[{"id":"9601","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 S6E1, Invitation to Sonic Poetry: Demarcations, Repositories, Examples, 7 October 2024, Whiteman"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/"],"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 6"],"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":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creator_names_search":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/35145971350432331044\",\"name\":\"Andrew Whiteman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/559b1f32-3d22-44aa-9b3f-3125de148a67/audio/225b5ac2-e7fd-45a6-a035-97f4c89bb277/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,284,009 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-10-07\",\"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\":\"“Happy Birthday Ed Sanders Thank You!”, written and performed by Edward Sanders ( from “This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate” part of the “Totally Corrupt Dial-a-Poem Series by John Giorno. Found at https://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html ) and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track.\\n\\nAudio clips of Amiri Barak, Helen Adam, and the Four Horseman from Ron Mann’s 1980 film Poetry in Motion. found at https://vimeo.com/14191903.\\n\\n“The Great Reigns” written and performed by Erica Hunt ( from Close Listening with Charles Bernstein at WPS1 Clocktower Studio, New York, June 20, 2005, available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php ), and Andrew Whiteman.\\n\\n“#7” by Alice Notley and AroarA. Unreleased track. Text taken from Notley’s book “In The Pines”, Penguin Books. 2007.\\n\\n“ Pinbot” and “Abu Surveillance” by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track. Text taken from Waldman’s book “Iovis: the Trilogy”, Coffeehouse Press. 2011.\\n\\n“How I wrote Certain of my Books” by David UU and the Avalettes.  from the casette Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU). Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.18. 1984.\\n\\n“whn i first came to vancouvr” by bill bissett. from the cassette Sonic Horses. Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.19.1984.\\n\\n“From The Life & Work Of Chapter 7 (For Steven Smith)” by Tekst. from the cassette “Unexpected Passage”.\\n\\nUnderwhich Audiographic Series – No. 15. 1982.\\n\\n“ Canto One” by Andrew Whiteman featuring Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieberth, Al Filreis. buried somewhere at Penn Sound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Unreleased track.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549667971072,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 6, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. We all know it when we hear it, and we have mixed feelings about it. Why does the archaic meeting place of music and poem hit such a nerve? Is this art form literature or is it music? Surely, it’s not song, is it? And if poems already carry their prosodic intentions within themselves – why bother supplementing them with extraneous audio?” These questions are answered by Siren Recordings, a new digital-DIY sonic poetry label run by Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:51\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. The episode features the playing of newly created works of “sonic poetry,” along with recordings of sonic poetry that inform and inspire this type of sound work that reactivates audio archives.\nLet the sounds wash over you as you listen, and maybe even start dancing. Plus, along with all of this sound, this episode announces the creation of Siren Recordings, a new multi-platform collaborative venture co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron.\nSiren is a record label, a digital academic hub, and a stable audio-visual archive for a growing database of sonic poetry in many forms. A place for people obsessed and interested in this kind of sonic art making that sounds like us.\nHere is episode one of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Invitation to Sonic Poetry Demarcations, Repositories, Examples.”\n00:02:00\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Sound of voice recorder] At the dawn of 1976, during the New Year’s Day marathon poetry reading given at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, Ed Sanders began his reading with the following lines–\n00:02:18\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders, 1976\tThis is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate.\n00:02:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tForty-seven years later, I raided the UbuWeb Sound archives, listening through all the incredible Giorno poetry systems albums that are digitized and archived there, and I discovered this work.\n00:02:38\tAndrew Whiteman\tI wanted to make a birthday present for Sanders, who turned 83 this past August. I altered his poem, attending to its syntax and cadences and nuances and its energies, supplying whatever skills my training as an indie rock musician affords me.\n00:02:55\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders’s reading, edited by Andrew Whiteman\t[Piano plays in the background] This is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate. For the pallid tracks of guilt and death, slight as they are, suffuse upon the retentive electromagnetic data retrieval systems of our era. And let the investigators not back away one micro unit from their investigations. And this is the age of investigative poetry when verse froth again will assume its prior role as a vehicle for describing history. And this will be a golden era for the public performance of poetry when the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling Troubadors and Muckrakers will roam through the citadels of America to sing opposition to the military hitmen who think the United States is some sort of corpse firm. And this is the age of left-wing epics with happy endings. [Upbeat music starts playing]\nThis is the poet’s era, and we shall all walk crinkle toes upon the smooth, cold drill of Botticelli’s show.\nHappy New Year.\nAnd this [Distorted voice] Is the age of the triumph of beatnik messages of social Foeman coded in videos the clatter of the mass media over 20 years ago. Oh, how we fall to salute with peels of that the beats created change without a drop of blood.\nIn 1965, it was all it could do to force cajole the writers for Time magazine not to reinforce the spurious and slinger synapse that pot puff leads to the puppy field. But now the states are setting hemp free. Ten years of coding romance yesterday, the freeing of bursts today, pot tomorrow, free food in the supermarket, and finally, [Distorted voice] haha.\nLet us never forget that this is the age of–ha ha ha. He is such a valuable tool, haha. He will set you free from worm farm haunts. Ha ha. He outvotes the warrior cast, haha. He peels out through all the cosmos mandarlid with poet angels, holding Plato’s seven single syllables in a tighter harmony than the early beach boys.\n00:06:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tThat was the track. Happy birthday, Ed Sanders. Thank you. A piece of sonic poetry from last year.\n00:06:32\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is a podcast about sonic poetry and announcing a new project called Siren Recordings, designed to create, distribute, promote, archive, and discuss it in all of its myriad forms.\nIt’s difficult to define. Here is one attempt I made.\n“Sonic poetry” is the collaboration space between contemporary poetry and music. It occupies an aesthetic space of its own making, neither coldly conceptual nor dramatically declamatory. It gathers people who are both passionate and curious about such workings. The poets give their full attention to the soundscape that compasses their words. The musicians arrange their elements in accordance with the materials of the poem.\nIt’s a bit stiff. At least that’s what Anne Waldman told me, and she ought to know, having contributed a vast amount of poetry, sonics, activism, and knowledge to the contemporary poetry scene over the past 50 years.\n00:07:27\tAndrew Whiteman\tMore from Anne later.\nI was trying to delineate aesthetic boundaries for the sonic poetry I wanted to hear and make. I wanted to cut out what I found to be lazy or ill-prepared artistic responses to the call of sonic poetry. The most obvious being either the single-note synthesizer drone, which provides a vague sense of eno-esque atmosphere to a reader. Or the quote: “my friends are great jazz musicians in their killer improvisers approach.”\nYes, I’m sure that’s true, but have your friends read Susan Howe, Percy Shelley, Anne Carson, or Jordan Abel.\n00:08:04\tAndrew Whiteman\tI want sonic poetry where both elements are scrupulously thought out and then allowed their free reign. Jazz and poetry might seem cliched, but listen to Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus or Kenneth Patchen with the Al Neill quartet, and you might have a different opinion.\nI need to remember that Brandon Hokura is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. He is also a part of the vulnerable media lab at Queen’s University, where he’s engaged with audio and video preservation.\nHe puts the distinction of sonic poetry in this for me: There are only two categories of sound sonic poetry, really: “acoustic” and “electric.” The “naked voice” and what “sounds the body can produce,” and those transformed by electronics. I suppose you could call the former “sound” and the latter “sonic.”\nStill, I see them as almost historical distinctions since recorded sound is, by necessity, transformed by electrical electronic recording processes.\n00:09:30\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m interested in the liminal space between the human voice and sonic technologies, language and expression, and body and media. This is what makes the work so important to me. These murky, definitional waters, along with my obsession to make such art, led Brandon, myself, and Kelly Barron to decide to build Siren Recordings.\nHere is a blurb we wrote for a recent grant proposal. So yes, this is going to be a little dry as well.\n[From the grant proposal] Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as a community hub, boutique, studio and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Edward Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic, the spoken text, the text as beauteously presented on the page, and the text as performed.\nWe incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the effective social experience of poetic work. We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in our work. Archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak. [Prposal ends]\n00:11:01\tAndrew Whiteman\tWhat that doesn’t mention is Kelly’s essential grasp on the importance of building a specific, stable archive. “Sonic poetry” has always suffered from the taxonomic impulse. Where does it belong, literature or music? People often answer this differently; so much of it slips through the cracks and becomes forgotten.\nSiren Recordings has three distinct archiving, creating, and hosting options, and I’ll discuss each of them. But before I do that, I’ll first give a genealogy of how I came to this art form, how it shaped me, and some of the work I’ve done.\n00:11:38\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tHis work is about the universe. [Echo]\n00:11:39\tAndrew Whiteman\tIn the mid-1980s, late-night television provided a welcome respite to the Reagan Mulroney-saturated daytime, fortunate enough to have stumbled multiple times onto Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann’s incredible documentary poetry in motion, which put the oral or the page poetries of that specific moment upfront—witness–\n00:12:00\tAudio Clip, Presenter\tAmiri Baraka. [Cheers]\n00:12:15\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tIt’s a poem for Larry Neal and Bob Marley, two [pause] black cultural workers we lost in 1981. [Beat music starts]\n00:12:37\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tWell, as a week, we know we don’t get scared. Nothing is happening, way out nothing is happening but the positive unless.\n00:12:54\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tYou the negative whalers, we whalers, yeah. Whale, we whalers we whale we whale we could dig Melville on his ship confronting the huge white man beast speeding death cross to see the wheat but we whalers, we can kill whales we can get on top of a whale.\n00:13:17\tAndrew Whiteman\tOr listen to Helen Adam in her apartment, singing an updated ballad of the times.\n00:13:21\tAudio Clip, Helen Adam\tTimes, cheerless junkie’s song, seeking love upon a day, a day of summer’s pride. I left Long Island suburbs for the Lower East Side. The train roared and thundered, and I sang above its scream. There’s a cockroach coming towards me, but it cannot spoil my dream. Love, love and LSD. It shall not spoil my dream. Or the four horsemen cantering toward an unknown destination.\n00:14:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tToronto was having a reggae music boom, and the dub poet Lillian Allen could be heard at the Bamboo Club. Around that time, I fell into a job at the Coach House Press, a place SpokenWeb listeners need no introduction.\nIn addition to making money for rent, I received an informal education in contemporary canlet and some of the people responsible for dragging canlett into what we could loosely call “postmodernism.”\nSome of these writers were experimenting with sonic poetry. As Mann’s film documented, BP Nicoll was one of the four horsemen we just heard, and Coach House co-founder Victor Coleman was making long-playing records. This is from one called “Nothing too fragile or heavy.” [Soft music starts playing]\n00:15:14\tAudio Clip, from BP Nicoll\tI only think of–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because I only Think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing here behind it–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing there behind it–nothing good in the distance, three fates wave signals BP–\n00:16:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tNicoll died suddenly in 1988, and Coach House began a short-lived talking book cassette project with the Toronto Music Gallery the next year.\nThat same year, Hal Wilner produced a record by Allen Ginsberg called “The Lion for Real,” which burned into me and has remained an imprint of what sonic poetry might achieve if the elements are precisely attended to. The musicians with Ginsburg were all people from the downtown New York scene, the secret location that had fostered so much critical writing, art, music and activism since the beginning of the 20th century. I wanted to participate in that communal and poetic world.\n00:16:57\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tDeath needs time for what it kills to grow in, for our book, sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American death site.\n00:17:07\tAndrew Whiteman\tAs I mentioned, I’m a musician, producer and performer by trade. In the early 2000’s, I began touring relentlessly, playing indie rock and spending an inordinate amount of time in vans, buses, and planes.\nI had been very slow to embrace computers, but when the iPhone came out, I took to podcasting instantly, and very quickly, I discovered both UbuWeb and PenSound, and my inner world exploded here.\nI must confess that my obsession with poetry has always held itself separate from my love of music, an aloof, almost higher state, nearly an inverse of Louis Zukovsky’s famous poetic statement, where in my case, music is the lower limit and speech the higher.\nThe discovery of PenSound and Ubu and the tendrils they put out to other locations and activations ignited a second, more profound wave of poetic thrill-seeking from which I have yet to recover. I discovered the incredible storehouse of recorded North American poetry that exploded from the 1950s onward. The archive, I realized, is a hive.\nI began to digitally flip through the lists of poets, listening to their speeches and eventually making sonic poetry. This is Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\n00:18:34\tAudio Clip, Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\t[Eerie music starts playing] A row of xs appeared overnight on windows across the street. We on this side wondered what they knew, what we weren’t being told. The sun shined through the taped windows and made geometric shadows on the floor. On this side, we learned that the sun did not shine that way for us. We did not know what they were doing with their days or nights. And there were photos. The family across the street taped photos onto the windows. After we put up our x’s, which was, after all, only one letter of the Alphabet, their family would never be broken. We on our side wondered what was coming to hurt us. Would our windows break into shards? Would our windows become weapons against us? We wondered who would protect us from the people across the street. Who would protect us from what they knew and that we didn’t know? We wondered what they meant to us. Were the families marked by x related to us? When would they come to occupy our apartments? What were they hiding, hiding behind the x? What did X stand for? Was it really for protection against possible flying glass? Or was it something else? Was the x a sign for the angel of death? Was it a cock? And what was it a code word for? What did the x exempt them from? Into? What did it enlist them? What did we leave out when we didn’t leave our ex? What hadn’t we joined? And what had we said yes to?\n00:20:42\tAndrew Whiteman\tI developed a rough technique for making sonic poetry related to how I used the archive. I would select a poem based on listening. Indeed, many of the works were difficult to access and print, but listening’s advantages were manifest, as Bernstein’s excellent introduction to the volume known as close listening points out that sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant—end quote.\nWhen backgrounding a poem, I decided firstly to avoid the two situations I mentioned earlier, the default into a textural or drone-like atmosphere created by synthesis, or its opposite, the live musician improvising to poet reading style. My second move was to develop constraints based on the un, as an Alypian might. These constraints might take any form, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or in the choice of instruments used. The formal qualities of the piece might be closer to d,  song, or something else, depending on what I heard in the poet’s voice and understood in the poem’s text.\nI’ll demonstrate how two very different examples. Interestingly, neither of these sonic poems use the archive as the Sanders and the Hunt pieces do, though it remains the greatest resource for creators and scholars. And I plan to make a record based on HD’s reading of “Helen in Egypt.”\nIn 2007, I bought books at Book Soup in Los Angeles. Alice Notley’s “In the Pines” had just come out. While reading it, I noticed her dropping quotes into the poems from a source I knew, the famous Harry Smith folk anthology records, which were legendary, and I knew because they had been re-released on CD.\nI felt instantly that I should take Alice’s numbered poems 1 through 14 and retranslate them back into faux folk songs, taking special care not to attempt any authentic folk or acoustic sound or structure which would have frozen them to death, but rather by using midi and the rough recording situation my partner Arielle and I had set up at home.\nI wanted to create a sepia sound and Dust Bowl sonics. I applied erasure to the poems and shaped them into semi-ballad forms. After securing Alice’s kind permission, we made a record.\nHere is number seven:\n00:23:17\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Alice Notley’s Writing\tEveryone said not to destroy time. We can’t have evolution, we can’t have the mind-body problem, we can’t have compassion, but I am losing mine because in the pines enchants and fortune in love once I had now I don’t in love there is no because your self-identification of the night is hard enough for identification. The night was hard enough, so in order to make the night hard enough, I slept all night. The pines as I offered to, I heard that ooh down moaning, but I’ve never heard that my defect is so beautiful. Now, it’s all that I have. My closet is on fire; turn up the clothes and shoes the closets are on fire to burn up the clothes and shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes and shoot the closets on fire to burn, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes that shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn off the clothes.\n00:25:52\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m happy to say that Siren Records will be re-releasing “In the Pines” in 2025 with extra poems read by Alice.\n00:26:00\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe second example I’ll play is my collaboration with Montreal-based poet and theorist Michael Nardone last year. From Metatron’s digital zine glycophorin, we chose his poem “Tower One, Tower Two” from the book thug titled The Ritualites.\nThe poem centers around an Italian American Sunday family dinner filled with loud, disjunctive conversation, plates being passed crosswise, and background noises of TV and the radio. Here, the constraint provided all the creative impetus needed, given that the song “Hotel California” gets referenced more than once, though interestingly, nobody at the table seems to be able to name it. I decided to scour YouTube for versions of this ubiquitous song, limit my sound choices to what I could find, and then manipulate all sounds other than the poet’s voice coming from other people’s ideas of what “Hotel California” is.\n00:26:57\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Michael Nardone’s Writing\t[Distorted voices with background instrumental] Oh, the pepper. The pasta. Pasta.\nOh, I hope we hear the one about Calvin. Such a lovely song. Such a lovely place. The crushed pepper. At Grossman’s. My dentist. At eight, I caught a commercial on his television for that concert on the national channel.\nWell, we wait until the sauce starts to simmer.\nIt’s nearly time.\nAdd sugar and your tooth, Helen. How to ache.\nBut it doesn’t hurt to eat. It does. But Bob, with all this good food, how could I not help but eat? Sue, this crab dips. My aunt Louise was in California, and she sneaked.\nThe recipe for her favourite.\nHow much sugar should I use, sue?\nTwo tablespoons.\nAdd a pinch of pepper to the pasta.\nOh, Joe. Television. Past the pasta.\nWait, wait, wait, wait. I can’t hear one word of what you’re saying.\nThe pasta, the television.\nTurn it down.\nJoe. Why must he eat adult television? Please pass the. Please, Joe.\nIt’s no use. We’ll have to wait till we have his attention.\n00:28:24\tAndrew Whitman\tWell, I faded that out. As it is a longer piece clocking in at nine minutes, I’d like to move on to Siren Records’s first release, which is slated for the fall of 2024. It’s an album based on a single book, Laois, by Anne Waldman.\nLaois is a thousand page, 30 year meditation on the patriarchy and Anne’s observations of them…uh, us [laughs].\nHal Wilner is responsible for introducing us, and back in 2009, I attempted to get him to produce an album for Anne, who largely relies on her son, Ambrose Bay, to produce her sonic poetry. “After all,” I said, “Hal, you made records for Burroughs and Corso and Ginsburg. Why not for Anne?”\n00:29:08\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Andrew imitating Hal Wilner] “This is in the eighties,” Hal drawled, “I can’t get that money anymore.”\nI thank Hal immensely for slyly shifting this job onto my shoulders.\n“What kind of Anne Waldman record do you want to hear, Andrew?” He dropped into my ear one day. Originally, I had wanted a Plastic Ono-style band featuring Cibo Matto founder Yuka Honda to back Anne up. Stark, minimal three-chord pieces, with Anne’s powerful moan reduced to a whisper. But I couldn’t get the money either. So during COVID I assembled the strongest pieces and began stitching Laois together.\n[Instrumental/techno music starts playing] I’ll play two tracks from the upcoming album.\nHere is “Pinbot.”\n00:30:01\tAudio Clip of “Pinbot”\tHe chokes me. He chose me. He chokes me. He chokes. He chose. He chose me. Pinbot. He shows me comet. He plays me Genesis. He plays TX sector. He shows me punched out Sega Turbo he needs more coins two tigers pole position two Gyrus Metro Cross Double Dribble action Circus Centipede he needs more coins Taito ten yard fight feature Spy Jailbreak super contra he shows me Wonder points Flicky Distron he plays Radical Ninja Galaga give me a break spy Hunter Ring King hat trick he shows me he shows me he shows me twin Cobra ikari warriors after burner danger zone Koban xy bots rampage silkworm Shinobi gorilla or xenophobe as the quest for freedom continues I can’t even carry or travel with this book, let alone read from it. I need a I need a roadie I need a roadie to carry it around and hold it out for me.\n00:32:34\tAndrew Whiteman\t“Abu Sus Valens.”\n00:32:41\tAudio Clip of “Abu Sus Valens”\tTo never have enough Canada never have enough being up Canada never to have enough be enough get enough have enough be enough yet enough never to have enough be enough yet do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish unmitigated, concealed our actual colour never be enough get enough never have enough be enough get enough never to have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough over in Iraq, over in Afghanistan, over in Pakistan where next?\nThat’s why we do it at night never have brown paper bags portrait death to never have enough never have enough one out of five to the crippling form of p t s d or suicide Eddie paid certainly slabs never have enough people to never have enough body slumber exultant civvies wild laughter turned on what drug area distorted by the marines where to hide set teeth to knuckles in combat wincey Lindy brutality o ever revert Abu surveillance never have enough be never again never have enough be enough or thumbs up never have a blow to the stomach cold savage beatings more brown bodies atrocity plus silence equals more atrocity Abraham not enough to never have enough link your memory to energy sleeping to never have the hungry ghost ever have enough to never have a hungry ghost more valiant have it all by itself between our realms hungry ghost that dwells in consciousness torments our desire never have a hungry ghost to never have a hungry ghosts never have enough be enough to never have enough be enough get enough never to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough yet to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have a get enough be enough get enough get enough.\n00:36:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’d like to return to the specifics of Siren Recordings’s three-part project as it is unfolding right now.\n00:36:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tFirst, the archive of Brandon’s work on the Underwhich Editions’s legacy, which informs our first acquisitions, includes most of the sonic poetry made and recorded by the likes of critical members of the Canadian avant-lit scene from 1977 to 1988.\nIn the words of our managing director, Kelly Baron, art needs to be additive, not iterative, for it to advance.\nWe need access to art that comes before us to learn from it and create something new. That access is incredibly limited when it’s originally on vulnerable forms of media, where it was never digitized and where it was originally given limited releases. I want to democratize that access and make it available. Opening up access to the sonic poetry of the past can show new artists how the boundaries between music and literature can be placed, and I hope it will inspire new art.\n00:37:17\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tThere are those who can tell you how to make Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, bombs, or whatever you might be needing. Find them and learn. Define your aim clearly. Choose your ammo with that in mind.\n00:37:29\tAndrew Whitman\tOur first two archival tasks are the Underwich audiographic editions and the Coach House talking books series. Neither have been archived in their totality.\nThe cassettes and reels from the Underwich audio, graphic series and Coach House talking books were given limited releases. There is limited time remaining to digitize them. Digitizing these works will provide widespread access to early, otherwise unseen and unheard works from significant poets in Canadian literary tradition, such as BP Nicoll, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffrey, Penny Kemp, David W., and Bill Bissett.\n00:38:10\tAudio Clip, Unknown\t[Distorted voice] Sewers go into the water instead. Where does it go from the train onto the tracks? Everyone said. My doctor told me cattle ship. That’s what the cows alongside the tracks are waiting for when the trains pass through an English bay in the waters. We could have cows dying. They would be washer cows. People could go into the water again and rob the cows on the dirt, out of the boats, or to the university. I remember a place in Nova Scotia called Cow Bay.\n00:38:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.”\n00:39:05\tAudio Clip from David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books”\tCrowd out, crowd out. Crowd out.\n00:39:18\tAndrew Whiteman\tListening closely, we hear the voice of Gertrude Stein and notice that David W himself is mining the archive to create new forms of sonic poetry. Finally, this is the text from the life and work of chapter seven of Stephen Smith.\n00:39:56\tAudio Clip, from Stephen Smith\tWhen they turned out to be inferior to their reverse heroes, silver’s reign, the poise was the burning beauty being allowed to become holy Balsam. His dignity clouded me possessed by being like an absolute cap sometimes about unloose the full ambition. But there was a person who was certain. Latency in the way of Slosha. With all his regard for the point. Departure stiff places disappeared became gloss fit to a little reveal something a new conscious purpose beyond humanity, having originality and ancient thought while there was still echoing a mighty Asian empathy born incapable of destruction, it became easy to recognize as if sorrow to divide outside. He had known the avoiding drama Asian.\n00:41:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tLanguages would have awakened an age, Kelly continues. Our archival approach is also special. A few Underwich audio graphics series recordings are currently available on Pen Sound.\nStill, the presentation of this archive is such that each piece is just a link, and it becomes a disembodied audio source. The original materiality of that artifact is lost. This materiality is significant, as these works were handmade with unique artwork associated with each release. Our archival process ensures that everything associated with the release is documented and scanned, rather than just the audio itself. We will then describe the images via text, making this work fully accessible for people with visible disabilities.\n00:42:15\tAndrew Whiteman\tDescribing the material ephemera of the tapes will allow the blind community to experience the artwork in its original form more fully. Beyond better serving the blind community, this archival approach also helps to narrativize the work, showing the conditions and artistic context in which it was made. Indeed, Siren seeks to become the standard repository for all forms of sonic poetry, creating a stable archive where the work can be accessed easily and indexed efficiently.\nThe second function of Siren Recordings is the label itself. Depending on the project, we will release three or four full-length albums per year in multiple formats. There are a lot of artists experimenting with sonic poetry at this moment, to name just a few: Kaie Kellough, who has an album coming out on Constellation Records this year, and Fan Wu from the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective is working with Tom Gill on a full-length.\nGary Barwin has been a tireless exponent of sonic poetry since the Toronto small press fair days. Jordan Abel performed at a recent SpokenWeb conference with a crew of two musicians and two readers, and he DJ-ed recording voices during his performance.\nFrom phonograph editions in Portland, Oregon, comes records by Douglas Kearney, featuring the incredible Haitian Vodou electric composer Val Gentil and author Harmony Holliday, under the moniker Bright Moments, creates incredible lo-fi mixes of African American speeches, poetry, interviews, and then mixes everything from Jazzenhe as to Rasta Nyabinghi sounds underneath, something I would love to archive.\n00:43:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tSo here is where I would like to formally call anyone listening. Siren solicits new works, archival manipulations, and interart collaborations involving poetry and sound. We are dedicated to the sonic poets of the present. Our goal is to provide a specific venue for these poets to publish their works.\nRight now, there’s no clear venue for doing this in Canada, but there are venues doing this elsewhere. Examples include recital records from the United States, which started in 2012, and nymphs and thugs and culture recordings. Both British labels begin in the mid two thousand ten s and blank forms from the US. It’s a nonprofit arts organization that began in 2016. Our poets deserve the same opportunities as the American and English poets. We’ll give them that opportunity in science.\n00:44:35\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tI don’t believe in any of your gods or powers. It’s all bullshit. I don’t even believe in my powers or gods.\n00:44:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe third effort of the Siren is perhaps the most important and follows directly on the productive actions of establishing the archive and running the label.\nThese two activities will generate the need for responses from our wider community. Essays, interviews, reviews, reports, and other writing will be hosted, shared, and discussed on the Siren Records hub by those obsessed and interested in sonic poetry.\nStrange as it may sound to those of you who have never left the university and might be a bit worn out by the institutional setting, as a latecomer to academia, I have been energized and excited by meeting scholars and students and deepening my study of poetry in an incredibly profound way. Indeed, I found it somewhat of an initiation, something Robert Duncan speaks of in a lecture he gave in 1969, describing when he was a young man, how desperate he was to find his way into Pound’s just released 1st 30 cantos.\n00:45:41\tAudio Clip from Robert Duncan’s Lecture, With Sound Edits\tWhen I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community: its total interest in Mister Ezra Pound seems to have faded. I want to go back to my initiation in the cabinet. How did I come to hear it?\n[Audio starts getting distorted] Forth, on the godly sea, we set up mast and sail on that swart ship, bore sheep aboard her and our bodies also heavy with weeping August and terrifying presence of a lady bluestocking who knew the entire modern scene, Aphrodite and in my belt on Telegraph Avenue, Elliot and the and pound, the 30 cannons. What was then the avalanche, the whole very confused domain of something one might call voice, which in pound one doesn’t know whether the voice is sort of actual metaphorical and then went down to the ship and I said, I can’t bear it, and then went, one week I went around with that on the godly sea.\nWe set up the mast and sailed on that swart ship. But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You find it the way they find it in music. Cadaverous dead brides of youths and the old born, many souls stained with the recent tears, girls, tender men, many more found out something we could not know when we were reading the thirties, the forties and so forth.\nAnd that is that pound intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of a singing intoning to the line. And then went down the ship, battle spoil bearing and. And these many crowded with bronze lands, many mauled. I mean, just our American trouble with men, many mauled. The word ” min men ” is already tricky enough when you get that many in there: men mauled with brand land.\nAnd so the Kirkheim. So I don’t always find, you know, Ava Hess’s husband as a Brit says, well, sounds like, you know, you never got out from under the impress of Yates or something like this, you know, and the next day reads in a completely different fashion, much more original. And you have the two readings there took it to heart, making them overlap so that the thing plays a double role.\nNow, I took it to heart. It’s exciting. The first high Yeatsian reading and the following much more casual and intimately superior reading. It’s exciting. Right. And where did you find them? She sent them to me. Oh, fantastic. They have not heard since, you know, they made them back in 59 for a German rating. I wonder if other stuff will start to sound. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution.\n00:49:05\tAndrew Whiteman\tThanks for listening.\nI’m Andrew Whiteman, creative director of Siren Recordings; looking forward to hearing from you soon.\n00:49:13\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to the Spokenweb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:49:32\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Andrew Whiteman.\nSiren Recordings is a project co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron. The SpokenWeb podcast team supervises producer Maia Harris, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. Our sound designer James Healy of season five will be making an exit this season, but we have a new sound designer: TJ MacPherson, who is ready to come aboard.\n00:50:02\tKatherine McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know. Please rate us, comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Also, check social media for our listening parties and more for now.\nThanks for listening."],"score":2.6060257},{"id":"9603","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 S6E2, Virtual Pilgrimage: Where Medieval Meets Modern, 4 November 2024, Pereira and Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/"],"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 6"],"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":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lindsay Pereira\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2d652a48-92e5-4aab-964f-13c84ab334cc/audio/768dfb20-fca9-4d6c-9e00-295fa04a0338/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e2-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,800,911 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e2-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-04\",\"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\":\"Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:\\n\\nFootsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/\\n\\nBirds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/\\n\\nWater: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/\\n\\nCows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/\\n\\nSheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/\\n\\nHorse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/\\n\\nHorse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/\\n\\nFootsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/\\n\\nMedieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/\\n\\nChurch bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/\\n\\nCoins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/\\n\\nBlacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/\\n\\nMusic: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615\\n\\nChurch coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/\\n\\nGregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg\\n\\nCrowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/\\n\\nBaby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/\\n\\nBreath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/\\n\\nHeartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/\\n\\nWorks Cited and Consulted\\n\\nAhmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.\\n\\nArsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.\\n\\nArvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).\\n\\nBailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.\\n\\nBeckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.\\n\\nBeebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.\\n\\nBenjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39\\n\\nCassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.\\n\\nDíaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.\\n\\nFoster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.\\n\\nGertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.\\n\\nGrazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.\\n\\nGregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.\\n\\nHill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.\\n\\nHill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.\\n\\nHundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.\\n\\nHurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.\\n\\nJenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.\\n\\nKempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.\\n\\nKuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.\\n\\nLangland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.\\n\\nNickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States — California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.\\n\\nOusterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.\\n\\nPowell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.\\n\\nSinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.\\n\\nWynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549671116800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the\n\nDepartment for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapping with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, producers Ella Jando-Saul and Lindsay Pereira invite us to ask what makes a pilgrimage real.\n00:01:00\tHannah McGregor\tAs digital technologies and global pandemics lead to the rise of virtual pilgrimages, modern spiritual seekers can go on pilgrimage without actually going on pilgrimage.\n00:01:14\tHannah McGregor\tBut is a virtual pilgrimage a mere mediation of the authentic experience? Or are pilgrimages, by nature, an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth?\nDrawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.\n\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tHere is episode two of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Virtual Pilgrimage, Where Medieval Meets Modern.\n00:02:06\tMusic\t[Soft harmonizing music starts playing]\n00:02:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m Ella Jando-Saul, a Master’s student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in English Literature.\n00:02:23\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd I’m Lindsay Pereira, your other equally brilliant, equally razzle-dazzle, though significantly shorter host from Concordia’s MA In Literature.\n00:02:34\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, Ella.\n00:02:36\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes, Lindsay?\n00:02:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI have a completely random and unscripted question for you that will miraculously segue into today’s topic.\n00:02:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, you’ve surely piqued my interest. Lindsay, what’s on your mind?\n00:02:47\tLindsay Pereira\tHave you ever gone on a pilgrimage or maybe wanted to go on one?\n00:02:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tUm, okay, no, I’ve never gone on a pilgrimage or even thought about doing so, to be honest. Have you?\n00:02:59\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, I’m so glad you asked. Yes, I have gone on one.\n00:03:04\tLindsay Pereira\tI’ve completed the Camino de Santiago and even have the virtual badge to prove it.\n00:03:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWait, what? Hold on. When did you go to school? Spain?\n00:03:11\tLindsay Pereira\tNo, no, I didn’t actually travel there. I did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\nI just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.\n\nPilgrimage complete.\n\nLook, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”\n\nCool, right?\n\n00:03:14\tLindsay Pereira\tI did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\n00:03:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tHuh. So, can people go on pilgrimage without going on pilgrimage?\n00:03:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI mean, yeah, it’s a thing.\n00:03:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt’s a thing.\n00:03:40\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah, it’s clearly a thing.\n00:03:41\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut is it a good thing?\n00:03:42\tLindsay Pereira\tHow is it a bad thing?\n00:03:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m not saying it’s a bad thing.\n00:03:45\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, my brain hurts. Speak with words, please.\n00:03:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tLook, I’m just saying with my scholarly hat on.\n00:03:51\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, fine, fine. I’ll Engage Smart Mode 2.\n00:04:02\tElla Jando-Saul\tVirtual Pilgrimage. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around since medieval times, too.\n00:04:06\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, absolutely. Not everyone could afford to travel during that period or was healthy enough even to make such a long, exhausting journey to Jerusalem and back again.\n00:04:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tRight, right, exactly.\n00:04:17\tElla Jando-Saul\tThis is why we have various manuscripts meant as walkthroughs of pilgrimage that were used by nuns who weren’t allowed to physically leave the cloister.\nVirtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.\n\n00:04:30\tLindsay Pereira\tA badge to validate the virtual experience and the indulgences.\n00:04:35\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd, in a way, all pilgrimage is virtual.\n00:04:38\tLindsay Pereira\tWhat’s that supposed to mean?\n00:04:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, ultimately, we are all metaphorically on a pilgrimage toward Judgment Day. And when we travel to Jerusalem, we’re symbolically walking in Christ’s footsteps.\n00:04:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tWhen we travel to Canterbury, Santiago, Walsingham, Hereford, or any number of other pilgrimages, we are metaphorically walking in the footsteps of a saint and, ultimately, of Christ and imaginatively taking ourselves to Jerusalem and Judgment Day.\n00:05:02\tLindsay Pereira\tSo then, why are you poo-pooing my flashy, virtual, totally legit pilgrimage badge?\n00:05:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tElla, I’m not.\nI’m just wondering about things.\n\n00:05:11\tLindsay Pereira\tThings like pilgrimage hierarchy.\nLike is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?\n\n00:05:20\tElla Jando-Saul\tNo. Well, yeah.\nI mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?\n\nWalter…Walter…\n\n00:05:32\tLindsay Pereira\tWalter.\n00:05:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tWalter Benjamin.\nAnd his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.\n\nLike the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.\n\nAnd in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?\n\n00:06:09\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, okay.\nWell, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.\n\n00:06:22\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, what’s going on?\n00:06:23\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, you may previously be aware of my Portuguese background from such things as our years long friendship and the fact that I don’t try to hide it.\nAnd my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.\n\n00:06:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes.\n00:06:41\tLindsay Pereira\tYou may also be definitely previously aware from such things as Professor Yeager’s grad class, colourfully entitled “Virgins, Martyrs, Trans Folk, the Early English Saint’s Life,” that my interest in pilgrimage stems from my father’s 50-year plus career as leader of a religious Marian pilgrimage known as the “Romaria,” which is specific to the Azorean island of San Miguel and in existence since 1522.\n00:07:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, this is both absolutely shocking and incredibly exciting.\nTell me more.\n\n00:07:14\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, my father, Eduardo Pereira, was a master who led pilgrims on an eight-day journey during Lent.\n00:07:25\tLindsay Pereira\tThey would all walk from before dawn until dusk, no matter the weather, in a clockwise direction around the island, stopping at churches and chapels, all the while praying the rosary and singing religious songs. At night, benevolent hosts who considered such guests a blessing from the Virgin Mary would feed and shelter them.\nOr if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.\n\n00:07:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, eight days. That’s a lot of walking.\n00:07:54\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah. And praying. They walk, they pray, they pray, they walk.\n00:08:01\tLindsay Pereira\tI can’t help but think about this sort of invisible yet increasingly potent buildup of what Sarah Ahmed, everyone’s favourite affect theorist, would call affective value. I’m picturing all these pilgrims doing this pilgrimage on a yearly basis, going through the same motions, and every year it becomes more important, more powerful, more valuable.\n00:08:29\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt increases in effective value. And that’s why it feels so intense for pilgrims.\n00:08:32\tLindsay Pereira\tExactly.\n00:08:33\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut at the same time, I feel like there’s this thing where something gets super popular and then suddenly it’s too popular and it’s not cool to like anymore. Or it gets commodified.\nLike everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.\n\n00:08:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd someone might, for instance, take issue with feeling accomplished for having completed the Camino de Santiago via their Garmin forerunner.\n00:09:00\tLindsay Pereira\tHey, I thought we were besties.\n00:09:00\tElla Jando-Saul\tOkay, look, now I’m really excited to learn more about pilgrimages—medieval pilgrimages, that is.\n00:09:10\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, me too.\nI have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.\n\nNow it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.\n\n00:09:40\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, that’s not a good thing.\n00:09:41\tLindsay Pereira\tFor the first episode, we are treating you to two experts.\n00:09:45\tElla Jando-Saul\tWe interview Drs—Michael Van Dussen of McGill University and Simon Coleman of the University of Toronto.\nDr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.\n\n00:10:03\tLindsay Pereira\tDr. Coleman tells us about the modern revival of an important medieval pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England. Walsingham is a remote village in Norfolk that has become a popular pilgrimage destination over the last century.\nThe site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.\n\n00:10:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tWell, hello, I’m Michael Van Dussen. I’m a professor in the English literature department at McGill University in Montreal and I work a lot on medieval manuscripts, medieval travel, and I’m happy to talk with you today.\n00:11:00\tSimon Coleman\tWell, hello, I’m Simon Coleman.\nI’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.\n\nAnd my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.\n\n00:11:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tFrom your email, I understood that you’ve worked with the material culture of medieval pilgrimage.\n00:11:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tYeah, I am not intentionally going for pilgrimage, though.\nYeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.\n\nThat’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.\n\nSo that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.\n\n00:12:59\tSimon Coleman\tYou know, some of the best historians of Walsingham and people who’ve written really interesting work on Walsingham are also themselves associated with the church in some way.\nThose are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.\n\n00:13:34\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so there are all sorts of ways in which people are working to try and make the if you like, the religious or the theological and the historical come together.\n00:13:50\tSimon Coleman\tThere are obviously occasions when people see them as clashing. And I guess I’ll give you one example: If we go back to the Anakin shrine, I think I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, it’s not where the original site was when it was first constructed.\nA well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.\n\n00:14:48\tSimon Coleman\tGradually, that view tends to fade.\n00:14:50\tSimon Coleman\tIn the 1960s, an archaeological dig is made, it seems, to establish the original site further away. And yet when I first went to Walsingham in the 1990s and I said to people, hi, I’m an anthropologist.\nI’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.\n\nSo even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.\n\n00:15:38\tSimon Coleman\tAnd for many people, you know, where history and theology or when history and faith clash, of course, for many people, faith wins. What matters is what Walsingham can do for one’s faith and how it might bring one closer to a church. And I’ve had some clergy and pilgrims say that they don’t want to know the details of the history because that’s precise. That’s not important. And that’s a distraction from Walsingham’s real message.\n00:16:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd in that sense, I find it fascinating and curious that if you go to the original site of the Holy House, for instance, there’s the kind of. That’s now a blank space, and there’s a big kind of arch, which is the original east window of the pirate.\nThat’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.\n\n00:17:02\tMichael Van Dussen\tI accidentally found an itinerary in an ugly manuscript in Prague Castle.\n00:17:10\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou know, forgive me, a proud castle for saying the manuscript’s ugly, but it’s got water damage all over it, and it’s grimy. And the last part of this manuscript is soiled. It’s gross and different from the rest of the manuscript it’s bound with. It was clearly carried on its own as a little notebook on the trip that it describes. And there’s this guy; he seems to be a knight. He’s called a Miles, a knight in Latin. But we don’t know anything about it, or what he’s travelling for.\n00:17:43\tMichael Van Dussen\tWhat we do know is that he moves from Prague and makes his way across the continent in the direction of England. He dips down to Paris, goes back up to Calais, and crosses the English Channel.\nAnd then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.\n\n00:18:08\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd he…It’s unclear. Sometimes people are writing their itineraries themselves.\nSometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.\n\nWe don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.\n\nSo that’s another layer.\n\n00:18:36\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know in this particular case, but he starts to describe the distances between places. You know, this is a very…almost literally grounded itinerary. It’s saying, from Dover or Dover to Rochester or Canterbury to London.\nThis many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.\n\n00:19:12\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe goes to Canterbury. He describes the shrine of Thomas Becket as one that no longer survives. One of the tricky things about England is that most of these shrines, these pilgrimage destinations, were destroyed during the Reformation.\nIt’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.\n\n00:19:55\tMichael Van Dussen\tThen he starts describing all sorts of tombs, which do, for the most part, survive.\nThese still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.\n\n00:20:22\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe describes the dimensions of the place in swords, which is weird because he describes the dimensions in swords. It’s this many swords wide, it’s this many swords long, and it’s this many swords high from the ground into the top of the.\nThat’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.\n\n00:20:54\tMichael Van Dussen\tI found it by accident. The exact same description, maybe a couple of words different, but the exact same measurements, the exact same everything, is found in another manuscript in the British Library.\nIt tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.\n\n00:21:26\tMichael Van Dussen\tThis is this cross, this pilgrimage destination at the north door, this CR Cross associated with Joseph of Arimathea and the Christianization of England. There are all these guides in textual form that he’s just transcribing.\nAs I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.\n\n00:21:59\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou Know, going back in the.In the 2000s and twenties. Of course, that has to do with technology, but it also has to do with the post. Post covert experience and the sense I got, you know, having and having done. I’ve been in Walsingham a lot over the last year, especially just posting in the post-COVID period, if you can call it post-COVID. We’re not quite post Covid now, but you know, what I mean was the ways in which actually that sent that.\n00:22:24\tMichael Van Dussen\tDuring that period, people could not come to the shrines, people physically could not come to the shrines, or very few people could.\n00:22:33\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd you had this kind of. You had to have these groups separate. They were separated from each other.\nSo, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?\n\nWell, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.\n\nAnd now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.\n\n00:23:43\tSimon Coleman\tSo you’ve got a shrine mass, and you suddenly realize that people who are attending that mass virtually, who are looking through the cameras at the priest at the altar, and so on, are people who are spread around the world.\n00:23:58\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so in a curious sense, you’ve, I mean, as one person put it, one, one. One priest put it, he said we broadened our constituency.\nWe actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.\n\nI forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.\n\n00:24:46\tSimon Coleman\tAnd okay, at the kind of Fsites, you can see how people attending mass also chat with each other.\n00:24:55\tSimon Coleman\tSo there’s another. There’s communication going on there that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.\nBut there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.\n\nAnd so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.\n\n00:25:36\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, it. You have a cl. Effectively, you can meditate on that statue in a way you wouldn’t have been able to do if you had been there. And so I’m like, there’s a sense in which there’s a kind of diffusion of links, but also a kind of magnification and bringing one closer to these images, even if one can’t physically touch them.\nAnd then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.\n\n00:26:28\tSimon Coleman\tAgain, there are all sorts of ways in which people can retain this sense or magnify this sense.\n00:26:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tBeing in touch with Walsingham and that sort of doing a local pilgrimage because you can’t actually do the bigger one, is something that we’ve been researching a lot for this project because that’s a lot of what medieval pilgrimage in England seems to be doing is like, well, if you can’t actually make it to Jerusalem, you can make it to this cathedral in England and that’ll be a stand in for Jerusalem.\n00:27:07\tSimon Coleman\tThis is absolutely true.\n00:27:08\tSimon Coleman\tAnd of course what we need to bear in mind is that Walsingham itself, and when I think about Walsingham, I talk about Walsingham as the place, but I also talk about Walsingham as the experience.\n00:27:21\tSimon Coleman\tBoth Catholic and Anglican shrines are linked up with parishes and dioceses that will have their own local altars where you might Celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham.\n00:27:38\tSimon Coleman\tYou might get together once you know you’re part of a guild or something else orientated towards Our Lady of Walsingham.\nAnd so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.\n\nYou might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.\n\nShe might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.\n\n00:29:01\tSimon Coleman\tAnd, you know, Pope John Paul II effectively contacts her and blesses her, and then she returns to Walsingham. So Walsingham, as a wider experience, is itself mobile.\n00:29:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd then this gets augmented, as we say, during COVID as people recreate not just to celebrate Mass. You can’t get together to celebrate Mass in your local church, but you can still go on a walk and coordinate with others online.\n00:29:32\tSimon Coleman\tI think this has had some degree of effect after the lockdown experience, where people have realized that you can expand the ways in which you celebrate your connection to Wolsingham.\n00:29:51\tMichael Van Dussen\tI mean, a lot of these are not like the texts, say, the Stations of Jerusalem or Stations of Rome, which are encouraging.\n00:30:20\tMichael Van Dussen\tThey’re not just saying, and it takes one day to get from here to here, or this is how many meters wide this is or something. These kinds of itineraries. Yeah, swords wide, you know, statues or something. This isn’t what they’re recording. They’re. They’re usually much more meditative. Yeah, they are. They have a reference point to specific locations and what’s there, but they might.\n00:31:03\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know if you know about the Stations of the Cross, but you’ll find in every Catholic church today and during Lent, especially leading up to Easter, the Stations of the Will, there will be Stations of the Cross. So you can come.\nIt can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.\n\nThis still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.\n\n00:31:58\tMichael Van Dussen\tUsually, there are prayers interposed between descriptions of a location so that the emphasis is.\nIt’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”\n\nYou’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.\n\n00:33:02\tSimon Coleman\tOf course, you can have your Walsingham, your statue of Our Lady Walsingham, in your local parish, but that’s different than making an effort to travel, let’s say, 200 miles in a coach with other parish members.\n00:33:03\tSimon Coleman\tYou’ve paid. You’ve paid some money, which may be difficult for some people.\nYou are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.\n\nBut you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?\n\n00:34:21\tSimon Coleman\tSo, all of that, that complex process of hosting is occurring. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you are separating yourself from a lot of the things that you might be having to do at home.\nPeople talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.\n\n00:34:59\tSimon Coleman\tSo it’s a combination of the place itself and the experience of having gotten away and having a time and space in which you can focus in unusual ways on the pilgrimage experience, which I think is very significant.\n00:35:00\tSimon Coleman\tAnd I talked. I have written about this.\nWe need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.\n\nIt’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.\n\nThey may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.\n\nIt’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.\n\n00:36:23\tSimon Coleman\tAnd those Anglo Catholic sensibilities that we’ve talked about were sometimes derisively talked about as being kind of British Museum religion. And why are you going back to an ossified faith?\n00:36:35\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, what we’re trying to understand here is how it’s not an ossified faith.\n00:36:49\tSimon Coleman\tIt’s a faith where the past and the present are so closely sandwiched and allied together for theological and other reasons that we’ve got to try and think back into a sensibility where the past becomes living in a new.\nIn a new kind of way.\n\n00:37:07\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, well said.\n00:37:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tCan we do that? Can we create a sensibility where the past becomes living?\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWe sure can.\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWith the magic of our next segment, Medieval mixtape soundscape shapes from centuries past.\n00:37:20\tAudio Clip\t[Background noise of sheep and chatter]\n[Background chatter in Middle English]\n\nIt that will not…\n\nA fool I…\n\nWish is overcome…\n\nBut first in and…\n\nEke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…\n\nAnother thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…\n\nThe morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…\n\n00:49:39\tLindsay Pereira\tThank you, gentle listeners, humble scholars and fellow medieval addicts.\n00:49:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tThanks to James Healy and the rest of Concordia’s SpokenWeb Team for letting us use their facilities and to the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia for lending us fantastic recording equipment.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd thank you, of course, to our lovely experts, Professors Michael Van Dusen and Simon Coleman.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tDon’t forget to check out Professor Coleman’s book– Farathya Sunder.\n00:50:08\tMusic\t[Harmonized singing and music starts playing]\n00:50:56\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The Spoken Web Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web Team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:51:00\tHannah McGregor\tElla Jando-Saul and Lindsey Pereira produced this month’s episode.\n00:51:01\tHannah McGregor\tSpecial thanks to Dr.Michael Van Dussen and Dr.Simon Coleman for lending their time and expertise.\n00:51:18\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team supervises producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and, me, Hannah McGregor.\n00:51:29\tHannah McGregor\tTo learn more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n00:51:36\tHannah McGregor\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tThanks for listening.\n\n"],"score":2.6060257},{"id":"9604","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 S6E3, Sound Box Signals Presents – “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings'”, 2 December 2024, Drew, Chircop, and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/"],"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 6"],"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":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sofie Drew\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Emily Chircop\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c42f89ac-b9dc-42d9-8fca-240f2598846c/audio/4976f18d-ed74-4fde-91c1-f1ac6d19fad6/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,746,880 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Side A: Sharon Thesen’s Reading at [George and Angela] Bowerings’” from Sharon Thesen fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/sharon-thesens-reading-at-bowerings/\\n\\nSharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: Studio Reading of “The Fire.” Ed. Amy Thiessen. https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/reading\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems. Ed. Erin Moure. Talonbooks, 2023. https://talonbooks.com/books/?refabulations\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 1 “Stories of Spoken Web”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 2 “Sound Recordings Are Weird”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\\n\\nThe Capilano Review, The Sharon Thesen Issue. Spring 2008. https://thecapilanoreview.com/issues/spring-2008-the-sharon-these-issue/\\n\\nSpecifically, Thea Bowering’s article “Sharon Thesen: Poem in Memory, and growing up there”\\n\\nhttps://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/2674/2674\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549676359680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast is happy to showcase an episode from our sister podcast, the SoundBox Signals Podcast from SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan. SoundBox Signals is hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer.\n\nIn this episode, from Season 2, Episode 1 of the SoundBox Signals Podcast, University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings’ house. Drew and Chircop’s conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:55\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we present an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals.\nThe episode we selected was produced by Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop.\nThey are students at the University of Exeter, and this episode was produced as a collaboration between their university and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, home to the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nIt is not the first time that SoundBox Signals has made an appearance on the SpokenWeb podcast feed.\nAnd like in those past episodes, this episode is another close listening and real conversation about archival audio.\nWe’ll let Sophie and Emily introduce you to that audio at the start of the episode.\nHere is episode three of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings.”\n00:01:52\tEmily Chircop\tWelcome to season two, episode one of the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nWe are your guest hosts for the episode.\n00:02:00\tSofie Drew\tHi, I’m Sophie Drew.\n00:02:01\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I’m Emily Chircop.\nWe’re undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, and this is part of the Press Play Project.\nWe are very excited to collaborate with UBCO researchers to explore and share these recordings with a wider audience.\n00:02:15\tSofie Drew\tWe’re here in the Digital Humanities Lab in Exeter to discuss the circa 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen’s reading at the Bowerings of her first published collection of poetry, Artemis Hates Romance.\nWe will be looking at “side A” of this tape in which Sharon Thesen, introduced by fellow poet Robin Blaser, reads the first half of this poetry collection.\n00:02:33\tEmily Chircop\tThis recording is available to listen to in full at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca\n00:02:40\tSofie Drew\tBefore getting into the recording, we’re going to play you a clip from our interview with Karis Shearer about the tape.\n00:02:45\tKaris Shearer\tHi, I’m Karis Shearer. I’m an English professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, and the director of the AMP Lab.\n00:02:55\tSofie Drew\tGreat!\nWe wanted to ask you a little bit about the tape recording and how it got to the AMP Lab.\n00:03:02\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, that’s a great question. I had already been working on a box of tapes that a colleague, Jodey Castricano, had given me, and we were digitizing them.\nWe’d done some presentations about them. So it was known–People knew we had this box of tapes. They knew the lab was busy digitizing, doing scholarship on literary audio recordings. And Sharon Thesen was a colleague of mine in the creative writing department, and she one day gave us two tapes. And her sound is now part of what we call the “SoundBox collection.”\nAnd so it’s two tapes, one of which you’ve worked with.\n00:03:46\tEmily Chircop\tCould you just describe the tape for us, for the listeners? Give an idea of what the event was and what the format was?\n00:03:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. So this is a tape that George Bowering made at his home in Vancouver. And the occasion is he and his wife, Angela Bowering, have invited Sharon Thesen to launch her very first book at their home.\nMy understanding is that that was their reading, and literary events in their home was something that happened quite a lot and they often recorded.\nSharon is introduced by an American poet named Robin Blaser, who was living in Canada. And she reads the entire book, and then she reads a little bit of new work. And so it’s both a kind of presentation of her, a launch of her first book, and then also, you know, what I love about that is a kind of sounding out of new work with a friendly audience.\n00:04:48\tEmily Chircop\tWe also wanted to ask you about the George Bowering oral history that you conducted for us.\n00:04:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, so when you listen to a tape that’s been recorded in an amateur context, people don’t necessarily say their names the way we said our names at the beginning of this recording. So we don’t really know who is speaking on the tapes. And so the tapes are full of mystery.\nOne of the ways that we can do some research and solve some of those mysteries is by inviting people who we know are on the tapes or who gave us the tapes to do some oral histories with us. So we invited them to listen to the tape first.\nHaving, you know, having digitized it, we share it with them, and then we set up an oral history where I get to ask them, or people who work on their research team, get to ask them questions about the context, the history, what they hear on the tapes. And they have all kinds of insights about things that, of course, there’s no way that I could know they can describe the setting as George Bowring does in that particular tape. He says, “Oh, it was a living room.”\n“Do you know how big the living room is?”\n“You know, my living room was?”\nAnd I was like, “I have–I have no idea”.\nSo he is able to sketch out and give me a visual sense of the scope of that room and setting, who was there, and all the. As you hear, what the kind of social context and circumstances of the recording were.\n00:06:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s the kind of context we were looking for when we listened to the recording.\n00:06:27\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. And in some ways, those questions that you have, the tapes themselves, generate all kinds of questions. Right.\nSome of these questions can be answered with research, and some remain mysteries.\nBut I love it–That’s one of my favourite parts of working with archival literary audio. Like, this is the kind of really wonderful questions that they generate and the kind of mysteries that are on them, partly because they’re not often well labelled or they’re, you know, people don’t document in the way that would be useful, but also it’s fun.\n00:07:05\tEmily Chircop\tThank you so much, Karis.\n00:07:06\tKaris Shearer\tThank you.\n00:07:08\tSofie Drew\tIn this episode, we will take you through the recording, delving in and out to explore the sounds of this poetry reading.\n00:07:15\tEmily Chircop\tFirstly, we’re going to play you a clip from the very start of the recording before the poet is even introduced.\n00:07:36\tAudio Recording from the Literary Event at the Bowering\t[Overlapping voices]\nWell, go get one, George.\nGo get one. Go get one.\nGet yourself.\nSomebody might take your seat.\nNo, respect you.\n00:08:06\tSofie Drew\tSo before we hear anyone’s clear voice, there’s a series of sounds that set the scene. There’s whistling, there’s laughing, the sounds of people clearing their throats.\nAnd it really sets the image of a lively, excited group that Thesen is about to be reading to.\n00:08:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it immediately places you in a very intimate household setting. And it really sets the tone for the whole recording by placing you in that atmosphere.\n00:08:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely, and you pointed out that we can even hear a child in the background. It really adds to that household setting.\n00:08:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it does seem like a child’s voice in the background as well.\n00:08:42\tSofie Drew\tIt feels like this little community that’s all gathered.\n00:08:45\tEmily Chircop\tDefinitely, yeah, it is. It’s a community feel. And that’s, I mean, exactly what poetry reading feels like when you’re listening to it. It feels like a very community-based event, a really social event, and a really intimate one. Yeah. And it sets the tone for the whole reading because that’s a thread that’s carried through for the whole performance.\n00:09:06\tSofie Drew\tSo one of the first voices that we hear is, we presume, George Bowering saying that he doesn’t have a beer, which is quite an informal moment, really, that’s captured there. And he gets responses from various people telling him to go and get one or just wait.\nAnd there’s really that sense of familiarity there between the audience members. They’re not afraid to accidentally offend him by telling him to wait. And it’s that really nice view of the intimacy of the setting. And it’s something that’s continued throughout.\n00:09:36\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And it’s a really funny moment as well. It sticks out from what you expect a poetry reading to be like. It’s a very informal moment, and it sets the tone.\n00:09:49\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:09:50\tEmily Chircop\tSo, we hear a man we believe to be Robin Blaser introduce Sharon Thesen on the recording.\n \n\n00:09:55\tAudio Recording, Robin Blaser\tA little respect here.\nI always feel very peculiar introducing somebody that everybody knows. Actually, I kind of like–I very much like introducing Sharon. I’ve been watching her for a long time, and what fascinates me about this book of hers is–she’s going to read to us tonight.\nShe’s going to split it, she tells me, and she’s going to give it the rest in the middle, and she’s going to add to it.\nOne, two, three, newborn something. Anyway, whatever she decides, she wants to do. But Artemis Hates Romance fascinates me. One, Artemis–\n00:10:37\tSofie Drew\tSomething that really stuck out to me about this part about his introduction of Sharon Thesen is probably the pronunciation of the word “romance.” It was quite unfamiliar to me, with this pronunciation putting emphasis on the “ants” at the end of it.\nAnd really, that small change there, for me, conjured up ideas of “courtly romance” of knights in shining armour.\nWhen Sharon Thesen then goes on to talk about her thoughts on the title, she says the word “romance” in a way that is more like how I would. How I’m used to it completely changed the meaning of romance to something a bit more informal, a bit more casual.\nAnd I think it shows us how the recording as a whole does that kind of thing, opens up all these different interpretations that if you were just reading the collection of poems, or perhaps even if you were in the audience, you wouldn’t think too much about.\nAnd I think that really sums up something that the whole reading does: the idea of these different available interpretations. Something Thesen also taps into when she talks about the context around each poem, her insight into them.\n00:11:42\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, the recording and the extra content we get from the introduction and Thesen’s explanations add something to the meaning of the poems.\nWhat I found interesting about the introduction was that this man says that “I always feel very peculiar when introducing someone everyone already knows,” which highlights how social this reading was. And again, the intimacy we mentioned before kind of blurs the boundaries between what should generally be a public event or a book launch with the very private friendship group and household intimacy.\nAnd it’s-it’s very interesting. It really adds something to the meaning of the poems. When you listen to them, you feel–\n00:12:23\tSofie Drew\tThat everyone there is contributing to make this reading work. When people talk about–and they’re discussing whether to have the lights on and, yeah, you really get this feeling that although it is Sharon Thesen doing the reading, she has this supportive audience around her who are all helping to make this happen.\n00:12:41\tEmily Chircop\tSure. It becomes almost a collaborative performance when you hear the whole thing. You can hear the audience as well as Thesen reading. And it adds to the performance. It becomes one whole rather than a reading on its own.\n00:12:54\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:12:57\tEmily Chircop\tWhen we first listened to this recording, I remember we talked about our first impressions. And a lot of the stuff that came up was about these kind of small background noises–\n00:13:11\tSofie Drew\tlike underneath that of the—\n00:13:13\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And interspersed throughout the whole recording. And I mean, there’s a wide range.\nThere’s a moment where a door opens. You can hear someone come into the room. There are cars in the background as well. We can hear cars on the street outside the house, as well as just an ever-present static behind it all. A child laughing in the introduction–\n00:13:39\tSofie Drew\tPeople clearing their throats, that kind of thing.\n00:13:42\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I mean that really made an impression on me when I listened to it. It’s just something I wasn’t expecting at all. I was expecting it to be more of a formal kind of poetry reading.\nAlthough, of course, it, you know, with it, with the setting, that isn’t how it is. But those extra background noises, they take that to a whole different level for me.\n00:14:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I think the sound of the door opening or closing, especially. Especially as we don’t know if it is opening or closing, if someone’s leaving or entering.\n00:14:13\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s this constant reminder of the people in the room that the recording is. And that the performance is more than just the speaker. It’s more than just the reading of the poems. It’s a recording of the whole room. It’s a recording of the audience. It’s a recording of the whole event.\n00:14:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd in turn then you wonder where that line is between the actual reading and the performance as a whole. Including the audience, including the setting.\n00:14:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I think that’s one of the main questions I have about this recording. Where is the line between what is performance and what is just coincidental noise picked up by the tape?\n00:14:51\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely. And I guess having that constant awareness that the audience is there. When you’re listening to Thesen speak, you also know that you’re accompanied by all these other people also listening to her, and you feel as if you are part of that little community there.\n00:15:09\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. You almost get kind of sucked into the recording, sucked into the atmosphere of the tape, because it’s just so. It’s so tangible.\nYou can tell that they’re in a residential area because you can hear the cars on the road. You can know. You can hear the doors; you can hear the people. And it just really places you in the material surroundings of this recording.\nEven though it was recorded 40 years ago, it still feels like it’s happening presently around us when we listen to it.\n00:15:43\tSofie Drew\tYeah, yeah. You experience similar sounds, cars going past all the time. It’s things that we’re familiar with, even though it was that long ago.\n00:15:50\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s definitely–It’s the familiarity. It pulls you into the recording makes you feel part of the audience, which, of course, you are part of the audience listening to the tape.\n00:15:58\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:15:59\tEmily Chircop\tThe original audience adds to the performance, but at the same time, you become part of that audience.\nThe way that it’s been recorded, being able to pick up on all those background noises, it’s not just a poetry reading. It’s a much bigger experience when you listen to it.\n00:16:14\tSofie Drew\tI think it’s a moment in time captured in a way.\n00:16:17\tEmily Chircop\tYes.\n00:16:17\tSofie Drew\tAll these individuals are people you can make out little bits of what they’re saying and doing rather than just the focus being on. Although the focus is on decent speaking, you’re also very aware that there are all these other individuals who have all come together for this one moment.\n00:16:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I like that. A moment in time. That’s a really interesting way of putting it. That’s definitely how it feels to listen to kind of like a poetry time capsule.\n00:16:45\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nYou will now hear the voice of George Bowering, the host of the reading and Thesen’s fellow poet and friend, who was interviewed by Karis Shearer.\nKaris Shearer’s Interview of George Bowering\n00:16:54\tKaris Shearer\tGeorge, one of the things I was thinking about when I was listening to this tape, I realized there is kind of a difference between reading in someone’s house amongst friends and versus, reading at a public library or launching a book at a bookstore.\nOne of the things that’s happening in this tape, especially in the second half, is that people are responding. People are laughing. People are–There’s twice in the reading, someone asks her [Thesen] to read the poem a second time.\n00:17:27\tGeorge Bowering\tYeah.\n00:17:27\tKaris Shearer\tAnd I wonder if you could say something about it.\n00:17:30\tGeorge Bowering\tJust used to do that a lot.\nWell, when you’re at–in somebody’s house like that, especially somebody that you’re close to, right? And that you’re really good friends of, you feel a little bit like that thing that I said about Robin, that you’re not doing a performance, that isn’t that formal thing staying in front of you is rather that they know that you’ve been writing this work for a long time and you finally seem to have got it done.\nAnd it’s almost as if they helped you. Right. It’s like a joint production, and they were there. I really do remember not enjoying it. It might not be the right word, but I felt as if it was important to my soul, you know because it was because of the continuity that I was talking about.\nAnd sometimes, we would do something like work that was not finished and say, here’s where I’ve got so far. And people would read it and get familiar with it. And then later on, you know, when it was 3/4 finished, another one. In a sense, doing something that’s in your house, in somebody’s house. Well, you could have done it in a bookstore, or you could have organized it for, you know, the Western Front or something like that could have happened. But deliberately.\nWould you go to somebody’s house and do it? Because of the sense of community and to use it. We knew this poem was coming, right?? And we knew we. We had read quite a bit of the poem before that. We have it. So it wasn’t as if it was, oh, geez, there’s the poet, et cetera. It was so high.\n00:19:32\tEmily Chircop\tShared.\n00:19:33\tGeorge Bowering\tIt’s shared. Right. Yeah. It was also because. Partly because Sharon, like, she and Angela were best friends at the time, at least, and they were.\nThey spent a lot of time at each other’s place. It was not just an extension of the poetry, but it was an extension of that friendship as well.\n00:19:59\tSofie Drew\tThat was the voice of George Bowring.\n00:20:03\tEmily Chircop\tSo you were talking about the ambiguity and the different interpretations of the poems that are opened up by the recording. Could you tell me a bit more about that?\n00:20:14\tSofie Drew\tSo, yeah, really, some of the most interesting moments of the recording for me were actually the bits where I couldn’t quite hear it.\nI couldn’t quite make out what was being said. And I think it’s due to the sound quality, really, of something recorded. So Long ago. But really, I found that when there were moments where I couldn’t quite make out the words, I was, without really thinking, replacing those ambiguous moments with words that felt more relatable to me and, you know, things that perhaps I would have liked to have written about, that kind of thing.\nSo, one particular moment where I noticed this was something like meeting the sweetest sky at night, meeting the sweetest guy at night, or even sweeping the sky at night. And I thought it was that variety of interpretations that could be taken from the reading that really made it so fascinating.\nThere was another moment where, until we had access to the written versions of the poems, we listened to the recording quite a few times without any knowledge of the actual text.\nJust what we had to hear Thesen speak about it and say because quite a few times, she adds in bits. And you can’t always quite tell where the poem starts and where the explanation ends.\n00:21:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it all blends together.\n00:21:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd so there was one moment where there was a word, we realize now it’s “Creeley”, which is the name of an American poet, but we weren’t sure of that until recently. And so it was this moment where we just really had no clue what these lines were, but it really added to it. It felt like there’s this intimate audience that presumably understands that reference, and we’re almost outsiders to that, in a way, and yet.\nSo that just increases that idea of familiarity among the audience, among Thesen, that we, as listeners, are hoping to catch a glimpse into and join. So, in continuing on from the idea of the listener of this recording being somewhat of an outsider to the community of this reading, is when in one of her poems, she mentions stc, and it’s not explained within the poem, but then afterwards, she explains to the audience that it’s Coleridge.\nAnd the audience reacts to this by laughing. They all burst into laughter, insane laughter. And so it’s like, oh, it must be some kind of inside joke. Must have perhaps expected that kind of thing from her. And yet. So we see that it’s an inside joke. And yet, as the outsider, in a way, we still don’t exactly know what the joke is. We’re not allowed in on it.\n00:23:06\tEmily Chircop\tNo, no. In a sense, yeah, definitely it is.\nThere is that barrier which, to me, amplifies that sense of the sociality and the intimacy of the reading. It really makes you feel the social atmosphere, that they’re all friends, and that they’re all close.\nThey all know each other.\n00:23:28\tSofie Drew\tYou kind of want to get invited in, you know, you want to become one of them.\n00:23:32\tEmily Chircop\tI guess listening to the recording, the fact that it was recorded and has been kindly given to the Amp Lab for us to listen to, is kind of like them inviting us into the moment, which is the only way they can.\n00:23:44\tSofie Drew\tYeah, I like that.\n00:23:46\tEmily Chircop\tIn a way, the kind of ambiguity that you get through the recording, it both alienates us from that original recording context because it also reminds you that it is a recording and that’s why you can’t hear.\nBut then at the same time, it kind of brings you back into that potentially because you are acting more as an audience than ever and trying to understand.\n00:24:10\tSofie Drew\tYes, definitely.\n00:24:13\tEmily Chircop\tI think it does both, which is very interesting as a listener. It’s a very strange experience to be both pulled into the recording and pushed out of it at the same moment.\nBecause I don’t think that’s something you experience when you’re listening to something live.\n00:24:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:24:31\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you miss something, you don’t feel like you’re being pushed out of the experience.\n00:24:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd you could even make a point that today when we’re listening to something, there’s subtitles available or, you know, there’s the whole Internet out there ready to explain it to you, but when you’re looking at something from a while ago, you know, you do lack that.\n00:24:55\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah. The prevalence of captions and transcriptions, I think it definitely changes the way we listen to things. We kind of expect to be able to hear every word and know what the correct word is.\n00:25:08\tSofie Drew\tIn fact, when I went through the written versions, I had a completely different insight really, to some of the poems that I just read. I wouldn’t have gotten just from listening to it.\n00:25:20\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. Listening to poetry being read is a completely different experience. And listening to a recording of a reading, I would say is even a different experience to that. When we’ve been talking about this recording, the way we talk about the recording versus the way we talk about listening to a reading of a poem, it’s completely different. It brings so much more to it.\nI mean, all the things we’ve been talking about today are things we would never really consider in a live reading. We wouldn’t be talking about how the door opens at this point or there’s a car in the background, or we can hear laughter.\nBecause of it being recorded makes all of those things more obvious and noticeable.\n00:26:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nAnd I think, live, your brain probably automatically filters out those background sounds like doors opening and cars driving past.\nBut when you’re listening to a recording, it’s all there at the same level, really, as each other, and you have to work a bit harder to figure out which bits to filter out and which bits to focus on.\n00:26:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And, I mean, personally, I think none of it should be filtered out. While a lot of those noises might not be intentional, they’re still part of the recording. They add to the art and add to the performance. And I think if you cut out all of those background noises, it would be a completely different reading. The impressions we get from it, and the emotions and ideas that are conveyed.\nThe audience has such a huge hand in portraying that to us, and you wouldn’t get it if you cut out all that background noise. It’s interesting. I wonder if they recorded the whole room because that’s the technology they had available or if they recorded the whole room because they wanted to hear their friend’s reactions to their friend reading a poem. In our interview, Karis Shearer had some really insightful comments about this, which we’ll now play for you.\n00:27:11\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, I think that is such a great question. And it’s something that I find I listened to a lot, actually, and I have a research assistant who works on the project, Megan Butchart.\nWe both do a lot of listening for intention. Like, what did people think they were recording? What did they think the occasion was, and what did they think the purpose of the tape was? The recording captures bookends in some ways that exceed the intended purpose of the event.\nSo the sort of sociality, the, you know, George Bowering says, “oh, I gotta have to get another beer from the fridge.”\nProbably not, you know, an intended part of the recording, but nevertheless something that tells us a lot of information about the kind of conviviality of the setting and the way in which people were, you know, food and drink flowing.\n00:28:05\tSofie Drew\tSo another area of the reading that we wanted to focus on was the poem Kirk lonergren’s home movie, taking place just north of Prince George, with sound.\n00:28:14\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you can hear a clip from that play, now.\n00:28:18\tAudio Clip, from N/A\tThis one is a prose piece. It’s a description of a movie that a student of mine brought to class. Instead of an essay, they had that choice.\nIt was one of those kinds of classes. You could do something else. So this kid brought this movie, and he had bright red hair. He was a Sagittarius, and he was into archery completely and thought that archery had a lot more integrity going forward as far as killing things and guns and so on.\nAnd he and all these other archers would go up to a place just outside of Prince George every year and hunt for bears with their bows. And this movie was a–they took up their little movie camera, and they made a movie of one of these little trips, these little hunting trips that they took.\nThis is a description of the movie. And it was very artistic, the movie, the beginning. Some landscapes and words about nature. That particular landscape and what it harbors. Shots of woodpeckers, porcupines, the swamp lilies, bears and moose. And the three archers, one old guy, one medium guy, one young guy, Kirk.\nThis is called “Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.” Taking place just north of Prince George, with sound. That was another thing that was really interesting about it. It was sound. Okay, so.\nAnd one young guy, Kirk, all dressed in camouflage clothing, like those green–\n00:29:53\tSofie Drew\tSo something that really stuck out to us was the introduction to this, in which Sharon Thesen uses quite intimate, small details about this Kirk Lonergan, saying he’s got red hair, that he’s a Sagittarius. Quite unusual details.\nYou can kind of get an insight into her mind that these are the specific details. Not the common details you’d use to describe someone, but those are the ones that stick with her.\n00:30:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:30:19\tSofie Drew\tAnd it’s that kind of thing as well that I think perhaps lots of people can relate to. When something’s quite personal to you, you do remember those small, perhaps unusual details.\nAnd so you get this feeling that what she’s about to read is definitely an insight.\n00:30:36\tEmily Chircop\tAnd it’s humorous, of course, mentioning that he’s a Sagittarius and then describing all of this archery.\nYou can really get that insight into the humour that’s present throughout this whole reading as well.\nThe bit I find most interesting is what she said–She says the film is very artistic, and the room laughs at this. And you just–I just don’t know, does she mean it seriously? Does she mean it’s an artistic movie, or is she saying it’s sarcastic?\n00:31:06\tSofie Drew\tWe have no clue what face she’s making as she says this. Or if people just naturally get from the context that it’s meant in a humorous way.\n00:31:16\tEmily Chircop\tI think either way, whether it’s sarcastic or genuine, it’s a really wonderful moment.\n00:31:21\tSofie Drew\tIt’s great to see the audience engaging with the poem like that.\n00:31:25\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:31:27\tSofie Drew\tAnd she continues to engage with the audience.\nHalfway through reading it, she decides to go back to the title, give a bit more description, context for the poem.\n00:31:37\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. The way she reads this poem is really interesting because in most of the poems, she reads the title, and then she reads the whole poem.\nSome of the poems don’t have titles in this collection. But in this one, she explains what the prose piece is about, and she explains the context behind the movie and the fact that it was a submission to her as a teacher, but she doesn’t give the title.\nShe starts reading the piece and gets to the name “Kirk.” Then, she has to interrupt herself because she realizes, or at least we presume she realizes, that the audience does not know who Kirk is. She interrupts and says, “oh, this is called Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.”\nAnd then she goes back and repeats herself, “Kirk,” and continues with the reading. And it’s really–I find it really fun, a very different way of reading poems, but it brings it back to just the presence of the audience in the intimate setting.\n00:32:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:32:35\tEmily Chircop\tThe fact that that interruption to put the title halfway through the poem is likely a necessity of just the way she was reading it and in the context of the moment rather than a deliberate decision. And yet it’s a really lovely way to read the poem because you don’t need to know the title until you get to that part where you mentioned Kirk. And the way it flows, I think, is actually–It flows really well. I think it’s a really good way of conveying that to the audience.\n00:33:08\tSofie Drew\tAnd in fact, by not introducing it with the title initially, it is almost as if what Thesen is speaking is actually just her thoughts she decided to share with the audience.\nThere’s that sense that she feels comfortable around them. Comfortable enough to interrupt a poem in the middle of it to add on to it more.\n00:33:26\tEmily Chircop\tIt feels very organic, I think, I would say.\n00:33:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd you had some interesting ideas about the form of it.\n00:33:33\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah.\nI think this section really showcases the medium of the recording because you have this prose piece which already stands out in a poetry collection, but that prose piece is a visual, written-down rendition of an audio-visual medium of the home video itself. Then we receive it in an audio format with no visual element. The descriptions are still so immersive and striking, even when you take away the visual aspect that you would expect to be central to a description of a video.\nAnd I think it’s a really. It’s a really interesting experience to be able to convert what was written visually about a visual medium into purely audio. And how that–Then we’re listening to it now, and we can visualize that movie, and I think we get something from it that we wouldn’t get from seeing it written down in the way that she describes it, the way her voice sounds and the way the audience responds.\n00:34:41\tSofie Drew\tAnd I think the fact that in the title, it’s added on at the end “with sound,” I think that really highlights element of the different forms merging together.\n00:34:52\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. So, considering the medium and the fact that it is purely sound-based, how do you think it interacts with the imagery in the poem?\n00:35:02\tSofie Drew\tWell, the images are quite disturbing; some of them, especially in the last few lines, talk about how there’s blood on the hunter’s hands but not on the bear. And I think the fact that these images are so vivid, again, contributes to the idea of the different forms of media kind of coming together there.\n00:35:23\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, there’s convergence of the different elements.\n00:35:26\tSofie Drew\tExactly. The descriptions, the–some of the disturbing simile metaphors that she uses are when she compares things: Cuddling their dead teddy bears.\n00:35:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:35:38\tSofie Drew\tBut I think the fact we get almost, perhaps a better description, a more emotional description of these things in the video than we perhaps would get from actually just watching the video.\nWe do get that sense that there is emotion behind it for either the people in the video or for Thesen watching it.\n00:36:00\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, definitely.\nAnd I think it is because we feel quite pulled into the audience because of the way the recording is formatted, the way that the listening experience–You feel like you’re part of that audience. You feel very kind of taken and potentially like, shaken by what she’s saying. And it’s very–It is quite off putting, but in a very mesmerizing way.\n00:36:28\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely.\nIt’s almost like we’re–You feel that…\nWell, yeah. In the gruesomeness of the imagery, Thesen is being forced to watch the video, in a sense, as–I mean, if these people have submitted it–\n00:36:43\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:36:44\tSofie Drew\tAs work, then she is forced to watch it, in a sense.\nAnd it’s like she’s taking the audience along, us along with her, into being forced to see these gruesome images. It’s almost–\n00:36:56\tEmily Chircop\tSee, I don’t know if this is the right word.\nThe way we’re listening to this is almost voyeuristic, as the content of this video is viewed through the very, like, opinionated lens of Sharon Thesen’s work. And to see someone’s home video through that lens, it’s–I think it definitely changes the meaning. We might feel the same way if we were to see that video or just read a less opinionated description. But the nature of it being prose poetry, really, it just adds that extra level of vividness, that extra level of, like the grotesque metaphors that she uses similes.\n00:37:34\tSofie Drew\tAnd we really get the feeling that it is something personal, even to Kirk Lonergren, because his full name is in the title of this poem.\nI wonder if he knew that he would have a whole poem.\n00:37:46\tEmily Chircop\tI wonder.\n00:37:47\tSofie Drew\tAnd the fact that it’s a home movie.\nYeah. We’re seeing something that’s very personal to this guy, Kirk. What’s, then, very personal to Thesen becomes personal to us.\n00:37:57\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, It’s. It’s just. It’s also intimate, isn’t it?\n00:38:01\tSofie Drew\tAnd yet, while we see the intimacy of this reading as a positive thing, very friendly, comfortable.\nThe intimacy that we see in the. Well, see, in the reading of this poem of the home movie, it’s very disturbing.\nDefinitely not a comfortable. Definitely not comfortable for the reader or the audience.\n00:38:24\tEmily Chircop\tThe next clip we’re going to play for you is from near the end of the recording. And it is the start of the poem, “The Shifting Sands Motel.”\n00:38:35\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tThe Shifting Sands Motel.\nSome transients for you, Robin.\nClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nI get this blue stuff from the Safeway called intensive care.\nBaths and the mineralmakend it makes the water just Mediterranean blue.\nIt’s wonderful.\n00:39:06\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nYou are soon to have lunch with a movie star.\nOpen your eyes and pretend your bath is the Arctic Sea.\nYou are soon to eat your companion in the rowboat.\n00:39:24\tSofie Drew\tSo, from the very start, you seemed quite interested in this poem in her description at the start of it. Why is that?\n00:39:32\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, this part of the recording really was one of my favourite parts. I find the way that she pauses her reading of the poem really intriguing. She says the first two lines, “close your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.”\nShe then explained that the bath beads she got from Safeway make the water really blue.\nAnd then, she goes back and repeats the first two lines. And in doing that, the explanation, that additional context, becomes part of the poem.\nWhen you’re listening to it, it becomes part of the performance. And it brought a lot of extra meaning to the poem for me. And I just. I just think it’s a really interesting concept, especially the explanations throughout this whole recording.\nBut I think this really exemplifies it. Well, the way the explanations are presented and the audience’s reaction. You can hear them laughing when she provides the content, the way that it kind of works its way seamlessly into the performance itself.\n00:40:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I mean, do you feel like it, at least, I think, possible?\nI feel like when she’s describing it, it almost feels like she’s talking to you as a friend, you know, like, “oh, check out these great bath bombs that I get.”\n00:40:44\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s very casual, isn’t it, outside of just the intimacy that’s so prevalent in this recording. And it’s both an interruption to what you would expect to be quite a, like, formal, straight-through-the-poem kind of performance.\nIt’s both an interruption to that aspect, and also it slots right in and makes the poem a lot more, I would say, tangible.\nIt makes it more tangible because you can imagine just how blue that water is.\nAnd by rooting it more in the home, it really picks up on that idea of, like, imagine your bath is the Mediterranean. Not just imagine you’re in the Mediterranean. Imagine your bath in the Mediterranean. And by describing the bath beads that she buys herself, I think it really amplifies that aspect of it, being your bath and the location. Yeah.\n00:41:33\tSofie Drew\tShe’s trying to connect to her audience on that kind of level.\n00:41:36\tEmily Chircop\tThat’s exactly it. It connects to you.\nSo, just to finish off now, I’ve got to ask, what is your favourite part of the recording?\n00:41:45\tSofie Drew\tI think for me, it’s probably within the first poem, “Japanese Movies.”\nI just–I really loved the image created there, especially of death, really. But the main line is where a cold snow lady waits with blackened teeth to cure you of the fear of life. And it’s something that throughout the rest of the recording, that image from the very start really stayed with me.\nI love the representation of death there, really. The idea is that if you trust death long enough, you end up risking more, and death will come down on you twice as hard.\nYou know, the idea that the poem just conveyed, I really loved it, and I think it set a tone for the rest of the poems.\nSo what about you? What was your favourite part of this reading?\n00:42:29\tEmily Chircop\tI think we’ve honestly talked about most of my favourite parts so far. The “hunting piece” and the “Shifting Sands Motel” poem are two of my favourites.\nBut one part we haven’t talked about yet is the poem from which the title of the collection, “Artemis Hates Romance,” comes. And I love this part of the recording.\nBesides, it is just a wonderful poem; you also get this interruption of Thesen talking about the inspiration from COVID-19, which I loved hearing. I loved getting that extra insight into the whole collection, especially with it being a book launch.\nI think getting that kind of extra information about COVID and about the process behind not just writing these poems and reading them but shaping the text into the book form that we end up hearing. Being read from, I think, is something extra special that we get from this recording.\n00:43:24\tSofie Drew\tIt’s something that we probably don’t really think about the majority of the time.\nYou know, you see, like a collection of poems–\n00:43:30\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:43:30\tSofie Drew\tYou take it; those poems are as they are. You don’t think about how they came to be put together, how you choose the title, that kind of thing.\n00:43:38\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:43:38\tSofie Drew\tThis really reminds me of when Thesen reads her poem, “It Being Over, There Being No Other Way,” when at the end she says how she hates it and that she only put it in the collection because Robin Blaser told her to.\nAnd I think that just really highlights that collaborative element of this collection of poems.\nThere’s a personal insight there from Thessa and the people around her. All these individuals have come together to create the collection and create the reading.\n00:44:08\tEmily Chircop\tI think that idea that you touched on about taking the poems as they are is really key in the way we listen to this recording because we’re not taking the poems just as they are.\nWe’re getting so many other layers of meaning and layers of interpretation from the audience, from the recording, from listening to her speak them aloud, and from the fact that it was recorded in the past. That kind of temporal shift. All of it just adds layer upon layer upon layer to the point that you’re not just taking the poem as they are, you’re taking the recording as it is. And that’s, to me, what makes this recording so special.\n00:44:47\tSofie Drew\tYou’ve been listening to the SoundBox Signals podcast with Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop from the University of Exeter.\n00:44:53\tEmily Chircop\tI study English and Communications, and I’m particularly interested in podcasting and how different mediums can influence texts.\n00:45:00\tSofie Drew\tI’m studying Classical Studies in English, I’m pursuing writing poetry, and I’ve written and directed a couple of short audio dramas with the BBC.\n00:45:07\tEmily Chircop\tYou can check out the full recording we discussed today on the SoundBox website.\nThe link can be found in the show notes.\n\n00:45:13\tSofie Drew\tIf you enjoyed this podcast, you can read more of Sharon Thesen’s work in her newest book, Refabulations.\n00:45:20\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music]\n00:45:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was a guest appearance by our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals. It featured producers Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop.\n00:45:54\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n00:46:05\tKatheryn McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n00:46:14\tKatheryn McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media.\n00:46:21\tKatherine McLeod\tPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\nFor now, thank you for listening."],"score":2.6060257},{"id":"9672","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 S6 Trailer, Welcome to Season 6!, 16 September 2024, Harris, McLeod, McGregor, Healy, and Ajeeb"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/"],"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 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Yara Ajeeb\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3849923d-330b-4a2b-8e36-2347aca1e839/audio/1fac0b3b-c40e-4950-8e0f-966db64790a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,544,931 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-09-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"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":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897346,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!\n\nThis season, we’ll continue to bring you contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.\n\nCheers to Season 6 ~\n\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:14)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does the SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? Or should I say — when?\n[Theme music fades]\n(00:21)\tMusic\t[Futuristic, electronic music starts playing]\n(00:26)\tHannah McGregor\tBecause in season 5 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we travelled through time–\n(00:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tFirst, we paid a visit to the medieval period [choral music starts playing] where we attempted to textually and orally translate the old English poem “The Ruin.”\n(00:42)\tAudio clip from episode 1 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Ghislaine Comeau reciting “The Ruin”\t[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]\nnum geheapen felon/\ngrimly ground/\nIt shone/\n(00:52)\tMusic\t[Upbeat pop music starts playing]\n(00:54)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen we jumped to the 1950s, where we revisited the fascinating early history of Caedmon records.\n(01:02)\tAudio clip from episode 4 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Barbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth.\n(01:13)\tMusic\t[Grunge guitar music starts playing]\n(01:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe travelled to the 1980s and listened to recovered recordings from the boundary-breaking Ultimatum Festival.\n(01:24)\tAudio clip from episode 6 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Frances Grace Fyfe\tThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n(01:32)\tMusic\t[Pop-esque, upbeat music starts playing]\n(01:35)\tHannah McGregor\tWe “crossed over” to 2021 and checked in with Linda Morra to hear about Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator.”\n(01:43)\tAudio clip from episode 3 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Linda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it.\n(01:53)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Pop-esque upbeat music continues] And we revisited the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium to ask academics and artists big questions.\n(02:02)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Kate Moffat\tWhat are you listening to?\n(02:03)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Rémy Bocquillon\t“What are you listening to?” Ho, that’s a hard question.\n(02:07)\tMusic\t[Eerie echo music starts playing]\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWe also explored how our bodies experience time, by asking how “not-knowing” feels and how it sounds.\n(02:20)\tAudio clip from episode 2 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Nadège Paquette\tDoes the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps]\n(02:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd then, [Sci-fi music starts] we looked to the [echo] “future.”\n(02:36)\tHannah McGregor\tWe heard from the artists harnessing algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance in a live episode.\n(02:45)\tAudio clip from episode 8 of SpokenWeb Podcast\n– Audio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\t[Overlapping voices] nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat.\n(02:52)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe also asked computers to help us decide which oral performers are the best at “doing” the voices in the Waste Land.\n(03:01)\tAudio clip from episode 5 of SpokenWeb Podcast, MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading The Wasteland\tTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\n(03:07)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd we looked ahead to a future without our mini-series Shortcuts, bidding it a fond farewell.\n(03:13)\tAudio clip from SpokenWeb Shortcuts Season 5, Episode 6, Katherine McLeod\tAs always, thank you for listening.\n(03:18)\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast that showcases audio from archival literary recordings across Canada.\n[Theme music starts playing] But while we’re fascinated with how audio archives can help us understand the history of literature in Canada, we’re not just a history podcast.\n(03:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast covers the “then,” the “when,” and the “now” – contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds.\n(03:49)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season, we’ll continue to look back at the past and explore the future with new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n(03:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tSeason 6 will be our last season, at least in this current form. The podcast will evolve into a new series, on this very same podcast feed, so don’t go anywhere!\n(04:10)\tHannah McGregor\tIn the meantime, as always–\n(04:13)\tKatherine McLeod\t–My name is Katherine McLeod–\n(04:14)\tHannah McGregor\t–And I’m Hannah McGregor. And we are back as your co-hosts.\n(04:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe podcast production team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, and transcriber Yara Ajeeb.\n(04:27)\tHannah McGregor\tSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.\nAnd welcome to season 6!\n(04:37)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Electronic music fades away]"],"score":2.6060257}]