or come to terms with it or like, you know, critique, critique whiteness at the same time as like having this intergenerational kind of like smorgasbord experience. And so, I think though that that’s just, it’s part of what of what comes with this.\n12:44\tRachel E. Beattie:\tYeah. I remember cause they had, it might’ve been the lesbian singalong room. There was all these quotes on the wall from various lesbian feminists. And then that there was an accusation made that they were sort of appropriating without like bringing in more diverse voices into like the making of, so it was like essentially these white feminists that are using the voices of feminists of colour, and that kind of thing.\n13:11\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd it doesn’t mean that the history that we have access to has less value. It just means that there are other histories that we can now look to as well.\n13:26\tMichelle Schwartz:\tI wanted to say how odd it was to watch that Press Gang film, and then hear people sort of restating debates that, that we hear so much now in, in like the, in the movement. You know, like that woman who was ranting about how she doesn’t know what’s politically correct and so she doesn’t know whether I can, but what she can say because now everything she says is wrong, and so she’s not going to say anything. And it’s just so frustrating to hear the same things sort of eternally return, within sort of these kinds of communities. And it was, it was just really, you know, fascinating to hear that particular, kind of iteration of political correctness sort of from, from so far, in the path. And I just, like, I always wonder whether we’re just like doomed to have the same fights forever. Is that too dark?\n14:23\tFelicity Tayler:\tNo, but I do think it’s like worthwhile kind of embracing it, or I don’t know, like learning to live with the discomfort, like, you know, like learning to live with that affect. Right. So, like the, this question of, you know, nuancing, intergenerational conversations and like tempering your fandom for, you know, something like the, the Killjoy Kastle, right. Like, cause I was just kind of like googling quickly cause like my, so I, I always kind of had this like FOMO relationship to the Killjoy Kastle, cause it was always like not in the city that I was in.\n14:55\tRachel E. Beattie:\tYeah. And I think it’s a very important point that you raise and I think that sort of come out before, is that like, all of these movements they’re never just it’s there’s never just like one thought it’s, you know, people have fights like have really big, like, you know, really serious fights about very specific points of ideology and very specific things like, where are we going? That’s – movements have always been like that, they’re always going to be like that. And so, you know, kind of like looking back that you can look at both of those things like that, there was this wonderful thing that was achieved by the movement and this like great togetherness, but then also like, you know, you argue like day and night, but then you, you know, you love the people at the end of the day, but like, “Oh my God, they made me so mad when we had the big argument” kind of thing. And I think —\n15:40\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n15:40\tRachel E. Beattie:\t— that seems like a thing that sort of evergreen, like, I’ve certainly noticed that in organizing spaces now and I’m and I’ve seen, you know, as the documentaries, that you see about various different groups organizing.\n15:56\tMichelle Schwartz:\tAnd we also just wanted to thank everyone that donated towards the screenings because we were able to source additional funding for the screening rates we were able to donate all that money to The519 and to support our youth in Toronto. So, thank you so much. We raised almost $400 for those organizations for queer Black and trans youth in the city. And that’s just a really great thing that we can do for our community. So, thank you all for donating.\n16:23\tElspeth Brown:\tI mean, it’s so nice to just watch these fabulous films without leaving my house I can’t even begin to tell you. I probably never would have gone, frankly, because I’m such a home body.\n16:35\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThe first film, A Working Women’s Collective, opened a discussion of lesbian feminist film aesthetics and printing collectives. In listening to a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds we wondered what these sonic resonances told us about how printing collectives lived their politics through their work and loves.\n17:00\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd so, I just want to quickly introduce Press Gang and Press Gang was a feminist collective with a strong lesbian constituency that were in a publishing house and printing press in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, I’m happy to say that some people here are from that area. So, it started in 1970 as a mixed collective, but in 1974, it became a woman only collective and it would go on to publish several books that were integral to the lesbian liberation movement, such as Stepping Out of Line and Still Sing, and print many, many, many documents, flyers and posters for lesbian liberation organizations in the city. So, the video we’re about to see is called, A Working Women’s Collective, and it was produced by the Media Mothers organization It is currently housed at VIVO Collection or VIVO Archives,  excuse me, in Vancouver. So, what’s exciting about what you’re about to see is that it does document the origins of the collective and their values as they stood in 1974.\n17:55\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd you get to hear from the members of the press, but what you also get to see is what the site looked like. So, what I want, I encourage you to think about is, you know, what does the relationship between sound and visual do in the film? What’s the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic sound mean what you can see in here at the same time, and if you can actually identify the source of the sound, and if you can’t do that, I encourage you to think about that with like the rest of the videos as well. And finally, really just a general question to ask yourself, which is when you’re watching this, what can you see in the documentary and what can be heard in relation to lesbian feminist culture production? So that’s really what I’ve been thinking about and collaboratively with this wonderful collective.\n18:39\tRachel E. Beattie:\tFirst off with Press Gang – I, this is such a great, I love the, like lo-fi [Sound Effect: Film Reel] kind of, it looks like it was shot on some kind of magnetic video that is rapidly deteriorating. As a person who works on analog media I really loved that. And so, when we were, when we were talking about doing this session, there was a lot of talk about the sound of the film and so I was really listening to that. And I – the thing that I’ve been sort of obsessed with for a while, which is the way that voices sound different from the past, like there’s like a different, I, don’t not like an audio person [Audio: Background Chatter from Film] I don’t know the exact word, but there’s like a different tone to those voices. And that’s so on display when, when you’re sort of, you’re looking at the beautiful printing presses and then hearing those voices in your ear. So, Mathieu, I wonder if you had any thoughts on the sort of the prominence given to the sound of the voice.\n19:35\tMathieu Aubin:\t[Sound Effect: Film Reel] What’s it’s interesting about the voices – it cuts because of the editing. Like it’s a bit choppy. It’s not just the way that they’re articulating their politics and their relationship to the press, but also the way that they sounded doing so. And also, the sound of the machines. Like they don’t sound like the printing, like the printer we have at home producing these books. Like it’s like really loud and that’s part of their daily sounds. Right. So, in thinking about that, I think like we have a cacophony of sounds in the, in the video. And so, part of what I’m interested in thinking about is not just what can we see and where the sources of the audio, but how do they inform each other? So, when somebody is talking about, you know, taking over the means of production [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and then all you see is a machine just pumping, right. You’re like, Oh, okay. Like this is literally it. And then I’m thinking, Oh, step back, let’s look at this video that they produced. And like the choppiness of that. And like, as they’re explaining something like it almost cuts out and you’re like, Oh, okay, well, we might have missed the message, but so the best way to describe it at this point in terms of that video is like a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds. [Instrumental Music]\n \n\n21:21\tAudio from A Working Women’s Collective:\tWhy I was a printer and why all this had happened to me because women don’t have access to the media and that women have to be printers or have to be publishers to — (crackle) (new voice)— fell into it too. You know, like I was working, designing posters and things, and I came down and I thought, Oh, there’s this press. And I knew one of the men and he was doing dark room stuff. And so, I went in and so he showed me how to do all the darkroom stuff. And so, I developed the negatives of my own, like my own artwork. And then he was starting to print it and he said, do you want to do this? And I said, sure. [Laugh] And like, I was really afraid, but I thought there’s this big press. And like, I can’t drive a car and I’ve never run a machine. And I had this mental block and I thought, now’s the time. [Instrumental Music] \n22:20\tFelicity Tayler:\tI had a kind of a follow on that is it sort of struck me like I’ve seen the film in different contexts now a couple of times, but the thing that struck me in this listening is there’s this moment where they’re talking about how it’s about the skills, like how it’s about gaining the skills and being really good at what you’re doing. And like, and, and you see them you know, working in wrenches and fixing the machines. And then they’re talking about how they’re having this conflict with somebody who’s like, who cares if you can do stuff? You just have to say things! And it’s like this big kind of like production versus content sort of false binary.\n23:14\tMaureen Fitzgerald:\tHi, hi. Yes, I was connected with Press Gang through feminist publishing because I was involved in The Women’s Press Collective, and I actually —.\n23:29\tAmy Gotlieb:\tYou’re here in Toronto?\n23:30\tMaureen Fitzgerald:\t— I am in Toronto. I’m speaking from Toronto, but there was a year that I spent in Vancouver because I was lovers with Pat Smith. And it was wonderful to see that image, those images. I knew and know Sarah. The skills debate in ’81 was very interesting. The way I worked at Press Gang, I suppose I volunteered once a week and they taught me how to do layout. I’m an academic. I was on leave from U of T for the year, because that’s where my lover was. But the, the, the raging discussion was around skills. And some people thought that everybody should do everything. Like there should be no division of labor and no acknowledgement of the skills that some of the people who had been working in the presses had and were very experienced at. As Marusya just said, I mean, it was a very sophisticated operation. And by then it was also publishing books, a lot of books. So, Press Gang publishing, I think well probably didn’t outweigh the the flyer printing and printing for other organizations, but it, it became more predominant. And when I was there, it was more predominant. And I remember this discussion around skills where some people thought, well, we should all do everything in all be able to do everything. There should be no specialization.\n25:12\tRachel Epstein:\tIt’s Rachel Epstein. And yeah, I worked at Press Gang in the early 80’s maybe just after Maureen, maybe ‘82, ‘84 or something like that. And I don’t actually remember that skills debate so much, but I started out working as the production coordinator and then I actually learned to run a press. And I remember being – that being one of the most empowering things I ever did was actually learning how to run that printing press and how to fix the printing press and all of that. And I was also lovers was Pat Smith at the same time that Maureen was lovers with Pat Smith and just [Laughs] that’s how Maureen and I met each other. So, it was, that was going on too. But also, before we, I unfortunately did not see the film. I came in late and I missed the film. I think I may have seen it a long time ago. So, I can’t really speak to that, but just not to romanticize totally what it was like there. We were also struggling with working collectively and I have some memories that were like some harsh memories of how we treated each other, how we sort of in the, in the process of trying to be fair were very unfair. So, I know lots has been written and post-feminist collectives, and that’s what we were, and it was amazing and so many ways and what we did and, and the skills that we developed, the political causes that we supported. But there was many things going on there in in that attempt to work collectively.\n26:56\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\t[Instrumental Music] In the second film, Labyris Rising, we hear no dialogue, only an Eros propelled musical score, set to a collage of visuals built through mimesis and citation. We see and hear how editing is a form of care. If you want to be part of the community, you have to understand the codes.\n27:19\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, when Mathieu and I start— first looked at these two films together, what we were listening for was, you know, the sound in the films, and how that sound worked with the visual [Instrumental, Percussion]to show us how community is created through different kinds of cultural institutions that produce a common language and a set of shared practices. It’s a video made by Margaret Moores and Almerinda Travassos who are two former members of LOOT. It was filmed in the basement of the LOOT building. [Sound Effect: Printing Press] And what you don’t see off screen is a printing press where the newsletter was published.\n28:00\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, in Labyris Rising we hear continuous soundtrack of folk rock and R&B. And I saw a, a comment go by while we were watching, where somebody was trying to guess the track. And, I got, I got to say, that’s kind of my, my experience of the film as well, trying to, trying to situate the sound while I’m watching the images. [Instrumental, Trumpet] And so the musical landscape kind of helps the flow of the non-linear narrative structure throughout the film and the collage, but as you saw between the two clips, the collage aesthetic of the video, and also the sonnet composition are borrowed from the iconic film of gay cultures, Scorpio Rising. So, there’s a lot that’s borrowed from the film, but there’s also a lot that’s kind of worked at — redefined in relationship to that film.\n28:51\tjake moore:\tWe all know the soundtrack from Scorpio Rising and that’s even many years after the fact because the – Kenneth Anger was able to draw from very known, popular culture to find the representation of this so-called outlaw. That outlaw is fully coded as what we accept as a masculine identity. And the idea that the, the sort of travel that was going to happen, this, this, the gathering that would become what was going to be a Hell’s Angels gathering, whereas in the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, you have, people riding bicycles and all of the coded things that you’re describing, but in the soundtrack, most of us are not as familiar. And well Joan Armatrading. And, until we see Janice Joplin, it really doesn’t enter into a contemporary imaginary. And, I think it’s really the outlaw status is still much stronger for the lesbian woman. It still doesn’t enter into the same kind of accepted social practice.\n29:52\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, but another parallel between them is that both opening clips also point to fashion as a signifier of community belonging. And for the woman fixing her bicycle we can look at the embroidered patch that’s, that you see on her hip of her jeans so what you see there is the line “woman identified woman.” So, this kind of echos a pop —in the context of fixing the bicycle it echoes a kind of a popular saying that people would wear on t-shirts and protests at the time, it says, “a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.” But it also has an organizing function. And so, historian Becki Ross had, when speaking about LOOT talks about this term as a political category. So, she says “a true feminist is a lesbian by definition in the political sense.” And this further explained by a Vancouver journalist, Judy Moreton, that “all women fully committed to the cause of freeing themselves and all other women from oppression are lesbians.”\n30:54\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\tSo, I was interested in the sort of like warning at the beginning around sort of different ideas of gender in second wave feminism. And you know, that there were no non —I mean the word non-binary didn’t exist. And transgender existed, but was identified, I think, in different ways. Certainly, there was gender bending. And we see that in the the, out— the clothing and the, the embodiment of female masculinity.\n31:32\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, this of course is an articulation of an ideal that’s easier said than done, because there tensions. There’s always tensions in social movements, and so there’ll be tensions in this time period between gay and straight feminists, and also between feminist organizing and male-identified gay liberation organizing, for example. And this tension between — this tension within the gay liberation movement is alluded to in Moores’ appropriation of Scorpio Rising. So, when I also looked at this film, I looked at it as kind of a semantic structure. So, the different scenes are being put together as if the, the visuals themselves and the kind of soundtrack are a narrative structure that’s built through mimesis or citation. So, it’s, it’s repeating motifs that come from somewhere else. And it is not —so there’s no spoken dialogue. So, it’s not as it’s kind of a direct or explicit as the last film that we saw. You have to kind of like imagine yourself into the scene and imagine your knowledge of what you know about the scenes that are being portrayed, at the kind of community that’s being shared with us, the music that’s being played to kind of imagine yourself into it, depending on what your existing experiences are. So, this ambiguity of origin contributes to the sense that to be part of the community, you have to know it’s references or codes, which include specific genres of music as a cultural institution. And in Labyris Rising you’ll see that those genres of music kind of lead to this, like, you know, [sound of concert cheering] heady dream of the outdoor music festival.\n33:08\tjake moore:\tThe Michigan Womyn’s Festival was this iconic, though clearly specific, gathering site. And I think it’s telling that it was known as the land where people gathered and my exposure to it as a musician was as a punk rock musician that they invited there. But we were very much interlopers in the warm, fuzzy, like the, in the kind of breakdown of feminist status. And what was outlier? What, what was allowable outlying? Uh, I think you get into really interesting territory thinking about when a rebellious figure can be fully embraced by a larger dominant culture, like the masculine and biker that is still embraced today. Like we still see this in, in contemporary film and television. It gets a lot of play. It’s a very common association of, of, a powerful and often militarized understanding of how to achieve power.\n34:10\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, you learn a lot about the world of LOOT from the movement of the camera around the scene in Labyris Rising and I’m going to read an excerpt that describes the scene from historian Becki Ross’s book. “An inventory of 1970s, lesbian feminist lifestyle is richly detailed in the 1980 film Labyris Rising. A deliberate feisty send-up of the urban gay male style captured by Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising. This lesbian cult classic was shot on location at 342 Jarvis Street and the Fly By Night Lounge by former LOOT members, Margaret Moores, and Almarinda Travassos. The half-hour super eight film is full of clues. The double-headed axe, the Labyris or cunt beads on a chain. The famous maxim woman identified woman embroidered on the back of blue jeans, pinky rings, interlocking women’s symbols, pink triangles, and suspenders. While reading the Washington DC based feminist journal, off our backs, the protagonist drags deeply on her marijuana joint and drifts off to remember scenes from the Michigan festival to the music of Be Be K’Roche, Heather Bishop, Joan Armatrading, and Janis Joplin. If you think about Labyris Rising, then taking the vocabulary from that film, what’s interesting is note— noting what they keep. Right? So, the, the scene that we all love with the cat and somebody named Mark, like on the bed, like there are some comments going by, like maybe people knew the name of this person in the bed.\n35:50\tMathieu Aubin:\tOh, we have a comment from Amy Gottlieb that says the person on the bed is Marcia Cannon known as Mars.\n35:59\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut you know, so in Labyris Rising you have somebody on the bed, they’re smoking a joint, they’ve got all the music festival kind of paraphernalia all around them, they’ve got a cat and that scene is constructed almost exact — and they’re reading off our backs right? So, it’s like —\n36:13\tRaegan Swanson:\tThey’re reading on our backs! And all I could think about was like, I were about to like, watch the movie about Chris and how much work that she did around censorship. And, it, that was one moment where I was just like, it all, I know it felt very tied together.\n36:35\tMathieu Aubin:\tThe sound of the music and the voices as they are connecting, which are mostly non-diegetic then become diegetic think at a certain point with the poster, if I’m not mistaken, like there’s a poster referenced, like that’s where you’re like, okay, here’s where, like there’s a whole community. They’re not just trying to like, leave the music production. It’s like, it’s, there. Here it is. Right?\n36:55\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\tI was published by Press Gang, but I was, I worked more in a feminist video collectives, Emma Productions and Women’s Media Alliance, which Nancy Nicol was part of. And I remember when I first joined Women’s Media Alliance, there were no, there were no roles. There was no camera person. There was no sound person. We just, we, we just rotated those roles, which, was part of that, that notion that there —of collaboration and of circularity. And I think that it, it created a kind of aesthetic actually, which at the time, you know, which, which results in those, those kinds of interesting audio choices or editing choices. We, I remember the video we worked on, Our Choice, about teenage mothers and we edited that entire thing by committee. It took —\n37:59\tRachel E. Beattie:\tWow.\n37:59\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\t— So, so what resulted was also long swaths of talking that weren’t edited and that kind of editing was a form of care. And it was, a way of caring for our interview subjects and working against the grain of, of television and mainstream cinema.\n38:26\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThe third film, Proud Lives, featured a significant force in Toronto’s local communities and Canadian lesbian and gay liberation at large. We heard how a singular figure could be part of a generative field of queer cultural production and galvanize a movement to shift the terms of the world, our bodies, and our relationships.\n38:52\tRaegan Swanson:\tHi everyone, so the next film we’re going to be watching is Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell, which was directed and produced by Nancy Nicol. It was a commemoration video that was shown at Chris’s memorial in 2007 after she passed. For those who aren’t aware, Chris is well Nancy describes her as a towering figure in the history of gay liberation in Canada. And I think that’s a fair assessment. She began writing for The Body Politic in 1975. And she’s kind of, when you look at the pictures of like the body politic, she’s the woman. And everybody else is just like, those are the guys. She was, one of the founders of LOOT. She worked for the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay —CLGO — the coalition for lesbian gay rights of Ontario. She was a part of GATE [Gay Alliance Toward Equality] in Toronto, but she also did organizing in Edmonton when she was a teenager. When The Body Politic was charged, Chris was right along there and so there’s this really great picture of them celebrating after they’ve won the court case. But when a lot of people think of Chris, they think of Chris yelling, “no more shit” [Audio clip: People chanting “no more shit”] as part of the bathhouse raids. And I think that’s a picture of her and sums her up in an interesting way. She’s definitely one of those people that I really wish I could have met in person, especially reading about her and seeing all of her work. If you look at the material that we have at the archives, she’s got her fingers in all the pies, you see her stuff in the [inaudible] you see this stuff Body Politic you see it everywhere. And we have a small collection of her material, of one of her folios at the archive as well. And she’s a part of our national portrait collection. And I really love the portrait that we have of her. She’s done a whole bunch of stuff that I know some of it’s going to be in the film, but you should definitely look up more about her. And if, especially if this video piques your interest.\n41:38\tFelicity Tayler:\tFor me the thing that like, I mean, there’s so many things that I love about that film. and I’m like in the work that I do, I’ve been really interested in the work that Pink Triangle, no, that Pink Type that Chris did with Pink Type as the typesetter for, so many different magazines, you know, so sort of like an arm of Body Politic, but it’s also type setting Fireweed its type setting, like all these other magazines. And so, it becomes kind of this really important sub layer to all of this different – the kinds of cultural production that were coming out of all, all the different edges of this kind of lesbian gay feminist, like press movement in Toronto. So that’s kind of like where my personal desire comes from, in relationship to this field, this film, but there’s, there’s so many other aspects of it that I, that I do kind of pull on those emotional threads. And but, but one of the things that I like the biggest, I guess the biggest takeaway, I don’t know, the thing that I, that I think about from that film in relationship to Labyris Rising and the questions about how do you see or hear like these institutions that, that lesbian and gay liberation like produce for themselves is when she’s talking about how the gay rights movement or the lesbian gay rights movement is not just committed to rights in an end of itself, but that like the, the political kind of protests and boots on the ground, trying to like change legislation is just like one way of generating like community and cultural institutions that are the actual movement, like, or like the bigger kind of like part of the movement is you have this multiple multi-layered push towards shifting the terms that your body interacts with the world and that you, in your identity interact with world and you interact with others. And, and both are important, but there is like this much larger kind of like force that’s taking place alongside this kind of challenge to the law.\n43:50\tConstance Crompton:\tNot to put anybody on the spot, but I do see in the chat that Amy Gottlieb amazing has a comment about working at Pink Type. Amy, did you want to talk about it? [Instrumental, Piano]\n44:06\tAmy Gottlieb:\tSure. I worked at Pink Type. We typeset, I mean, I sort of, I remember type setting The Body Politic type setting Fireweed. At that time, we were on Duncan Street sort of queen and university area. And Gabe Bell worked there as well with me. I remember all sorts of people in the office and I remember our wonderful, beautiful typesetting machine, which we took great care of and felt quite privileged to be using to typeset all these incredible magazines and, you know all sorts of different kinds of publications. And people came in and there were, there was a space for people to do the layout. And so, you got to hang out with people and sort of learn about, you know, what the, these different publications were all about. And, yeah, lots of discussions about the content of The Body Politic about the personnel that the, the, the personal ads in the back. And, that was another, you know, interesting, and a difficult time sometimes in terms of the kind of tension that I think, I certainly felt and I think that Gabe might have felt as well. Yeah, it was, it was a time.\n45:51\tFelicity Tayler:\tWere you ever like tempted to, to change what the type was going to say?\n45:57\tAmy Gottlieb:\tIn terms of the ads? [Laughs].\n46:00\tFelicity Tayler:\t[Laughs] Or, you know, editorial copy, like who knows.\n46:08\tAmy Gottlieb:\tI don’t think so. So, it’s like, it was, it was, I mean, I think we would have, you know, you’re working at such a fast pace when you’re type setting [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and that it’s like, it’s just, you know, how any of us trying to get it out there and so that it can be proofed and pasted up and, you know, it’s, it was, you know, there was some crazy hours as well. And so no, but we, and, you know, yeah, he didn’t organize in that, in that way. Good idea though. [Laughs].\n47:15\tMathieu Aubin:\tThank you for listening to Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening. Welcome to the epilogue. My name is Mathieu Aubin and I am here with Felicity Tayler, and we wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the process of making this episode. [Instrumental Music]\n47:34\tFelicity Tayler:\tIn designing this audio collage, we have proposed a reflexive remix, an aesthetic that Eduardo Navas describes as a sonic collage that blurs the origin of the sounds that we appropriate while relying on your allegorical recognition of the many sonic codes embedded within the soundscape, their larger meaning, and how they are received by members of LGBTQ2+ plus communities. We’ve remixed the sound space of the SpokenWeb: Lesbian Liberation Across Media listening practice held in April 2020. And the watch party of the same name held later in June. We think this produces a new sonic space as a continuation of what Judith Butler calls a citation politics, and that we honor the sounds of feminist press and lesbian liberation films shown during these events. And as we consensually site and remix the sounds of people’s voices, co-producing these events.\n48:38\tMathieu Aubin:\tThis episode cites and further circulates a queer language that acknowledges rich and complex lesbian histories. It makes room for intergenerational discussion and listening. And the virtual space of the watch party attendees from different generations can together to watch lesbian liberation films, and listen to each other’s responses to them. The event highlighted the importance of earlier community building, while challenging romanticized notions of what that community meant. It also enabled members of more recent generations to reflect critically upon that time period, and to identify shared, lived experiences across generations. All this to say, the event built a virtual space that created rich intergenerational dialogue.\n49:32\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo, with that being said, I want to take this opportunity to reflect upon the whole process of making this episode with you Felicity. And you and I have been working on this project for months now, time flies by even during a pandemic. And I was thinking about this, but like, remember when you originally asked me to co-lead the listing process with you beginning of the pandemic, it’s kind of surprising that we’re now here with a podcast episode capturing all the Lesbian Liberation Across Media events. So, my question is kind of broader and it’s, it’s this what surprised you the most about the process of producing this episode, given where we started and where we are now?\n50:15\tFelicity Tayler:\tI think what surprised me the most was how easy it was. Like how smoothly it went, but I feel like it’s because we’ve been establishing kind of a set of like an, an underlying trust for so many years. And you know, the work, the work around the feminist presses and this sense that those communities produce their own, like the communities around these presses use that as the upward apparatus to produce their own kind of alternate world, is something that brought us together in the beginning. So, it’s sort of like we’re starting to, we’re starting from a space of queer affinity in order to be able to continue to speak about these things and draw a wider narrative around it. And now we’re thinking through it in relationship to sound.\n51:11\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. I still remember when we first met at that Concept of Vancouver conference and you were like, you, you do queer things. I’m going to come and talk to you. And that was what, 2016, I think? So, four years this month. Wow. Time flies by.\n51:31\tFelicity Tayler:\tYeah. So, I guess I can kind of, I can follow up on that with my question. And this is a question that other people have asked me while I’m working on this material and as I continue to work on this material. And so, the question that I get asked is whether or not this is about identity and if it, so, yeah. So, is this about identity and if so, what does that mean to you?\n51:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tThat’s a tough and good question. I think that for me, it’s, it’s strange because I’ve come to these materials through obviously, well, just say, I identify as a man and I’m interested in queer materials in general and the sounds of that period. So, for me, it’s not just an idea of identity, but also community building and solidarity, and thinking about what that type of solidarity work looks like. So, one of the things that was really powerful for me was being invited by you to not only participate in that listening practice with our past relationship and amount of work that we’ve done together, but also being invited for that launch party and being asked to contextualize some of those materials and to give some of my reflections. So, the word that I think that comes to my mind is privileged to be able to be in those spaces with the identity that I have, and also knowing when to perhaps limit the amount of space that I occupy when I’m invited to be in those spaces.\n53:04\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo being invited to be there means that I have to be responsible and be respectful. So, I guess going back to your point about the easiness of all of this work, me feeling not only an enormous sense of respect for you, but also feeling that this respect is mutual. And I think that is grounded in our shared queer affinities. I, that’s probably the best way to put that. It’s just at the end of the day, I think that it has something to do with community building and identity, at least at the level of producing and collaborating together, you and I. So yeah, I have —in short, yes, it has to do with identity.\n53:44\tFelicity Tayler:\t[Laughs]. Yeah, that’s what I always say. And I mean, of course it has to do with identity, even if it doesn’t pivot on it. But it is always about creating a sense of self in relationship to the, to the idea of communities and what does produce that idea of community. And in this sense, it’s has a temporal dimension, as it often does in, in queer spaces, because we’re always looking for a past that isn’t always necessarily available to us.\n54:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. Exactly.\n54:14\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut I do like the, you know, what we were talking about earlier today about this clip that we wanted to revisit, and the editing kind of really illustrates where these questions are going. I think where, you know, in an earlier edit, there was a mistake and there was your voice like overlaid on top of one of the other participants voices and so you, you kind of produce this like typical stereotype of the, you know, the mansplaining, like, not, not making, not making space. And so, the ease with which we were able to address that and to smooth it out, in the final product, I think is a really great kind of example, of, of how working together has worked.\n54:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tEven though it’s a tiny glitch in our process over logic. I was just thinking, you know, I was listening to that I was thinking, this is egregious if we let this be, because this is just bad.\n55:10\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut also funny that there was like an ambiguity as to whether it had actually happened in real life or not. When we were working in the collage space, which it didn’t, it did not happen in real life.\n55:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tThis is great. I’m super thankful that I’ve had this opportunity to collaborate with you on this project and for all the other collaborators as well.\n55:33\tFelicity Tayler:\tYeah. Well I thank you for your thoughtful ways. And with that in mind, here are some other thank yous for all the voices that you hear in this podcast. And also for the institutions that we were able to wrangle to make this series of events possible. So, we’d like to thank Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Scott Girouard, Constance Crompton, Michelle Schwartz, Rachel E Beattie, Raegan Swanson, May Ning, jake moore, Becki Ross, Amy Gotlieb…\n56:09\tMathieu Aubin:\t…Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Emma Middleton, Marusya Bociurkiw, Baylee Woodley, Elspeth Brown, Stark, Humanities Data Lab at U Ottawa, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, ArQuives, VTape, and VIVO Archives. All the proceeds from the event were donated to supporting our youth of Toronto and their Black queer youth and Trans crew and The519 trans people of colour project. \n56:47\tFelicity Tayler:\tWe couldn’t have made this podcast without you.\n57:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Mathieu Aubin of Concordia University and Felicity Tayler of the University of Ottawa with guest collaborators, Scott Girouard.\n57:26\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tAnd additional voiceover by Emma Middleton.\n57:29\tHannah McGregor:\tOur podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland and a warm welcome to new podcast research assistant Judy Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribed to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. [Theme Music] You can rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada from all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.4307246},{"id":"9279","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E3, Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp, 7 December 2020, Beauchesne and Kemp"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/"],"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 2"],"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":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creator_names_search":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/43083879\",\"name\":\"Penn Kemp\",\"dates\":\"1944-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/bbda2b6f-992a-45a6-bbee-f3074a8ccfd2/audio/919f9dbb-30d9-4851-ae29-ef6b52f23820/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,299,694 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nPenn Kemp’s Pandemic Poems originally published in: Belanger, Joe. “It’s time to embrace London’s poet laureate, Penn Kemp, and all artists.” London Free Press. 11 Apr. 2020. https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/belanger-its-time-to-embrace-londons-poet-laureate-penn-kemp-and-all-artists. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “PENN KEMP – Home.” Weebly. http://pennkemp.weebly.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp: Penn, poet/playwright/performer.” WordPress. https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. From the Lunar Plexus. Pendas Productions, 2001.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. “Night Orchestra.” Barbaric Cultural Practice, Quatrro Books, 2017.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Form. Soft Press and Pendas Productions (reprint), 2006.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “[Night Orchestra] Barbaric Cultural Practice.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/sets/barbaric-cultural-practice. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp – Trance Form, Live at U of A, February 18, 1977 (1).” Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/penn-kemp-trance-form-live-at-u-of-a-february-18-1977-1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Dance Form, Pendas Productions, 2006.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “When the Heart Parts – Sound Opera.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/when-the-heart-parts. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549478178816,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For Penn Kemp, poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied, and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects, while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us, as listeners?\n\nThrough conversation with poet Penn Kemp and SpokenWeb Researcher Nick Beauchesne, this episode invites us to explore these questions by tracing the threads of magical practice from Kemp’s early career to the present day. A clip from her performance of Trance Form at the University of Alberta (1977) is brought into conversation with more recent material from When the Heart Parts (2007) and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017). The episode concludes with a live reading from Kemp’s brand-new Pandemic Poems (2020). \n\n00:03\tIntro Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will be here if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. [Music Fades] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How often do you think of your own voice as sonic art? What happens when you speak poetry aloud? What effects can voices in the air produce? For sound poet Penn Kemp, poetry is something more than the written word — words must be lifted off the page into the air and sculpted in sound. Her voice is her poetic instrument and sound becomes a verb — the transporting and trance-forming act of “sounding”. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Penn weaves us through her creative practice with SpokenWeb researcher Nick Beauchesne. Exploring the magical effects of literary sound to transport us, transform us and entrance us, Penn and Nick take us on a journey through Penn’s illustrious decades-long career discussing archival performances of Tranceform (1977), When the Heart Parts (2007), and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017), plus two brand new poems from Penn Kemp shared in this episode. Penn Kemp has published 30 books of poetry and drama, and had six plays, 10 CDs, and several award-winning video poems produced. A former poet Laureate of London, Ontario, and League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Artist of the Year, Penn has been giving creativity workshops, teaching, and performing her poetry since 1966. Here is Nick Beauchesne with honored guest Penn Kemp in episode three of The SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories of Trance Formation. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tGood day, audio lovers. Welcome to a very special episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Nick Beauchesne, PhD candidate at the University of Alberta department of English and Film studies and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. Today we’ll have an interview with a very distinguished Canadian sound poet in Penn Kemp. For Penn Kemp poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy, informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us as listeners? Thank you very much for joining us, Penn. How are you today?\n \n\n03:45\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s a pleasure to be here. I’m well and happy to join you.\n \n\n03:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, I’m broadcasting here from Kamloops, British Columbia, and here you are in London, Ontario coming together over Zoom in these very strange pandemic times.\n \n\n04:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s true. It’s a lovely September day here full of long light approaching Equinox, a balance time.\n \n\n04:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe world has seemed so out of balance in many ways. So perhaps we can look forward to that as some sort of omen.\n \n\n04:15\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s the seasonal transition from summer to fall. And the Celtic new year is coming up.\n \n\n04:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll get into these topics as we go, because a lot of what drew me to your work was your involvement with the mystical, the magical to some extent the alchemical — although it seems you’ve moved away from that in recent years — but you still have that very strong, magical thread that works through all your work and the way that you use sound as a tool for change and for expanding consciousness. Your website lists you as a performance poet, activist and playwright. And you have a reputation as one of Canada’s foremost sound poets. What does that category of “sound poet” mean to you?\n \n\n05:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt means that I can do anything I like in performing a piece and how it wants to lift off the page.\n \n\n05:11\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, what do you mean by “lift off the page”?\n \n\n05:14\tPenn Kemp:\tInto sound, into performance. So, basically, I separate the written word into various categories and if the sound is predominant in the poem, in the original poem, then I lift it into a chant or various ways of expressing it beyond English language.\n \n\n05:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is it that ability to, to get beyond language that, do you find that that’s what distinguishes your sound poetry from, from other types of poetry —which all do have a component of sound built into it —but how and why do you emphasize sound? What is it about sound that so draws you?\n \n\n06:03\tPenn Kemp:\tSound is both the first and the last sense. [Low chant begins, steadily increasing in volume] Hearing, as we know in the dead, in the dying, is the last sense to disappear. And it’s the sound that we —it’s sound that we first hear in our mother’s womb. McLuhan once said something that the Catholic religion lost its sense of mystery when they moved from the Latin in resounding through the cathedral, through the natural sounds of the cathedral. And when that was replaced by a microphone, it lost the resonance. It lost being inside the cavity of the mother’s womb, where sound is transmitted through the permeable membrane of the stomach. [Low chant ends] And so, I really believe that sound is transporting. It takes you back to primeval experience to first— before —it’s the closest we get to a kind of synesthesia where before sound before, excuse me, the senses are divided into five or 5,000. I think sound is the basic basis of all that.\n \n\n07:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s such a fascinating connection there between the mother’s womb and the womb of the cathedral space. Before we get into looking at some specific pieces of your work, I did want to kind of ask about that role of place. And it seems like you naturally tied into that in terms of, you know, since sound is so important for you, what are some of the coolest places you’ve been and hearing your voice in a raw environment and the different ways that that sound kind of affects it?\n \n\n08:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYes, I was —as I was talking about the cathedral, I remember performing in the ’80s at the cathedral of St. John the Divine along with a hundred conches that were led by Charlie Morrow. And that was a very interesting way of the voice resonating with the cathedral. And I’ve also done a lot of sounding in the center of standing stones in Scotland and Exmoor. And at the temple of Asclepius in Greece, you stand at the center in the hollow of that temple and the sound reverberates. You can whisper and the sound reaches the outer limits of the amphitheater. But the most amazing place to sound was being in the third pyramids at Giza. I was sat there for a night in absolute darkness, so dark that my mind started to create visual images and oral images. [low chanting begins] And I spent the night sounding. But there’s just another story. I was also invited to lie down in the sarcophagus at the King’s chamber at Giza — first in Cheops’ pyramid. And I had a very expensive Sony recorder at the time, and I was recording myself chanting in that sarcophagus. And when I came out, the recorder had blown a gasket. All the batteries had exploded with the energy. [Sound, ends]\n \n\n09:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tOoooooh.\n \n\n10:01\tPenn Kemp:\tIt was a very expensive lesson in power.\n \n\n10:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhat an amazing location to be able to experiment with sound. And then it’s such a strange phenomenon to have your piece of technology just disintegrate like that. Perhaps that sound was too sacred for this world, Penn.\n \n\n10:21\tPenn Kemp:\tI think so. Well, it is very interesting to have a kind of — my way of perceiving the world is, is very Celtic, very old, ancient, and yet to work with technology in a way that acknowledges its power is, has been a very interesting journey for me.\n \n\n10:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis podcast will proceed with basically a conversation built around four clips that I selected. I enjoy these clips because they give the listener a broad selection of material from across your lengthy career, beginning with an excerpt from “Bone Poems” which was published in Trance Form. And that recording took place in 1977. I also have clips from When the Heart Parts, two clips from the year 2007, and then the final clip we’ll be playing is from Night Orchestra in 2017. So, it’s something quite recent. And once our conversation around these pieces of sound has been completed, we’ll conclude the podcast with a special reading live by Penn Kemp from two new poems from your collection of pandemic poems. So, looking forward to getting to that material. The first excerpt I’ll play is from “Bone Poems” which is part of Trance Form. [Ambient Music starts] This clip was recorded at the U of A, from the department of English and Film Studies on February 18th, 1977. And this was how I was first exposed to your work, being a research assistant. It was my job to do a close listening of all this raw material and to then try to identify poem titles, collect timestamps, and all that. And so, over the course of listening to maybe 50 of these tapes from the EFS collection at U of A, I heard all sorts of different clips, and I’m always listening for components featuring mysticism, the supernatural, magic as poetic themes. And I identified that immediately in your work. And it’s something we’ve kind of talked about in our kind of private conversations. So, after kind of hearing this and then doing a listening practice back in June, where you joined as our guest, we put together this podcast where I wanted to pursue that strand of sound as a form of magical practice, as well as poetic practice. I’m going to play this clip. It’s about six minutes long. It’ll kind of form the — a good backbone (poem) of the rest of the interview. So, we’ll just listen to this clip and we’ll return with some questions. [Ambient Music ends.]\n \n\n12:59\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAhhhhhhhhh. Oracle. The last section we can do together. This —my voice is running out and I’m sure you’ve got [Cough] a cough. It’s “Bone Poems.” It’s like getting down to the — it’s the last bone we wear that covers our essential emptiness. All you have to do is say, chant: “bone poems.” For those of you with books, you can follow the “bone poem” line along on page. For those of you who don’t have books, you can say “bonepoembonepoembonepoem.” And we’ll start at that. And then I’ll read the the “Bone Poems” supposedly over top of your loud “bonepoembonepoem.” You’re the bass section. Can I hear you please? Bonepoembonepoem…. [Audience chanting] If you want to get into varieties, you can. There’s quite a few. [Cough] Bonepoembonepoem. [Water pouring] You’ve died out. You have to keep it going for the next 10 pages. [Audience laughs] All right. Take a deep breath and then go. [Inhale] Hmmmmmmmm. [Audience chanting begins]\nSkin. A breeze. Hmmmmmmm. Green. Saw. Blue.\nWords. Breathe. Shed their skin. Skin to bone.\nOne bone under. Sun shine, some sun, some,\nsome sunshine, some shine. Hmmmmmmm.\nHmmmmmmm. Sa-sa-sa-hum-sa.\n\nOne bone sunshine shed skin. One bone over,\none bone under. Sun shine. Over under, over under,\nover under. Some. Cloud. Bone be nimble. Bone be\nquick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Bone\nbe quick. Bone be quick. Bone be quick. Bone be\nover, under, over, under, over under. Bone be nimble,\nbone be quick. Do. These. Bones. Live? Bone be quick,\nbone be quick. Jump over. Quick dry, quick dry, quick\ndry quick, these be quick, bone be quick, bone be quick,\nquick, quick, quick, quick. Bone be nimble, bone be quick.\n\n[Audience chanting ending]. Music to my ears! [Audience: “ it’s hard work!”]\n\n16:39\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAnybody want a glass of water? [Audience chanting returns]\nSweet marrow sweet morrow, all fleshes as grasses as\ngrasses as whistling down wind, is whistling down wind.\nBare. Root. White. Grow. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Bare. Rock.\nBone. Root. Of fleshes as grass is as grass grows over, grows\nunder. These. Those. These. Bare. Bone. Grope. White. Flesh\nis as grass is. Sweet morrow, sweet marrow. Cell in skull, skull\nin cell. Desert father’s memento mori. Bone shards endure\nwhen soft flesh withers. Slower bone retains our image. As\nby jaw or femur, they determined what we were. What we\nbecome. Our final trance formation. Slow. Bone. Soft flesh.\nTo marrow, tomorrow. Conjure our story. Become the thing\nwe divine.\n\nCome on, don’t get tired! I’ve been reading for an hour. You can’t be tired!\n\nFrame us erect. Base, bed, rock, mountain, tree. Axis\nof our bloodline, pole on which was strung and hung\nour nine-day lives. Oh spine, oh sacred virtue spreads\nher branches as our limbs. Her white, our white. Play us,\nwe are your instrument. Tibia, flute, femur, during, enduring.\n\n[string of high pitched sounds]\n\nHold the femur by its polished leather knuckle. Clang! Clang-inggggggg. Dangling. [Audience chanting ending]\n\n19:16\tNick Beauchesne:\tWow. That was quite something there. Kind of a blast from the past for you, Penn.\n \n\n19:22\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s for sure. It’s interesting how I have continued to use certain techniques or habits of speech or habits of sounding like the rising ‘ing’. I’ve done a lot of that, of playing with the varieties of sound that can be produced.\n \n\n19:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s one of the things that really drew me to your work is there’s not a lot of singing in the EFS collection of the SpokenWeb tapes. So that was one of the, well, it was certainly the first, occasion of singing I heard in the collection, although there is another one or there’s another few of them out there. But not something that I’ve heard a lot of in our collection, anyways. So, it’s something that immediately got my attention, you know, being a vocalist and performance artist myself. I just wanted to ask about just that that pun of transform, you know, not with the Tran “N S” but with the, the “C E” of a kind of pond on forming a trance. And, you know, we can hear all sorts of, you can hear the, you know, the crowd gasping for air and, and laughing. And just also the way that the chanting is kind of known to change the brain state, you know, to like a delta or gamma brain state. So just the way that, that sound and chanting, not only like the sound itself, but also through like the breath, the breathwork, as well as a kind of tool of consciousness transformation. So, yeah, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of how you use sound, both not only in your own, but also in the kind of audience participation or interaction forming that trance.\n \n\n21:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. I believe that a poem must be transporting or at its best is transporting you to, not — certainly to an altered state, not a higher state, but a more spacious state of consciousness, where there are more possibilities. For example, we know that a baby [vocal drone begins] by the time it’s a year old has made every sound that it’s possible for a human being to make. But then by the age of 10, the child has — the child’s mouth has condensed, hardened. So that say the African —some click language can’t be, can’t be pronounced properly after a certain age. So, as a person fascinated by travel and languages, I was really interested in reaching beyond English, which is such a lovely mongrel language of many sounds, but into, you know, the more guttural sounds of German, for example, or how, how language is placed in the mouth. The way French has right at the top of the lips, right at the front. And that — or Russian is way back in the throat. That sort of thing really intrigued me. But it was basically listening to how my children at the —as infants developed language. And that’s where the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What that’s where the repetition came in of what in Buddhism or Hinduism we call “seed syllables.” And so, I was very interested as well in the power of seed syllables.\n \n\n22:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd there’s something powerful in the sense of the participation about sound poetry as well, because even you said, you know, “you can feel free to follow along if, and if you have no books, you can just go, bonepoebonepoembonepoem.”\n \n\n23:09\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. Yes.\n \n\n23:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, it’s —so even people who don’t have the book or have never heard the poem before are able to participate in the village chant. So, so maybe we can call it.\n \n\n23:19\tPenn Kemp:\tSo, it becomes a participatory — all my sound poetry is participatory because then the experience is reenacted in the audience’s body as a collective. And that’s a joyous thing to get beyond the mind, the ego, into an experience that is so spacious.\n \n\n23:45\tNick Beauchesne:\tThey got into that in the “bone poem” section, but I wish a few of them were more adventurous to try some of those variations to, to hear more [trill sound].\n \n\n23:56\tPenn Kemp:\tIf I had a little more time to do a sound workshop with them.\n \n\n23:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYes. Yes.\n \n\n23:59\tPenn Kemp:\tBut I think Doug Barbour had invited me to do that reading and he very kindly had the kids, students buy the books. So, they had these — the cover is of a bare-breasted, beautiful woman caught in a slant light in a very bright yellow cover. And here they were turning the pages. And at the end they corrected me and asked why I had changed the words in “Bone Poem” because they were following it exactly. And I —I was everything I do is ad lib and improvised and I wasn’t synchronized to what the page was saying. So, they felt it necessary to correct me.\n \n\n24:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tTo inform you that you read your own poem incorrectly.\n \n\n24:51\tPenn Kemp:\tWrong!\n \n\n24:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, if the students commented on where the poem is going and how it should be delivered…Penn, where do poems come from?\n \n\n25:03\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, they have many choices, but for me, the most powerful poems come from sound. But I also write a lot from a translation or a transliteration from visual fields. So, I dream vividly. And for example, after you had sent me the possibility of the podcast, I dreamt, I wrote a poem about that dream. And for me, the dream poems that are astonishing. I’ve got a whole collection called Dream Sequins, but they’re not as powerful as poems that lead me on the way through sound. So, I like poems to lead me, to take me to places rather than translating images that already exist. But let me read you this poem and it’s dedicated to you and you can make up your own mind.\n \n\n26:11\tPenn Kemp:\t\nLiteralizing the metaphor\n\nFor Nix Nihil\n\nThe host asks me to do a Zoom podcast, live in BC. I’m to record\n\non a cloud some metres above ground. The ladder up to the cloud\n\nseems precarious, even with gold underlining and heavenly chords.\n\n \n\nI’m afraid of falling through watery vapour, afraid of heights, afraid\n\nthat my voice will be tremulous. But once embarked upon the cloud,\n\nthe local Indigenous elder teaches me her healing heartbeat chant,\n\n“la-Doe, la-Doe”. She repeats the resounding phrase as I join in.\n\n \n\nSo the recording goes well. As BC is my last stop on tour, I have\n\nrun out of books to sell. A shame, since audiences here buy more\n\nthan anywhere else. My host gladly accepts my last copy as a gift.\n\n \n\nI return to home ground, empty of baggage and replete, complete,\n\nand ready to begin again, earthed.\n\n \n\n27:27\tPenn Kemp:\tNow, if I were developing that poem as a sound poem, I would be playing with “replete, complete, and ready to begin again. Earthed.” I would be playing with “I’m afraid of falling throooooooough.” Wherever the sound takes me. I would play further.\n \n\n27:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tI can also imagine some lah-dot, lah-dot, lah, dot persisting in the background. [Sound: Echo of “lah-dot”]\n \n\n27:52\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah! Well, for sure.\n \n\n27:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell I don’t know what else to say, but “aww shucks!”\n \n\n28:00\tPenn Kemp:\tOh, I expect the sound poem in return.\n \n\n28:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell, I’ll have to return the favor. No doubt. The next audio clip that I’d like to play is from a sound opera composed in 2007, called When the Heart Parts. Written in honor of your departing father, Jim Kemp.\n \n\n28:24\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tWhen the heart parts. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wha-wha-wha-why? why? why? [interspersed sounds] When. When. When. When. When. When the heart. When the heart. When the heart. Hearts, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, parts, heart, parts, when the heart parts company, heart parts company company, our heart stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh- when the company, when the company, when the company parts, when the company parts. Art. Stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-when the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts from the hearth. When the company parts from the hearth. Company from the hearth. The heart does not stop.\n \n\n29:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat was a clip from When the Heart Parts. That was the first minute of the sound opera. Quite a lot of layers, quite a lot of voices. What’s going on in that opening clip?\n \n\n29:42\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, I’m trying to recreate the experience of driving through snow with the knowledge that I was going to witness my father’s dying. And coming into the hospital, to the room, hearing all the different electronic sounds that were so pervasive, trying to keep him alive. And my voice is asking, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” You know. And so, I was trying to express the immensity of all the emotions through sound.\n \n\n30:30\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, there’s the sound – The sound of like the male voice is doing like a “lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.” So, is that like the heart? The heart sounds there?\n \n\n30:37\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s John Magyar the producer. And then, Ann Anglin, the actor is performing with me the various machine sounds and the sounds of “why” taking the form of my voice and my mother’s voice as we’re in the room.\n \n\n30:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd when you were saying, “company” —I just heard this now. And I don’t know if I, if this was intentional, but— were you attending to say Penny, like your, your name is a child?\n \n\n31:07\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Yep.\n \n\n31:07\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, “come, Penny.” So, younger Penny in there as well. And, just like the, not with sound poetry in general, but with you as well, the importance of homonyms, homophones, and puns. So, you go from heart, you know, the organ to a hearth, like a space in a home, to art, like the art that comes from the heart and then parting and leaving. So, you have all these related sounds and these kinds of concepts, in a stream of consciousness, kind of interwoven in there —\n \n\n31:37\tPenn Kemp:\tI’m trying to get whatever works to get below the mental process into a deeper experience of the sound of language. And that comes again from a love of different languages.\n \n\n31:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe next clip takes place about 17 minutes into the opera, which is about 45 minutes or so long. It’s about two-and-a-half minutes long, but it really dramatizes that magical power of sound and that instinctive supra, or maybe sub rational power of sound that it goes beyond mind and into direct connection and intuition. So, it was a very powerful moment where you almost succeed in resurrecting your father, just for a moment too, to have this final kind of moment of connection. And so, it struck me as a very powerful moment in the poem, not only in the message and the words, but also the way that you self-consciously use sound to try to connect with your father while he’s deep in his kind of sleep state. Here’s a clip of the sonic resurrection.\n \n\n32:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tIn love and ceremony [Bells Ring] he crowns Mom with a Tibetan headdress. Magenta. Magnificent. Something significant has been accomplished. When Jamie and I come home from supper, Penny stays to read Jim the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He asked her to,  ages ago, if he were ever…When she gets home, we know something has happened. I never saw anyone look so worn out. She has worked so hard doing something.\nMy commitment to Dad is to read him the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The old words are meant to appease the fear and confusion of the dying.\n\nDo not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted by other noises or pictures. They are all projections of your mind. Keep to what is happening here. Now, do not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted. Traditionally, this reading is a guide in the process of dying. Do not be distracted. Keep to the clear light. The ear is the last sense to go. But who knows if Dad is listening? They are all projections of your mind. To conjure these peaceable realms, pure lands, at least calms and clears by own anguish. It is true. You are dying. It is true. You are dying. We are not pretending anything else. We are not pretending anything else. We are not holding anything back from you. We know you can hear. Your family is gathered around you. Know this is happening to you, now. To the light. Keep to the light. I whisper close into Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive. Remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest typological level of the mind. I call his name in three tones of voice. In between each phrase, I pause to the count of four. Jim Kemp [Tapping] Jim Kemp, Jim Kemp. And then my father flutters his eyes, startled. Squeezes my hand tight. He tries to focus, stares, and sees me.\n\n35:20\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, a very powerful moment there. And earlier in the clip you say, “in love and ceremony, he crowns my Mom with a Tibetan headdress.” And it seems significant in a kind of a meta level, in a sense, that through the poem you in turn are “through love and ceremony” crowning your own father. So, what about this poem is ceremonial to you, or how is this poem a ceremony?\n \n\n35:44\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, dying is such a time of transition. It’s the opposite of our two great transitions, birth and death. So, for me, yes, it’s important to honor these transitions through ritual. Dad and I were both received — took initiation as Buddhists in 1974. And so, we had studied Tibetan Buddhism and The Book of the Dead. And I had offered to read him The Book of the Dead when he was dying. So, this was a prepared act. My Mom was not part of that. She was much more of a rationalist. So, the dream was such a welcoming of her into the ceremony, which at the point of his dying, she embraced. The moment that I read his name and he came to, it was just before the doctors were to pull the plug, which would mean that he would die, of course. And because he was being kept alive by these instruments. And it meant that he then lingered on [Musical tones begin] for 10 more days. I don’t know whether that was a good thing or not because they’d brought him back six times with pounding his heart and all that. So, it was very painful, but nonetheless, he was there. But when I read to him and when I said his name —.\n \n\n37:31\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:31\tPenn Kemp:\t— he responded by not only opening his eyes for the first time —.\n \n\n37:36\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:36\tPenn Kemp:\t— but lifting his hand, his index finger —.\n \n\n37:40\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:40\tPenn Kemp:\t— on his right hand as a gesture of —.\n \n\n37:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:45\tPenn Kemp:\t— I don’t know, admonition or instruction. I never have been able to figure that one out. But extraordinarily powerful.\n \n\n37:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd from your subjective position there, it must have certainly seemed almost like a, like a spell to wake the sleeper for a final farewell.\n \n\n38:06\tPenn Kemp:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n38:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo just to call attention to, again, the idea of sound as a kind of magical technique, but also as a scientific technique as well: “I whisper close into my Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive, remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest hypnagogic level of the mind I call his name —.\n \n\n38:27\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n38:27\tNick Beauchesne:\t— in three tones of voice.” So how old were you when that happened? And did you know that technique at the time? Have you used that since in your poetry?\n \n\n38:36\tPenn Kemp:\tI was 39. It was 1983. And super learning was, there was a book called Superlearning that I think the Russians had developed these —I haven’t heard much about it since, so — I think the technique was so powerful that I’ve never used it again. I didn’t dare.\n \n\n38:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Sometimes those maybe when something like that happens that’s so powerful once is enough.\n \n\n39:08\tPenn Kemp:\tThank you, Nick, for noticing that moment, because it’s, for me, the pivotal moment of the piece. It was also produced by Theatre Passe Muraille as a play: What the Ear Hears Last. Appropriately enough. And you’re the first person that has, aside from the actors, noticed that absolutely pivotal moment of transition.\n \n\n39:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll go to another night, maybe not necessarily a night of the soul, but “Night Orchestra” is the next clip. So, this is from 2017 from your Barbaric Cultural Practices. Maybe, before I play it, can you explain what this clip is doing?\n \n\n39:57\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Again, I’m in the midst of an aural field. This time, it’s a hot summer’s night in the Toronto beaches. And I have my windows open because I don’t have air conditioning, but the flat next door has very loud air conditioning. And so, I make a sound poem out of the experience.\n \n\n40:25\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd that experience was “Night Orchestra”.\n \n\n40:29\tAudio Recording,\nNight Orchestra:\tDeep, deep, deep, deep, deep, beep,\ndeep, deep, deep in, deep in, deep in.\nDeep in summer stillnessan electric hum of air conditioner in B flat.\nStill hum, still hum. Flat. Flat.\nMonotone entrains my body. Monotonous. [Low chant]\nproduced to cool my neighbors thrums the outside air,\nheats up our collective night. Sleepless in the beaches,\nI resist the single roar — sleepless, sleepless, sleepless —\nas Blake deplores single vision. And Newton’s sleep.The sound of the perpetual 20th century colonized our\nfuture with a dominant beep sales pitch for comfort. Con-\nvenience, reliance on the pliance. The pity is not that\nthe century has wound to a close, but that it’s whining\non and on. Mechanical multitudes self-replicate in chorus.Relentless fridge and clock. The only spell-breaker is a tape\nof Tibetan chant. [Tibetan chant] Deep harmonic overtones\nconjure a resonance, disturb the soundwaves. Somewhere\nbeyond the pervasive rattle, waves break on the shore.\nSpecies diversify. Night. Orchestra.\t\n42:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnother hypnotic sound collage there. The line that really jumped out to me is, “The only spell-breaker is the sound of a Tibetan chant”, which to me is almost ironic. The chanting in this track kind of constitutes part of the spell. I didn’t really comment on the past track as well, which also had a low, deep Tibetan-sounding chant. [Tibetan Chant Begins] So, it seems that the, this Tibetan chant and this influence persists through your work and probably in other poems as well, that I haven’t heard. [Tibetan Chant Ends] You mentioned you were initiated with your father. How else has this Tibetan chant kind of worked its way into your corpus?\n \n\n43:35\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, specifically in this piece, the “deep deep, deep, deep” was the actual sound or my replication of the sound of the air conditioner from the neighbors. And as a sort of dueling banjo, I set up my own CD of Tibetan chants. So, it was very specific and very actual in that I was trying to go — it’s like going onto an airplane and rising with the airplane, as it takes off. I convert the sound of the noise of the airplane into an ‘ommmmm’. It’s the same resonance. So, it converts the mechanical into the spiritual.\n \n\n44:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is that a technique you kind of frequently use in your everyday life whenever you hear obnoxious, ambient sounds? Is this an inner way in the inner monologue to overcode them with something of your own meaning to claim your head space, I guess?\n \n\n44:38\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right. For example, the frog, there’s a bull frog in my pond, and if he hears a certain truck, if he hears a certain sound of a large truck, he starts croaking, as in kind of setting up his territory, that this truck will not compete with. So, I think it’s very —a basic technique from the animal kingdom up.\n \n\n45:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Laying your claim —.\n \n\n45:10\tPenn Kemp:\tYep.\n \n\n45:10\tNick Beauchesne:\tStaking your sonic territory.\n \n\n45:13\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah.\n \n\n45:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you for commenting on some of these pieces that I selected. I did notice that sound as an instrument of will, and an instrument of change, an instrument of consciousness has persisted through your work for decades. So, I appreciate you joining me for this interview to comment on some of those strands and to help, you know, theorize about, you know, the bones of poetry and the transformational power of sound and how sound can form the trance and change the world. So, thank you very much. Before we end off, I understand you’ve written some new material to document your experience relating to this 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.\n \n\n46:02\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n46:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo why don’t you —\n \n\n46:05\tPenn Kemp:\tI’ll read them for you.\n \n\n46:05\tNick Beauchesne:\t— why don’t you talk about that?\n \n\n46:06\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, first of all, I want to thank you Nick, for asking those very astute questions that helped me articulate the process because I usually work without conscious intent until I get to the editing phase. And you helped me articulate what I was doing at articulating the process. So, that’s really fun and useful. [Musical tone begins] These two pandemic poems were published in the Free Press or London Free Press, and the first one was contemplating what we’ll remember. It comes from the spring of this year. “What We’ll Remember.” I think the only thing I’d like to say about it is that — I was saying earlier that poems for me come from either sound or a vision, a visual inspiration, and these two poems come from the visual field. Necessarily they include sound.\n \n\n47:17\tPenn Kemp:\tWhat We’ll Remember\nHow first scylla sky shimmers\n\nagainst the tundra swan’s flight\n\nwest and north, north north west.\n\n \n\nHow many are leaving the planet and yet\n\nare with us, still and still forever.\n\n \n\nHow they linger,\n\nthe lost, the bewildered, the wild ones!\n\n \n\nThough tears come easily these days,\n\nwe too hover over the greening land\n\n \n\nas spring springs brighter than ever\n\nsince stacks are stilled and the pipe\n\nlines piping down.\n\n \n\nWhen the peace pipe is lit\n\nand sweetgrass replaces\n\nsmog— when the fog of pollution\n\nlifts and channels clear—\n\n \n\nEarth take a long breath\n\nand stretches over aeons to come\n\nand aeons past.\n\n48:29\tPenn Kemp:\tThe second poem came from a vision I had of, I call it, les revenants, those who have come before. Those spirits that seem to me to be brought back to a kind of half life from the influenza of 2000- excuse me – 1819. So this is a spell for them to return to their abode.\n \n\n49:05\tPenn Kemp:\tNo Reruns, No Returns\nfor les revenants\n\nThose who died once from influenza\n\na century ago, who now are pulled to\n\n \n\na hell realm of eternal return—are you\n\nrepeating, reliving the hex of time as if\n\n \n\ndoomed to replicate the old story you\n\nalready lived through? Once is enough.\n\n \n\nNo need to hover. You have suffered\n\nplenty. You’ve loved and lost all there\n\n \n\nis to lose. You have won. You’re one\n\nwith all that is. Retreat now to your own\n\n \n\nabode. Return home, spirits. You’re no\n\nlonger needed here. You are no longer.\n\n \n\nAlthough we honour you and thank\n\nyou and remember you each and all,\n\n \n\nall those who’ve been called back, called\n\nup from dimensions we can only guess at—\n\n \n\ncaught in the Great War and carried away\n\nor carried off in the aftermath of influenza—\n\n \n\nby this spell, we tell you to go back to\n\nyour own time, out of time. Just in time.\n\n \n\nMay you depart. We don’t know, how can\n\nwe tell? where your home is. It’s not here.\n\n \n\nKnow this virus is not yours. Know this\n\nwar is not yours. You are here in our era\n\n \n\nby error, by slippage, a rip. You’ve mis-\n\ntaken the signage, the spelling in wrong\n\n \n\nturns. Now return, by this charm, retreat.\n\nYou are dispelled, dismissed, dismantled,\n\n \n\nreleased to soar free from the trance of time.\n\nMay you travel well. May you fly free.\n\n51:50\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Finger Snaps] There’s my finger-snapping of appreciation.\n \n\n51:57\tPenn Kemp:\tWell I couldn’t hear it.\n \n\n51:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you very much for sharing your new work with us here on the podcast.\n \n\n52:05\tPenn Kemp:\tYou’re the first to hear it.\n \n\n52:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tOh, I’m honored. Thank you very much, Penn, for joining us. Thanks to SpokenWeb for allowing me the opportunity to do this podcast. Thanks also to my friend and former bandmate, Adam Whitaker-Wilson for providing the tech support and the studio gear and space on my end here. Anyone seeking to learn more about Penn — she has a blog. Just google Penn Kemp at WordPress, and she also has a Weebly page, W-E-E-B-L-Y for further information as well.\n \n\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpoooooooo –\t\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Ambient Noise Begins]. Thanks. You. Audience. For. Your. Time.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpo-ken. Spo-ken.\t\n52:42\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web. Spo-ken. Web. Web of life web.\t\n52:55\tPenn Kemp:\tWeb. Web.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tWeb of time.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpokennnn Webbbbb.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd then we’ll “fade out: music.”\n \n\n53:14\tHannah McGregor:\t[Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Nick Beauchesne from the University of Alberta with guest collaborator and Canadian poet Penn Kemp. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Adam Whitaker-Wilson, Douglas Barbour, Ann Anglin, Bill Gilliam, and John Magyar for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media as @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\t\n"],"score":2.4307246},{"id":"9670","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2 Trailer, Season 2 Trailer. We’re Back!, 21 September 2020, McGregor and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/"],"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 2"],"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":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/cfd03a52-ba91-41a2-a177-e69003d4427e/audio/a85328c9-9743-4a2d-9c46-079bec3cd2d5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:30\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,512,638 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-09-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"contents":["Get ready for Season 2 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. We have a brand-new line up of original episodes for you from archives, universities and in these physically distant times, the many spaces and places we call home, all across Canada and beyond.  Whether it’s a deep dive into deep curation poetry, never before heard interviews with Canadian Literature legends or fresh takes on the role of sound in listening in our lives, this season has something for every canlit curiouso, sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, and lifelong learner at heart. Season premiere in your rss feed October 5th, 2020.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Upbeat String Music] Last season on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we brought you stories of early spoken word recordings, etched and wax —\n00:10\tJason Camlot:\t[Instrumental Music] [Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep2 plays: Old sound recordings are weird.] [Inaudible Voice] [Crackling Recording].\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\t— And the hidden labor behind archiving and caring for literary collections.\n00:23\tKaris Shearer:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep3 plays: I think often we don’t understand or see the labor that is behind that presentation.]\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe listened together to the arresting words of Dorothy Livesay and Elizabeth Smart —\n00:34\tElizabeth Smart:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E4 plays: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept] —\n00:36\tHannah McGregor:\t— and to the sounds of the changing world around us as the pandemic changed how we work and how we listen.\n00:43\tJason Camlot & Katherine McLeod:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E8 plays: How are you really listening, Catherine? Well, Jason, how am I really listening? Sigh.].\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThis season on the SpokenWeb Podcast we have a brand new lineup of original episodes from archives, universities, and, in these physically distanced times, the many spaces and places we call home all across Canada and beyond. Whether it’s a deep dive into the deep curation of poetry, never before heard interviews with CanLit legends, or explorations of the ethics of listening, season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast has something for every sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, or lifelong learner at heart. I hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca [Musical Tone] or wherever you get your podcasts."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897344,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.4307246}]