[{"id":"1292","cataloger_name":["Bindu,Reddy"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"source_collection_label":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Records Management and Archives"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_description":["The fonds consists of some administrative records of the SGWU Department of English and the Concordia Department of English between 1971 and 2000. It also consists of some SGWU Department of English records related to student academic activities in the 1940s and to public readings and lectures, and a few interviews, produced between 1966 and 1972. The fonds mainly includes minutes of departmental meetings and some course timetables. It also includes some student papers in bound volumes and 63 sound recordings (80 audio reels) mainly composed of poetry readings (see the Concordia SpokenWeb project which uses this material) but also a few lectures given at SGWU. There are also loose typed sheets describing some of the SGWU poetry readings."],"collection_source_collection_id":["I086"],"persistent_url":["http://archives.concordia.ca/I086"],"item_title":["Dorothy Livesay at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 14 January 1972\n"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_title_note":["\"DORTHY LIVESAY POETRY (1 OF 2) 3 3/4 IPS 1/2 TR. (COPY)\" written on the back of the tape's box. DORTHY LIVESAY refers to Dorothy Livesay. DORTHY is mispelled. \"D. LIVESAY I086-11-032.1\" written on on the spine of the tape's box. \"D. LIVESAY 1/2 1-72-012-5\" and \"reel 1 I086-11-032.1\" written on stickers on the reel. \"D. LIVESAY 1/2 I086-11-032.1\" written on the front of the tape's box. \"Reel 1: Contents.- Edmonton Street.-The operation-The women syndrome.-Other.-Bartok and the geranium.-Later day Eve.\" written on sticker on the front of the tape's box\n\n\"DORTHY LIVESAY POETRY (2 OF 2) 3 3/4 IPS 1/2 TR. (COPY)\" written on the back of the tape's box. DORTHY LIVESAY refers to Dorothy Livesay. DORTHY is mispelled. \"D. LIVESAY I086-11-032.2\" written on on the spine of the tape's box. \"I086-11-032.2\" written on sticker on the reel. \"2/2 D. LIVESAY 1/2 1-72-012-5\" written on the front of the tape's box. \"Reel 2: Contents.-Day and night.-Lorea.-Weapons.-Alienation.-Climax.-Blindness.-Song for Solomon.-Poem.-Four Songs.-The taming.-Give us our trespasses.-The notations of love.-Moving out.- At dawn.\" written on sticker on the front of the tape's box"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["The Poetry Series"],"item_subseries_title":["Poetry 6"],"item_identifiers":["[I086-11-032.1, I086-11-032.2]"],"creator_names":["Livesay, Dorothy"],"creator_names_search":["Livesay, Dorothy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/116854541\",\"name\":\"Livesay, Dorothy\",\"dates\":\"1909-1996\",\"notes\":\"Poet Dorothy Livesay was born in Winnipeg in 1909, and moved to Toronto in 1920, when her father managed the Canadian Press. In the fall of 1926 she started studying at Trinity College, University of Toronto, where she was influenced by ideas of socialism and women’s rights. She published her first collection of poetry, Green pitcher (Macmillan, 1928) when she was only eighteen. Livesay then went to the south of France to study for one year, and after her graduation in 1931 (B.A.) she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where she received a Diplôme d'études supérieures, in 1932. Influenced and affected by the Depression, she began studies at University of Toronto’s School of Social Work, joining the Communist Party. The same year, 1932, she published her second book, Signpost (Macmillan). She then moved to Montreal from 1933-1934, and to Englewood, New Jersey from 1934-1935, working with the unemployed as a social worker. During this time she also wrote for the Marxist news magazine New Frontier, Canadian Poetry Magazine and The Canadian Forum. Dorothy Livesay’s political poetry includes Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944) and Poems for the People (Ryerson Press, 1947), both of which won the Governor General’s Award. Married in 1937 to Duncan Macnair, Livesay raised two children in Vancouver. In 1960, when her husband had died and her children began their own lives, Dorothy Livesay moved to Zambia, where she taught English for UNESCO for three years. Returning to Vancouver, she earned a M.E.D. (1966) from University of British Columbia. She became involved in the Vancouver poetry scene and she experienced a change of style and content in her writing. She published The Unquiet Bed, illustrated by Roy Kiyooka (Ryerson Press, 1967), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971), which both focused on aspects of femaleness. Livesay founded an important poetry magazine CV/II in 1975 and edited the anthology, Forty Women Poets of Canada in 1971 (Ingluvin Press). Dorothy Livesay also published several long poems, The Documentaries (Ryerson Press, 1968), Nine Poems of Farewell (Black Moss Press, 1973), The Raw Edges: Voices From Our Time (Turnstone Press, 1981), Phases of Love (Coach House Press, 1983), Feeling Worlds (Goose Lane/Fiddlehead,1984) and The Self-completing Tree (Porcepic Press, 1986). She also wrote several works of prose, including A Winnipeg Childhood (Peguis, 1973) and Beginnings (Newpress, 1988). She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1987 and was the writer-in-residence and professor of English at many Canadian Universities. Livesay died in 1996.\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\",\"Performer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"Performance_Date":[1972],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"Half-track\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"Half-track\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Reel to Reel","Reel to Reel"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue","Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio","Audio"],"playback_mode":["Mono","Mono"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"1972 1 14\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"Date specified in written announcement \\\"Georgian Happenings\\\"\\n\",\"source\":\"Supplemental Material\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080570\",\"venue\":\"Hall Building Room H-651\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada\",\"latitude\":\"45.4972758\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57893043\"}]"],"Address":["1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"],"Venue":["Hall Building Room H-651"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971)."],"contents":["dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3 [File 1 of 2]\n \nIntroducer\n00:00:02\nI was going to talk on about Dorothy Livesay's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1250325] distinguished career, as a poet, and a critic and a teacher, but after what she told me tonight, I'm not sure if distinguished is exactly the right word, she says that at the age of nineteen, she snubbed the Prince of Wales [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q590227]. Nevertheless, two books should be mentioned, her selected and uncollected poems to appear this September and a book which was called 39 Women Poets which has gained another poet and another title at the last moment and as 40 Women Poets of Canada [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16] is now on sale outside, as you may have seen as you came in. Back in 1965, I guess it was, Wynne Francis managed to catch Dorothy Livesay as she was passing through Montreal [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q340], and Dorothy gave a really private reading in Wynne's office. Ever since then, we have been trying to convince her to come back and read to us all in the series. I'm extremely happy this year that we have been successful and that I can present to you Dorothy Livesay.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:01:58\nI think I might get hung up on this, I had quite a disastrous time getting here. I arrived with a new poem of seven, whose title is \"Disasters of the Sun\", and my first disaster was on the train, sitting on top of my glasses, which are now somewhat myopic, and second disaster going to Sherbrooke [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139473], the bus rolled right into an oil tanker, which somehow or other didn't blow up, but gashed my thumb, and at Bishop's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3551383] I had only begun to read when a fire alarm started [laughter], and rang for ten minutes before they silenced it. So I have a feeling that somehow or other, there are more disasters ahead tonight. However, I'm supposed to read a while and then call an intermission I think. Mostly I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the different things, especially love poems from early times on, but I'm going to skip about a bit. Recently in Edmonton [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2096] I edited the fourth issue of a quarterly magazine, White Pelican. Which Sheila Watson [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7493167] edits but she gave this particular issue to me, and I chose the theme of North. Feeling perhaps that we are still trying to find our identity, whether we're English Canadians or French Canadians, and that perhaps the north has some element of it in it which helps us to find that. I discovered though, in collecting material, stories, poems, plays about the north, that it was the Native Indian people who have a different view altogether of the north than we do. At the same time, you find many young Canadian poets identifying with Native culture, and almost feeling that they must become Native, and become Indian to be real, to know who they are. I wrote at the beginning of this issue this little note I'll just read. “North is from wherever you are looking.” It's starting...[laughter]. “For those living below the 49th parallel, Canada itself is North. In a sense, we're all here as explorers without a home. Our great guilt at having ousted the Native peoples from their land is now seeking expression in an attempt to re-create the Indian and Eskimo past, and every month brings forth books of poetry, fiction and history which seek to come to terms with pre-history, with myth, or with the way the Inuit live in harmony with nature. In ironic contrast, the Native artists and writers are expressing their concern, not with their past, but with possible ways of accommodation to the present, the white man's world. Thus, the three British Columbia [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1974] Indian poets here represented, Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams and Eleanor Crow are bitter, ironic and contemporary. Not for them the nostalgic recreation of the Indian myth, or even  not for them the vigorous folk humor of life in the north which you find in [unintelligible] and in later writers.” While I think it's worthwhile thinking about that because you do have a lot of young poets now seeping themselves in Indian or Eskimo culture, and feeling as if they must become that in order to be themselves. None of us can quite escape from this, and I have a poem or two that I'll begin with, which I suppose are my expression of coming to terms with the North, or the somewhat southernly north, Edmonton. I'll begin with a kind of collage poem where I put bits of history, bits of visual imagery and bits of surrealism together, called \"Edmonton Sweet\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:06:56\nReads \"Edmonton Sweet\" [from Plainsongs].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:10:19\nQuite a different poem about going North is called \"The Operation\", and that is the poem which is in this anthology, just out today, 40 Women Poets. I didn't intend to put myself in, but the other editors suggested it was the only 'done' thing to put one or two poems of my own in it. So here's the one called \"The Operation\". It's a kind of three-way poem where the woman is addressing the doctor and her lover, alternately, and then perhaps herself.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:11:10\nReads \"The Operation\" [from Plainsongs and collected in 40 Women Poets] .\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:15:36\nSince this anthology will probably be called a women's lib., even though it isn't, because none of the poets in it are consciously trying to be anything but their individual selves, nonetheless, I think there are poems by every woman which do express that individual point of view, that differentness, I have never been able, though perhaps I was a women's lib. creature in the thirties, I have never been able to feel that men and women are the same, and so I have poems, right through the years which illustrate that point of view. Here's a very recent one called \"The Woman Syndrome\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:16:26\nReads \"The Woman Syndrome\" [published later in Archive For Our Times].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:17:05\nAnd a much earlier poem, written when I had a family and young children and I suppose frustrated and not getting out into the world. It's called \"Other\", it's in The Selected Poems of 1957.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:17:34\nReads \"Other\" from Selected Poems, 1926-1956.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:19:11\nAnd in a different vein altogether, the poem I suppose that's been the most anthologized of any of mine, which to me is a rather traditional way I suppose of seeing the male and female element. It's called \"Bartok and the Geranium\". The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing, and I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps haiku-type poem, when they got home, to look at two objects, utterly different and disparate, and just see they could link these objects in a tension which would create a poem. Well the next day, I had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to a CBC [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q461761] concert, and heard music that I hadn't heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be, and in the window as I was listening was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well I've given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert they announced that it was Bela Bartok [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83326], violin concerto. So suddenly, the two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem which I think I've never revised. I'll tell you afterwards about what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:21:00\nReads \"Bartok and Geranium\" [from New Poems].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:22:10\nWell, a few years later, Dr. Roy Daniels was giving a course in Canadian Literature, which I was a member, and one day he asked me if I would not come to class, so I divined he was going to deal with my poems, and I asked a fellow student to please take notes. So this was one of the poems he dealt with, and he informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now about how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it. But perhaps upon meditation, that this could be another meaning in the poem which I as poet, wasn't aware of but which was still perhaps there. But still another example of the different interpretations which people take to themselves and perhaps get great pleasure from, was, happened in U.N.B. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1112515] when Fred Cogswell [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5494855] put this poem on a sight examination for a first year Canadian lit. class, and one of the students who I'm afraid failed his year, wrote on the paper, and on seeing this poem decided that it was written by a man, and he said it was about this guy Bartok who walked along the street and saw a whore leaning out of the window. Well on the same, and finally, this last one on the same kind of he and she of it, a poem written about a year ago, right out of a dream, I mean I dreamed this poem. It's called \"Latter Day Eve\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:24:18\nReads \"Latter Day Eve\" [from Plainsongs].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:25:34\nWell I'd like to jump back a bit, quite a long way back now, not to lyrical poems, which were the ones I really started out doing, but two poems from the thirties...\n\nEND\n00:25:51\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed between tapes].\n\ndorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-2.mp3 [File 2 of 2]\n\nDorothy Livesay\n00:00:00\n...Polish immigrant who came back to the same house to pick up his belongings, and not knowing what was happening, entered the house, and police shot him in the back and killed him. This happened in Montreal in 1934 or 5. So out of all those experiences, through the thirties, and out of another year I had in New Jersey [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1408], living amongst the Negro, very, very discriminated against people in Englewood [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q986210], New Jersey. I, my whole poetry changed from being lyrical and personal to being social and yet I always, never felt it was something outside myself because I felt very powerfully the identification to what was happening to people. I returned from New Jersey about '36 and I wrote this poem which E.J. Pratt [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3045744] published in the first issue of the Canadian Poetry Magazine in ‘36. I guess I wrote it in about 1935. In it, there are various themes, the whole poem seemed to start from Cole Porter's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q215120] lines, the song we were all singing then, \"Night and Day\" [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1477068]. “Night and day, you are the one…” And then also there's a theme from Lennon [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1203], who said \"In order to make two steps forward you may have to go one step back\". And this poem reverses that idea, in looking at industrial capitalist society. The other theme is that of the Negro and that of his exploitation and also of his release in song, and in Negro spiritual, because I did know them very well that year.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:02:16\nReads \"Day and Night\" from Day and Night.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:07:57\nI might read one more poem from that period, \"Lorca\", and then perhaps you'd like a break. This is a little later, of course, this is about 1937-8, when the Spanish Civil War [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q10859] was raging and haunted us very much in this country, many friends we knew joined the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1668887], and went to fight for Spain [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q29]. At that time, we believed that the Spanish Court, Garcia Lorca [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41408], had been killed by Franco's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q29179] men. I believe that, well in fact, Jack Spicer [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3805658] taught me that there's another version of his killing, that of a love triangle, but it didn't matter, the point was that many poets were fighting for Spain, and many were killed. So I'll just read \"Lorca\" if I can find it. Yes.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:09:15\nReads \"Lorca\" [from Day and Night].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:11:29\nI'll pause now for a break. \n\nUnknown\n00:11:32\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\n\nDorothy Livesay\n00:11:33\nAnd though I don't want to appear to suit every taste, quite a lot of my poetry has been personal love poetry, beginning with the earliest days, my teenage, and I thought I would read a few very early love poems and then you could, you might be interested to compare them with those written within the last five or six years. These were from a book published in 1932, Signpost. And you'll notice that they're pretty well structured, and in a sense quite conventional, but perhaps they have a kind of feeling in them. \"Weapons\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:12:25\nReads \"Weapons\" from Signpost.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:12:54\nReads \"Alienation\" [from Signpost].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:13:26\nReads \"Climax\" [from Signpost].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:13:47\nReads \"Blindness\" [from Signpost].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:14:11\nAnd a very short lyric, \"Song for Solomon\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:14:17\nReads \"Song for Solomon\" [from Signpost].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:14:36\nAnd now, recent poems from the 1967 book, The Unquiet Bed. I'll read a little ballad that is the title poem, which one of my students set to music at one point. \"The Unquiet Bed\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:14:56\nReads \"The Unquiet Bed\" from The Unquiet Bed.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:15:25\nAnd \"Four Songs\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:15:32\nReads \"Four Songs\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:16:41\nAnd a poem which certainly wouldn't be acceptable to women's lib., yet it's an experience probably all women have had. It's called \"The Taming\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:16:52\nReads \"The Taming\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:17:34\nAnd \"The Touching\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:17:39\nReads \"The Touching\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:18:49\nAnd a little poem called \"Give Us Our Trespasses\", which was an attempt to do what Jack Spicer had advised us at some of his sessions, to completely wipe out all sensation, all the senses and see what happened when the words came out of this void, out of this [unintelligible] and I did one poem about dreams dedicated to him, and then a little later, this other one came. One would listen in the dark for the words, but not expecting or unexpecting, you understand, but they would certainly arrive and I would turn on the light and write them down. And then turn off the light, turn to sleep again, but again, more words came, and so this series has about seven of these little interludes in it.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:19:52\nReads \"And Give Us Our Trespasses\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:21:08\nAnd two more from that book, one has five sections--six sections in it, it's called \"The Notations of Love\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:21:22\nReads \"The Notations of Love\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:23:27\nAnd a last one from there, \"Moving Out\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:23:33\nReads \"Moving Out\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:24:07\nWell, I have a few more recent poems, dealing a little differently perhaps with love. This is in the little book Plainsongs, which is still in print. \"At Dawn\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:24:30\nReads \"At Dawn\" from Plainsongs.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:24:58\nAnd \"Dream\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:25:03\nReads \"Dream\" [from Plainsongs].\n  \nDorothy Livesay\n00:25:30\nAnd this one \"The Uninvited\", the river in this is the St. John [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q607546] in New Brunswick [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1965] and it's a theme that reoccurs a lot, whether one is a man or a woman, the feeling that even though one is walking with one's loved one, there is another lover who one also remembers, or who perhaps is coming, one fears.\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:26:09\nReads \"The Uninvited\" [from Plainsongs].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:27:08\nAnd perhaps just this last one, \"Another Journey\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:27:17\nReads \"Another Journey\" [from Plainsongs].\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:28:08\nI'd like to read a poem about the West Coast. It was written summer before last, in Victoria [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2132], where one was, I suppose, feeling one's age, and yet observing the eternal pattern of the young. And perhaps relating it to our own history in this country. It's a more, I suppose, didactic poem. \"The Artefacts, West Coast\".\n \nDorothy Livesay\n00:28:51\nReads \"The Artefacts, West Coast\" [from Plainsongs; cut off].\n \nEND\n00:32:14\n"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones\\n\\nAdditional research and edits by Ali Barillaro\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"},{\"note\":\"Year-Specific Information:\\n\\nForty Women Poets of Canada was published the same year, 1971, as was an extended and revised edition of Plainsongs.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"Local Connections:\\n\\nDorothy Livesay has contributed considerably to the cannon of Canadian poetry, writing about national issues and extending the Canadian long poem. Her anthology, Forty Women Poets of Canada (1971) promoted other Canadian women and their work. Livesay’s writing was published by Canadian publishing houses, and she contributed to and edited Canadian journals and magazines of poetry and criticism. Wynne Francis, who was a professor at Sir George Williams University, met Livesay in 1965.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"2 reel-to-reel tapes>CD>2 digital files\",\"type\":\"Preservation\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-companion-to-canadian-literature/oclc/605246871&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Davey, Frank. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Benson, Eugene and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press, 2001.\"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/15-canadian-poets-x2/oclc/40224711&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Geddes, Gary. Fifteen Canadian Poets Times Two. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990. \"},{\"url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/dorothy-livesay-at-sgwu-1971/#1\",\"citation\":\"“Georgian Happenings”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 11 January 1972. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-companion-to-twentieth-century-poetry-in-english/oclc/807465072&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Gnarowski, Michael. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Hamilton, Ian (ed). Oxford University Press, 1996. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/archive-for-our-times-previously-uncollected-and-unpublished-poems-of-dorothy-livesay/oclc/409003526&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy and Dean J. Irvine. Archive for our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/selected-poems-of-dorothy-livesay-1926-1956/oclc/867932457&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. The Selected Poems, 1926-1956. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1957. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/40-women-poets-of-canada/oclc/855266796&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy and Seymour Mayne. Forty Women Poets of Canada. Montreal : Ingluvin Publications, 1971.\"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/day-and-night-poems/oclc/729783190?referer=di&ht=edition\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. Day and Night. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1944. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-poems/oclc/933132856&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. New Poems. Toronto: Emblem Books, 1955. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/signpost/oclc/317413427&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. Signpost. Toronto: Macmillan, 1932. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/unquiet-bed/oclc/493383805&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. The Unquiet Bed. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/plainsongs/oclc/1015379630&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Livesay, Dorothy. Plainsongs. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971.\"},{\"url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/dorothy-livesay-at-sgwu-1971/#1\",\"citation\":\"Stromberg, Paula. “The Gentle Poetry of Dorothy Livesay”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 25 January 1972. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-companion-to-canadian-history/oclc/990614829&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History.        Hallowell, Gerald (ed). 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This happened in Montreal in 1934 or 5. So out of all those experiences, through the thirties, and out of another year I had in New Jersey [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1408], living amongst the Negro, very, very discriminated against people in Englewood [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q986210], New Jersey. I, my whole poetry changed from being lyrical and personal to being social and yet I always, never felt it was something outside myself because I felt very powerfully the identification to what was happening to people. I returned from New Jersey about '36 and I wrote this poem which E.J. Pratt [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3045744] published in the first issue of the Canadian Poetry Magazine in ‘36. I guess I wrote it in about 1935. In it, there are various themes, the whole poem seemed to start from Cole Porter's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q215120] lines, the song we were all singing then, \\\"Night and Day\\\" [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1477068]. “Night and day, you are the one…” And then also there's a theme from Lennon [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1203], who said \\\"In order to make two steps forward you may have to go one step back\\\". And this poem reverses that idea, in looking at industrial capitalist society. The other theme is that of the Negro and that of his exploitation and also of his release in song, and in Negro spiritual, because I did know them very well that year.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:02:16\\nReads \\\"Day and Night\\\" from Day and Night.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:07:57\\nI might read one more poem from that period, \\\"Lorca\\\", and then perhaps you'd like a break. This is a little later, of course, this is about 1937-8, when the Spanish Civil War [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q10859] was raging and haunted us very much in this country, many friends we knew joined the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1668887], and went to fight for Spain [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q29]. At that time, we believed that the Spanish Court, Garcia Lorca [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41408], had been killed by Franco's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q29179] men. I believe that, well in fact, Jack Spicer [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3805658] taught me that there's another version of his killing, that of a love triangle, but it didn't matter, the point was that many poets were fighting for Spain, and many were killed. So I'll just read \\\"Lorca\\\" if I can find it. Yes.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:09:15\\nReads \\\"Lorca\\\" [from Day and Night].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:11:29\\nI'll pause now for a break. \\n\\nUnknown\\n00:11:32\\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\\n\\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:11:33\\nAnd though I don't want to appear to suit every taste, quite a lot of my poetry has been personal love poetry, beginning with the earliest days, my teenage, and I thought I would read a few very early love poems and then you could, you might be interested to compare them with those written within the last five or six years. These were from a book published in 1932, Signpost. And you'll notice that they're pretty well structured, and in a sense quite conventional, but perhaps they have a kind of feeling in them. \\\"Weapons\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:12:25\\nReads \\\"Weapons\\\" from Signpost.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:12:54\\nReads \\\"Alienation\\\" [from Signpost].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:13:26\\nReads \\\"Climax\\\" [from Signpost].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:13:47\\nReads \\\"Blindness\\\" [from Signpost].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:14:11\\nAnd a very short lyric, \\\"Song for Solomon\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:14:17\\nReads \\\"Song for Solomon\\\" [from Signpost].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:14:36\\nAnd now, recent poems from the 1967 book, The Unquiet Bed. I'll read a little ballad that is the title poem, which one of my students set to music at one point. \\\"The Unquiet Bed\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:14:56\\nReads \\\"The Unquiet Bed\\\" from The Unquiet Bed.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:15:25\\nAnd \\\"Four Songs\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:15:32\\nReads \\\"Four Songs\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:16:41\\nAnd a poem which certainly wouldn't be acceptable to women's lib., yet it's an experience probably all women have had. It's called \\\"The Taming\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:16:52\\nReads \\\"The Taming\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:17:34\\nAnd \\\"The Touching\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:17:39\\nReads \\\"The Touching\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:18:49\\nAnd a little poem called \\\"Give Us Our Trespasses\\\", which was an attempt to do what Jack Spicer had advised us at some of his sessions, to completely wipe out all sensation, all the senses and see what happened when the words came out of this void, out of this [unintelligible] and I did one poem about dreams dedicated to him, and then a little later, this other one came. One would listen in the dark for the words, but not expecting or unexpecting, you understand, but they would certainly arrive and I would turn on the light and write them down. And then turn off the light, turn to sleep again, but again, more words came, and so this series has about seven of these little interludes in it.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:19:52\\nReads \\\"And Give Us Our Trespasses\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:21:08\\nAnd two more from that book, one has five sections--six sections in it, it's called \\\"The Notations of Love\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:21:22\\nReads \\\"The Notations of Love\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:23:27\\nAnd a last one from there, \\\"Moving Out\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:23:33\\nReads \\\"Moving Out\\\" [from The Unquiet Bed].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:24:07\\nWell, I have a few more recent poems, dealing a little differently perhaps with love. This is in the little book Plainsongs, which is still in print. \\\"At Dawn\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:24:30\\nReads \\\"At Dawn\\\" from Plainsongs.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:24:58\\nAnd \\\"Dream\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:25:03\\nReads \\\"Dream\\\" [from Plainsongs].\\n  \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:25:30\\nAnd this one \\\"The Uninvited\\\", the river in this is the St. John [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q607546] in New Brunswick [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1965] and it's a theme that reoccurs a lot, whether one is a man or a woman, the feeling that even though one is walking with one's loved one, there is another lover who one also remembers, or who perhaps is coming, one fears.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:26:09\\nReads \\\"The Uninvited\\\" [from Plainsongs].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:27:08\\nAnd perhaps just this last one, \\\"Another Journey\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:27:17\\nReads \\\"Another Journey\\\" [from Plainsongs].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:28:08\\nI'd like to read a poem about the West Coast. It was written summer before last, in Victoria [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2132], where one was, I suppose, feeling one's age, and yet observing the eternal pattern of the young. And perhaps relating it to our own history in this country. It's a more, I suppose, didactic poem. \\\"The Artefacts, West Coast\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:28:51\\nReads \\\"The Artefacts, West Coast\\\" [from Plainsongs; cut off].\\n \\nEND\\n00:32:14\\n\",\"notes\":\"Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971).\\n\\n00:02- Unknown male introduces Dorothy Livesay [INDEX: Prince of Wales, Forty Women Poets, Wynne Francis, Montreal]\\n01:58- Dorothy Livesay introduces reading and “Edmonton Sweet” [INDEX: new poem:        “Disasters of the Sun”, love poems, Edmonton, White Pelican Magazine edited by Sheila Watson, Dorothy Guest edited “North” edition: contains three B.C. Native poets: Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams, Eleanor Crow, Canadian Identity and Native American Identity, young poets searching for it]\\n06:56- Reads “Edmonton Sweet”\\n10:19- Introduces “The Operation” [INDEX:  40 Women Poets: Anthology edited by Dorothy Livesay]\\n11:10- Reads “The Operation”\\n15:36- Introduces “The Woman Syndrome” [INDEX: Women’s Liberation Movement]\\n16:26- Reads “The Woman Syndrome”\\n17:05- Introduces “Other” [INDEX: from The Selected Poems of 1957]\\n17:34- Reads “Other”\\n19:110 Introduces “Bartok and Geranium” [INDEX:  teaching creative writing to housewives, CBC radio- Violin concerto by Bela Bartok, most anthologized poem: “Bartok and Geranium”]\\n21:00- Reads “Bartok and Geranium”\\n22:10- Continues to explain “Bartok and Geranium”, also introduces “Latter Day    \\tEve” [INDEX: Dr. Roy Daniels, teaching Canadian Literature, Interpretations of her      \\tpoetry, University of New Brunswick, Professor Fred Cogswell]\\n24:18- Reads “Latter Day Eve”\\n25:34- Introduces “Day and Night” [INDEX: Day and Night, 1934/5 Montreal: shooting of a Polish man in his own home, Englewood, New Jersey, Discrimination against African \\tAmericans, E.J. Pratt’s first issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1936, Cole Porter’s   song “Night and Day”, John Lennon quote: “In order to make two steps forward, you   \\tmay have to go one step back”, Negro spiritual songs]\\n28:07- Reads “Day and Night”\\n33:48- Introduces “Lorca” [INDEX: Spanish Civil War: Lorca and Franco, and the poets that were soldiers for Lorca, Jack Spicer, MacKenzie-Papineau Batallion]\\n35:06- Reads “Lorca”\\n37:20- Introduces “Weapons” [INDEX: Love poetry, 1932 Songpost by Dorothy Livesay]\\n38:16- Reads “Weapons”\\n38:45- Reads “An Alienation”\\n39:17- Reads “Climax”\\n39:38- Reads “Blindness”\\n40:02- Reads “Song for Solomon”\\n40:27- Introduces “The Unquiet Bed” [INDEX: 1967 The Unquiet Bed by Dorothy Livesay]\\n40:47- Reads “The Unquiet Bed”\\n41:16- Reads “Four Songs”\\n42:32- Introduces “The Taming”\\n42:43- Reads “The Taming”\\n43:25- Reads “The Touching”\\n44:40- Introduces “Give Us Our Trespasses” [INDEX: Jack Spicer]\\n45:43- Reads “Give Us Our Trespasses”\\n46:59- Introduces “The Notations of Love”\\n47:13- Reads “The Notations of Love”\\n49:18- Reads “Moving Out”\\n49:58- Introduces “At Dawn” [INDEX: 1968 Plainsongs by Dorothy Livesay]\\n50:21- Reads “At Dawn”\\n50:49- Reads “Dream”\\n51:21- Introduces “The Uninvited” [INDEX: St John River, New Brunswick]\\n52:00- Reads \\\"The Uninvited\\\".\\n52:59- Reads “Another Journey”\\n53:08- Introduces “The Artifacts, West Coast” [INDEX: West Coast, Victoria]\\n54:42- Reads “The Artifacts, West Coast”\\n58:05.94- END OF RECORDING\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/dorothy-livesay-at-sgwu-1971/#2\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://files.spokenweb.ca/concordia/sgw/audio/all_mp3/dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3\",\"filename\":\"dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:25:51\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"62.1 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3 [File 1 of 2]\\n \\nIntroducer\\n00:00:02\\nI was going to talk on about Dorothy Livesay's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1250325] distinguished career, as a poet, and a critic and a teacher, but after what she told me tonight, I'm not sure if distinguished is exactly the right word, she says that at the age of nineteen, she snubbed the Prince of Wales [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q590227]. Nevertheless, two books should be mentioned, her selected and uncollected poems to appear this September and a book which was called 39 Women Poets which has gained another poet and another title at the last moment and as 40 Women Poets of Canada [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16] is now on sale outside, as you may have seen as you came in. Back in 1965, I guess it was, Wynne Francis managed to catch Dorothy Livesay as she was passing through Montreal [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q340], and Dorothy gave a really private reading in Wynne's office. Ever since then, we have been trying to convince her to come back and read to us all in the series. I'm extremely happy this year that we have been successful and that I can present to you Dorothy Livesay.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:01:58\\nI think I might get hung up on this, I had quite a disastrous time getting here. I arrived with a new poem of seven, whose title is \\\"Disasters of the Sun\\\", and my first disaster was on the train, sitting on top of my glasses, which are now somewhat myopic, and second disaster going to Sherbrooke [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139473], the bus rolled right into an oil tanker, which somehow or other didn't blow up, but gashed my thumb, and at Bishop's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3551383] I had only begun to read when a fire alarm started [laughter], and rang for ten minutes before they silenced it. So I have a feeling that somehow or other, there are more disasters ahead tonight. However, I'm supposed to read a while and then call an intermission I think. Mostly I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the different things, especially love poems from early times on, but I'm going to skip about a bit. Recently in Edmonton [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2096] I edited the fourth issue of a quarterly magazine, White Pelican. Which Sheila Watson [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7493167] edits but she gave this particular issue to me, and I chose the theme of North. Feeling perhaps that we are still trying to find our identity, whether we're English Canadians or French Canadians, and that perhaps the north has some element of it in it which helps us to find that. I discovered though, in collecting material, stories, poems, plays about the north, that it was the Native Indian people who have a different view altogether of the north than we do. At the same time, you find many young Canadian poets identifying with Native culture, and almost feeling that they must become Native, and become Indian to be real, to know who they are. I wrote at the beginning of this issue this little note I'll just read. “North is from wherever you are looking.” It's starting...[laughter]. “For those living below the 49th parallel, Canada itself is North. In a sense, we're all here as explorers without a home. Our great guilt at having ousted the Native peoples from their land is now seeking expression in an attempt to re-create the Indian and Eskimo past, and every month brings forth books of poetry, fiction and history which seek to come to terms with pre-history, with myth, or with the way the Inuit live in harmony with nature. In ironic contrast, the Native artists and writers are expressing their concern, not with their past, but with possible ways of accommodation to the present, the white man's world. Thus, the three British Columbia [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1974] Indian poets here represented, Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams and Eleanor Crow are bitter, ironic and contemporary. Not for them the nostalgic recreation of the Indian myth, or even  not for them the vigorous folk humor of life in the north which you find in [unintelligible] and in later writers.” While I think it's worthwhile thinking about that because you do have a lot of young poets now seeping themselves in Indian or Eskimo culture, and feeling as if they must become that in order to be themselves. None of us can quite escape from this, and I have a poem or two that I'll begin with, which I suppose are my expression of coming to terms with the North, or the somewhat southernly north, Edmonton. I'll begin with a kind of collage poem where I put bits of history, bits of visual imagery and bits of surrealism together, called \\\"Edmonton Sweet\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:06:56\\nReads \\\"Edmonton Sweet\\\" [from Plainsongs].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:10:19\\nQuite a different poem about going North is called \\\"The Operation\\\", and that is the poem which is in this anthology, just out today, 40 Women Poets. I didn't intend to put myself in, but the other editors suggested it was the only 'done' thing to put one or two poems of my own in it. So here's the one called \\\"The Operation\\\". It's a kind of three-way poem where the woman is addressing the doctor and her lover, alternately, and then perhaps herself.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:11:10\\nReads \\\"The Operation\\\" [from Plainsongs and collected in 40 Women Poets] .\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:15:36\\nSince this anthology will probably be called a women's lib., even though it isn't, because none of the poets in it are consciously trying to be anything but their individual selves, nonetheless, I think there are poems by every woman which do express that individual point of view, that differentness, I have never been able, though perhaps I was a women's lib. creature in the thirties, I have never been able to feel that men and women are the same, and so I have poems, right through the years which illustrate that point of view. Here's a very recent one called \\\"The Woman Syndrome\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:16:26\\nReads \\\"The Woman Syndrome\\\" [published later in Archive For Our Times].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:17:05\\nAnd a much earlier poem, written when I had a family and young children and I suppose frustrated and not getting out into the world. It's called \\\"Other\\\", it's in The Selected Poems of 1957.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:17:34\\nReads \\\"Other\\\" from Selected Poems, 1926-1956.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:19:11\\nAnd in a different vein altogether, the poem I suppose that's been the most anthologized of any of mine, which to me is a rather traditional way I suppose of seeing the male and female element. It's called \\\"Bartok and the Geranium\\\". The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing, and I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps haiku-type poem, when they got home, to look at two objects, utterly different and disparate, and just see they could link these objects in a tension which would create a poem. Well the next day, I had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to a CBC [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q461761] concert, and heard music that I hadn't heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be, and in the window as I was listening was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well I've given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert they announced that it was Bela Bartok [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83326], violin concerto. So suddenly, the two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem which I think I've never revised. I'll tell you afterwards about what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem.\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:21:00\\nReads \\\"Bartok and Geranium\\\" [from New Poems].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:22:10\\nWell, a few years later, Dr. Roy Daniels was giving a course in Canadian Literature, which I was a member, and one day he asked me if I would not come to class, so I divined he was going to deal with my poems, and I asked a fellow student to please take notes. So this was one of the poems he dealt with, and he informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now about how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it. But perhaps upon meditation, that this could be another meaning in the poem which I as poet, wasn't aware of but which was still perhaps there. But still another example of the different interpretations which people take to themselves and perhaps get great pleasure from, was, happened in U.N.B. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1112515] when Fred Cogswell [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5494855] put this poem on a sight examination for a first year Canadian lit. class, and one of the students who I'm afraid failed his year, wrote on the paper, and on seeing this poem decided that it was written by a man, and he said it was about this guy Bartok who walked along the street and saw a whore leaning out of the window. Well on the same, and finally, this last one on the same kind of he and she of it, a poem written about a year ago, right out of a dream, I mean I dreamed this poem. It's called \\\"Latter Day Eve\\\".\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:24:18\\nReads \\\"Latter Day Eve\\\" [from Plainsongs].\\n \\nDorothy Livesay\\n00:25:34\\nWell I'd like to jump back a bit, quite a long way back now, not to lyrical poems, which were the ones I really started out doing, but two poems from the thirties...\\n\\nEND\\n00:25:51\\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed between tapes].\",\"notes\":\"Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971).\\n\\n00:02- Unknown male introduces Dorothy Livesay [INDEX: Prince of Wales, Forty Women Poets, Wynne Francis, Montreal]\\n01:58- Dorothy Livesay introduces reading and “Edmonton Sweet” [INDEX: new poem:        “Disasters of the Sun”, love poems, Edmonton, White Pelican Magazine edited by Sheila Watson, Dorothy Guest edited “North” edition: contains three B.C. Native poets: Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams, Eleanor Crow, Canadian Identity and Native American Identity, young poets searching for it]\\n06:56- Reads “Edmonton Sweet”\\n10:19- Introduces “The Operation” [INDEX:  40 Women Poets: Anthology edited by Dorothy Livesay]\\n11:10- Reads “The Operation”\\n15:36- Introduces “The Woman Syndrome” [INDEX: Women’s Liberation Movement]\\n16:26- Reads “The Woman Syndrome”\\n17:05- Introduces “Other” [INDEX: from The Selected Poems of 1957]\\n17:34- Reads “Other”\\n19:110 Introduces “Bartok and Geranium” [INDEX:  teaching creative writing to housewives, CBC radio- Violin concerto by Bela Bartok, most anthologized poem: “Bartok and Geranium”]\\n21:00- Reads “Bartok and Geranium”\\n22:10- Continues to explain “Bartok and Geranium”, also introduces “Latter Day    \\tEve” [INDEX: Dr. Roy Daniels, teaching Canadian Literature, Interpretations of her      \\tpoetry, University of New Brunswick, Professor Fred Cogswell]\\n24:18- Reads “Latter Day Eve”\\n25:34- Introduces “Day and Night” [INDEX: Day and Night, 1934/5 Montreal: shooting of a Polish man in his own home, Englewood, New Jersey, Discrimination against African \\tAmericans, E.J. Pratt’s first issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1936, Cole Porter’s   song “Night and Day”, John Lennon quote: “In order to make two steps forward, you   \\tmay have to go one step back”, Negro spiritual songs]\\n28:07- Reads “Day and Night”\\n33:48- Introduces “Lorca” [INDEX: Spanish Civil War: Lorca and Franco, and the poets that were soldiers for Lorca, Jack Spicer, MacKenzie-Papineau Batallion]\\n35:06- Reads “Lorca”\\n37:20- Introduces “Weapons” [INDEX: Love poetry, 1932 Songpost by Dorothy Livesay]\\n38:16- Reads “Weapons”\\n38:45- Reads “An Alienation”\\n39:17- Reads “Climax”\\n39:38- Reads “Blindness”\\n40:02- Reads “Song for Solomon”\\n40:27- Introduces “The Unquiet Bed” [INDEX: 1967 The Unquiet Bed by Dorothy Livesay]\\n40:47- Reads “The Unquiet Bed”\\n41:16- Reads “Four Songs”\\n42:32- Introduces “The Taming”\\n42:43- Reads “The Taming”\\n43:25- Reads “The Touching”\\n44:40- Introduces “Give Us Our Trespasses” [INDEX: Jack Spicer]\\n45:43- Reads “Give Us Our Trespasses”\\n46:59- Introduces “The Notations of Love”\\n47:13- Reads “The Notations of Love”\\n49:18- Reads “Moving Out”\\n49:58- Introduces “At Dawn” [INDEX: 1968 Plainsongs by Dorothy Livesay]\\n50:21- Reads “At Dawn”\\n50:49- Reads “Dream”\\n51:21- Introduces “The Uninvited” [INDEX: St John River, New Brunswick]\\n52:00- Reads \\\"The Uninvited\\\".\\n52:59- Reads “Another Journey”\\n53:08- Introduces “The Artifacts, West Coast” [INDEX: West Coast, Victoria]\\n54:42- Reads “The Artifacts, West Coast”\\n58:05.94- END OF RECORDING\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/dorothy-livesay-at-sgwu-1971/#1\"}]"],"score":3.032301},{"id":"1298","cataloger_name":["Masoumeh,Zaare"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"source_collection_label":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Records Management and Archives"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_description":["The fonds consists of some administrative records of the SGWU Department of English and the Concordia Department of English between 1971 and 2000. It also consists of some SGWU Department of English records related to student academic activities in the 1940s and to public readings and lectures, and a few interviews, produced between 1966 and 1972. The fonds mainly includes minutes of departmental meetings and some course timetables. It also includes some student papers in bound volumes and 63 sound recordings (80 audio reels) mainly composed of poetry readings (see the Concordia SpokenWeb project which uses this material) but also a few lectures given at SGWU. There are also loose typed sheets describing some of the SGWU poetry readings."],"collection_source_collection_id":["I086"],"persistent_url":["http://archives.concordia.ca/I086"],"item_title":["Maxine Gadd and Andreas Schroeder at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 18 February 1972"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_title_note":["\"SCHROEDER & GADD 1/4 I006-11-109.1\" written on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. \"I006-11-109.1\" written on sticker on the reel. \"POETRY 6 TAPE #1 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER\" written on the front of the tape's box.\n\n\"SCHROEDER & GADD 2/4 I006-11-109.2\" written on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. \"I006-11-109.2\" written on sticker on the reel. \"POETRY 6 TAPE #2 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #2\" written on the front of the tape's box.\n\n'SCHROEDER & GADD 3/4 I006-11-109.3\" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. \"I006-11-109.3\" written on sticker on the reel. \"POETRY 6 TAPE #3 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #3\" written on the front of the tape's box.\n\n\"SCHROEDER & GADD 4/4 I006-11-109.4\" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. \"I006-11-109.4\" written on sticker on the reel. \"POETRY 6 TAPE #4 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #4\" written on the front of the tape's box."],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["The Poetry Series"],"item_subseries_title":["Poetry 6"],"item_identifiers":["[I006-11-109.1, I006-11-109.2, I006-11-109.3, I006-11-109.4]"],"creator_names":["Gadd, Maxine","Schroeder, Andreas"],"creator_names_search":["Gadd, Maxine","Schroeder, Andreas"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/75225856\",\"name\":\"Gadd, Maxine\",\"dates\":\"1940-\",\"notes\":\"Canadian poet Maxine Gadd was born in London, England in 1940, but moved to the West Coast as a young child in 1946. Gadd attended the University of British Columbia and published her poetry with the UBC journal The Raven. Gadd was married and had a baby by the time she graduated with her B.A. She spent some time in California with her child, then she returned to Vancouver. Gadd reunited with the poetry scene and met bill bissett. Her first collection of poetry, Guns of the West was published by bill bissett’s blewointment press in 1967, and was followed by Practical Knowledge (Intermedia, 1969). Gadd was a founding member of Vancouver’s Intermedia as well as being involved with the Poetry Front. She then published a series of chapbooks, hochelaga (blewointment press, 1970), air two (Air Press, 1971), Westerns (Air Press, 1975), and Fire in the Cove (mother tongue Press, 2001). Gadd lived in a commune on Galiano Island until 1984, when she moved back to Vancouver and was associated with the Kootenay School of Writing. In 1982, Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen published through Coach House Press Gadd’s Lost language: selected poems. Most recently, Gadd published Backup to Babylon: poems, 1972-1987 (New Star Books, 2006), which was nominated by the BC Book Prize and Subway Under Byzantium: Poems, 1988-1996 (New Star Books, 2008). An excerpt from “Mazine Meets Proteus in Gastown” from Backup to Babylon was part of Vancouver’s ‘Poetry in Transit’ project in 2007, and was shown on Vancouver busses.\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\",\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/57773869\",\"name\":\"Schroeder, Andreas\",\"dates\":\"1946-\",\"notes\":\"Andreas Schroeder was born in 1946 in Hoheneggelsen, Germany before his family immigrated to Canada in 1951. Schroeder grew up on a farm in the Fraser Valley in B.C., until he was fifteen when his family moved to Vancouver. He enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program where he studied under Michael Bullock and J. Michael Yates and received his B.A. in 1969. He founded and edited The Journal of Contemporary Literature in Translation (1968-80) and worked as a columnist for the Vancouver Province (1968-73). Schroeder’s first collections of poetry were The ozone minotaur (Sono Nis Press, 1969) and File of uncertainties (Sono Nis Press, 1971), a collection of concrete poetry UNIverse (MassAge Press, 1971) and a collection of short stories, The late man (Sono Nis Press, 1972). Schroeder completed his M.A. in 1972 from the University of British Columbia, and began teaching creative writing at the University of Victoria from 1974-1975. Schroeder was the chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada between 1976-1977. His most popular book was Shaking it rough (Doubleday, 1976), and he has published over twenty books in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, radio drama, journalism, translation and criticism. Schroeder then taught at the University of British Columbia (1985-7) and at Simon Fraser University (1989-90), publishing The Mennonites: a pictorial history of their lives in Canada (Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), Carved from wood: Mission, B.C. 1891-1992 (Mission Foundation, 1991) and Scams, scandals and scullduggery (M & S, 1996). Schroeder worked as the “resident crookologist” or “resident Scam-meister” on the CBC Radio show Basic Black, which produced a few collections of history’s greatest scams, including a children’s book, Scams! (Annick Press, 2004). His most recent publication is Renovating Heaven (Ooolichan, 2008), and he continues to teach and write in B.C.\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\",\"Performer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Sommer, Richard"],"contributors_names_search":["Sommer, Richard"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sommer, Richard\",\"dates\":\"1934-2012\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\",\"Series organizer\"]}]"],"Presenter_name":["Sommer, Richard"],"Series_organizer_name":["Sommer, Richard"],"Performance_Date":[1972],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"Master\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Reel to Reel","Reel to Reel","Reel to Reel","Reel to Reel"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue","Analogue","Analogue","Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio","Audio","Audio","Audio"],"playback_mode":["Mono","Mono","Mono","Mono"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"1972 2 18\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"Date specified in written announcement \\\"Georgian Happenings\\\"\",\"source\":\"Supplemental Material\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080570\",\"venue\":\"Hall Building Room H-651\",\"notes\":\"Location specified in written announcement \\\"Georgian Happenings\\\"\",\"address\":\"1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada\",\"latitude\":\"45.4972758\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57893043\"}]"],"Address":["1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"],"Venue":["Hall Building Room H-651"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished. Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971)."],"contents":["maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]\n \nRichard (Dick)  Sommer\n00:00:00\nI'd like to introduce you to two poets who are Vancouver [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24639] friends of mine. Their poetry is quite different, as you'll discover. But from my own point of view, they...I owe both of them a debt that is similar in both cases though neither probably knows it. They've made me, in their own ways, rethink my own feelings about  what ought to constitute poetry and poems. And in the case of Maxine Gadd, this thinking went into a review which was then sent to the Firepoint which then folded. So you may never see that. And in the case of Andy Schroeder [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4755619], found its way into a long tape harangue between the two of us on the subject of form in poetry. Which I think is now in the Sir George Williams Library [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5159005], where any of you can endure it if you wish to. At any rate, the first of these poets to read will be Maxine Gadd. There will be a fifteen minute break, and then Andreas Schroeder will read. Maxine. \n \nAudience\n00:01:32\nApplause. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:02:01\nYou're plugged in. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:02:03\nOh boy. Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do. I don't know how much to talk about the poetry. My connection is very loose to the mainstream I guess, because, I don't know, I'm just not socially related to what's going on maybe in the poetry reading. I guess my identifications with words are somewhat with a West Coast hippie trip. And between the country and the city, the first feeling being, you know, the desire for purity, you know when you're seventeen or eighteen years old and you've figured the country life is it. And later coming to realize the necessity of the communal life and the city. So I think that's a task I'm going to try to set myself right here. I...this...I'm going to read first of all the second \"well\" poem, which I did, experienced in the country, living in the country. I remember the first \"well\" poem, I don't remember where it's gone, because it didn't get published. I disregarded its importance, you know. I tended to take the judgment of editors, and you know, people that set themselves up as authorities, and that's why I'm here, you know. I've kept close enough to them, I guess. I remember the first one went something like, \"Wanting pure water I went to the well/too wonderful\"...and there was something about the oracle as the bucket clacked. This is the “Second Well Poem”. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:03:57\nReads \"Second Well Poem\" [published later as “Well poem” in Lost Language].\n\nMaxine Gadd\n00:04:41\nWhich is about where I feel right now. But that's about where my connection to poetry is right now. I wonder if that...I wonder if that one's around. I don't think it is. I guess I'll just take it as it comes. There's some scheme in this. I guess, I got published by a cat, by bill bissett [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4911496] you might have heard, who did the thing, did the guru thing, the super-energy thing of getting a lot of work done, and getting a lot of people's work out, and a lot of his work out, a lot of it was real shit but he got it out, you know, and some of it worked and some of it didn't, but there was so much of it, you know...I'd like to have had that confidence, you know, I guess almost, most people write poetry, they've got it all in their trunk, you know, they don't get it out. But I guess that's what it takes. This is from one of his first, really cheap magazines. He put, he...it's typed, you know. Pretty good typing. His typing got worse, I get very angry, he makes lots of mistakes. But he did a lot of drawings and things, if anybody wants to look at it, you know.  I mean, he did it minimum, you know, he was living really poor. And a lot of people still read his stuff, so, I mean, to me he was a folk poet in that sense, a lot of people still read his stuff because he got the stuff out cheap, you know. \"Trip\".\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:06:05\nReads \"Trip\".\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:07:47\nI'm going to go over there. This one is to a poet who is in the, is in another world, okay? He looks like a silver lizard, and he's very beautiful, and he knows all about the Greek trip, and Eleusis, which is one's talking about in the first poem, okay, the oracles from under the ground, that belief you must start out with. It's called...and it's admiration, as well as a bit of terror.\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:08:22\nReads unnamed poem. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:10:19\nLeary, I should have mentioned, was Timothy Leary. Oh, I should have explained that before, yeah. Oh yeah, this is where I met...now I don't like it okay? And it's probably not a good poem. But that's, that's...you know, that's...the kind of art form I'd like to have seen as a collective art form, was what I yearned and hoped for. Poetry is what people write in rooms alone, and I don't like...I don't, you know, that's what I was stuck with. And I worked for a while with a group in Vancouver called, named, we called it \"Intermedia\". And I had the experience of working with a group, at one point there were five of us poets, you know, or what we called poets. And we'd go around to various places, we went to Edmonton [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2096] one time, and we tried things, we tried chanting and wailing, like, was it...who was that crazy old lady. Sitwell, Edith Sitwell [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q259921], remember her? And if you ever heard the sort of sing, the song, sing sing she used to do, you know, we tried that. And it really worked, you know, but you'd go around and you'd say, \"Do you dig the poems?\" and they'd say, \"I can't hear them, but we really like your voice.\" You know. [Audience laughter]. So, you know, left that, you got an ache in the gut or something.   \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:11:37\nReads \"Ratio\".\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:12:48\nI don't like it. I don't want to be there. Here's one from last year. I got into printing stuff myself, you know, and I do that--I wish, oh, you can't see it, can you? It was mimeograph, it was real cheap, you know? And you could take images, you could take newspaper articles, you could take scraps of anything you saw that you dug, you know, put 'em together, and to me that was a, that was a form of concrete poetry. Can't, of course, I don't know, you couldn't really say that one or any number of them. This one is half-said, okay. Behind it I put a map, I found a map of B.C. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1974]and Minster Island [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21906024] was a map, was an island I found once when I was working on a ship as a mess girl, on a freighter. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:13:46\nReads unnamed poem.\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:15:33\nAnd where that ended up was just over the name Bella Coola [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q815765], which is sort of where they do, can fish. There's no escape, though, you know? And...so then I want to read about Kitsilano [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4179275], where most of...I happened, you know, I grew up. Kitsilano's a sort of slum district of Vancouver. And it's disintegrating, and you probably all experienced this, you know, being city people, you know, they're bulldozing the places, there's no more cheap places to live, and so your friends, you know, you can't live there anymore, your friends can't live there anymore, so whatever you had, which was sometimes very heavy, you know, community's really beautiful, you know? I used to go over and play music with my friends. We had to move out, you know, because the city's being destroyed, and only the people who are well-to-do, who have some sort of stake in the city, you know, who are supporting the structure can stay. And this poem is about somebody who I met one day on the street, you know, and her story, she's sort of sick, just on the street, everything's falling to pieces. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:16:55\nReads “bee-people on 4th avenue” [published later in Lost Language].\n\nMaxine Gadd\n00:18:32\nWho's singing out there? But here, on the next street, you know, I ran into a friend of mine. Her name's Martina. And, you know, we're about the same age, and we've been through a lot of things, and, we've been through some bad things, you know, lots of rejections and refusal, no, there's no food now, you can't have any, go away, you know, fighting over somebody or other. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:18:58\nReads “4th ave” [published later in Lost Language].\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:20:49\nUs old ladies. Okay, but that's not entirely true. I got involved into all that magic stuff, you know, the Sufis, and into politics, and like this summer I hope I'm going to start some sort of woman's centre, back where I live, you know. \n \nEND\n00:21:09\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\n\nmaxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]\n\nMaxine Gadd\n00:00:00\nReads unnamed poem [recording begins abruptly].\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:02:20\nReads unnamed poem.\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:11:10\nThis is the thing that the guy that held onto the raft for fourteen days knew. This is what Armstrong [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1615], Collins [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q104859] and Reilley [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q739214] out there, those astronauts, this is what they saved up for. It had to be good. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:11:29\nReads unnamed poem.\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:23:31\nThat's the end of that one. \n \nAudience\n00:23:33\nApplause.\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:23:40\nI think I made enough noise for a while, huh? My voice is getting sort of sore, or, you know, like that was a trip, so. I got a lot of poems, but...Did you feel like reading now or should we have a break or what? Do you think...do you think we should read some more or what? I got...You want to read some more? \n \nUnknown\n00:23:59\nAmbient Sound [voices].\n\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:24:03\nDo you want to read some more? \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:04\nI don't know. I've not nothing in particular form, just bits, that's the problem. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:24:12\nYou can't do the one on the Goat-god....\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:13\nOkay, I'll do the Goat-god. Well okay, do you want to try improvising to a trip that's here? I'll let you read it. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:24:22\nSeriously, I'll do that? \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:23\nYeah. It's just going to be some sounds. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:24:24\nOkay. I don't know if I can…[unintelligible].\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:27\nI gotta find it first. What's that? Are we on? Oh, sorry. God. \n \nUnknown\n00:24:38\nAmbient Sound [voices].\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:39\nWhat? The flute? I think it's over there. For fun...the same message...I'm asking...Richard's going to make some noise with my flute. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:24:55\nI'll make some noise if you'll give me a microphone. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:24:57\nOkay. Which one do you want? Let's share it. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:01\nGive me the [unintelligible].\n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:25:02\nIt goes with the poem. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:05\nWhen'd you do that? \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:25:06\nWhat?\n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:07\nThis, this knot. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:25:08\nI tied myself into it. \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:11\nOh, here we go. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:25:12\nI don't even know if I can find it. All these little pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now how it goes, you have to keep quiet until...let's see now. He's never done this before.  \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:40\nWhat did, yeah, what do you want me to do with it? \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:25:42\nOkay, this is called \"Shore Animals\" and it's a speech piece with flute, and the flute has to listen. It can speak too. [Laughter]. You have to listen to it. You never heard it\n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:25:57\nI think it's learning how to speak. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:26:01\nIt's called \"Shore Animals,\" it's a speech piece with flute. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:26:07\nReads \"Shore Animals\" accompanied by Richard Sommer on flute.\n \nAudience\n00:30:13\nAudience.\n\nMaxine Gadd\n00:30:15\nMaybe I'll try to try that one…[audience applause continues throughout].\n\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:30:24\nI'll give you your microphone back. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:30:25\nYes. How many minutes we got? \n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:30:29\nI don't know. [Unintelligible]. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:30:35\nOkay, I'm going to read, I'm going to do, this one's totally mindless, okay? It's dedicated to my friend Gerry Gilbert [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5552756] who used to like to do those trips. And you can go to sleep or something, because that's what I want you to do. \n \nMaxine Gadd\n00:30:51\nReads \"Cantaloup, 29 cents\".\n \nAudience\n00:38:33\nApplause. \n \nEND\n00:38:37\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\n\nandreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]\n \nRichard (Dick) Sommer\n00:00:01\nOkay, we won't be using a flute this time, I think it's a bass trombone but I'm not sure.  It'll be up to Andy. I'd like to introduce to you Andy Schroeder.\n \nAudience\n00:00:15\nApplause.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:00:40\nRight. Normally they hang you after a reading. Jesus. I'm going to read from, oh, just kind of a merry jaunt through various books. I think what I'll do is I'll read some of the, some poetry first, and then I'll slip over into fiction. I've just, two days ago, published a book called The Late Man of short fictions and extended prose poems and so on. The work that I've done is gone cyclic in terms of form. I started out with prose poems and went into much more of a linear poetry, and then went back to a fiction which was kind of a half prose poem, half short story, half God knows, film script. And right now I'm working hard at both styles. First book I published was called The Ozone Minotaur, and it was more surreal than anything I'm doing now. I really get very excited about illusions, and I guess that's probably what most of my work is all about. At first I was very interested in surreal illusions; now I'm very interested in real illusions, and I'm not sure there's any difference. Here's a prose poem from way back called \"Introduction\".\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:02:10\nReads \"Introduction\" from The Ozone Minotaur.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:03:15\nAfter I found out that you couldn't live by writing poetry, I took a job with CPAir [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q986941]. That doesn't really sound like a very logical progression, but anyway, it was a teletype machine that they put me on, I think I lasted about four days, but I got a poem out of it, and it's entitled \"Cables\".\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:03:35\nReads \"Cables\" [from The Ozone Minotaur].\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:05:29\nThis next book, File of Uncertainties, I supposed was kind of created when I woke up one morning and was overwhelmed with my own ignorance, so I decided to write a book about it. [Audience laughter]. And then I figured the best way to do it was to go up north and I did that, and I spent a winter up in Alaska [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q797]. And that was where I really got into this illusion thing, because, you know, all the different, very very strange things that happen there, like white-outs, which you probably are familiar with here, as well, where a man suddenly loses all sense of up and down and forward and backward. They have better ones than that, though. They have, until the snowmobile rolls around, when people used to mush with dogs, they'd continually have this happening: a man would set off from one village for another, with his dogs, and he'd be perfectly well-dressed and perfectly well-fed, and apparently perfectly sane, and the dogs would arrive, and the sled would arrive but the man wouldn't, and they possibly found him and possibly not. But no one could ever understand what would make a man suddenly step off his sleigh and walk off in an entirely different direction to die. When he certainly didn't have it on his list of things to do when he left. They still haven't figured that out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that man's body is made up of such an incredible percentage of water, and very strange things happen to water up there. [Audience laughter]. Anyway, I almost got caught by an avalanche, so I thought I'd check into it and I'd find out what you do if you do get caught by one, cause I figured by that time that survival was probably a good thing. So, they said, one of the things you do is, if you get caught by an avalanche, you make swimming motions with your hands. I guess the idea is that kind of tends to keep you close to the surface, which is a good place to be. Now...[audience laughter] the lovely illusion part, which really intrigued me, was that a man can survive under the snow up to a depth of approximately six feet, but only for a certain period of time, and apparently the closer you are to the surface, the better your chances are, and the way they dig for, well, it's not necessarily logical up there, at least it didn't seem like it, but the way they dig for a man like this is they use sounding rods, and these are very sensitive rods, like, almost like tuning forks, and they walk along, in a very definite rhythm, it's almost like a musical score, and they ram these poles in, one foot deep, about a foot at a time, and attempt to hit somebody that's buried underneath it. And then they go back again and they do it at two feet, and then at three feet and four feet to six feet, they don't go any deeper. Now the peculiar part of it is that they of course can't hear anyone, but the poor bugger that's under the snow can hear very, very clearly. And, you know, and he'll hear people saying, like I wonder where, I think there's a place he might be, and he'll be shouting in there, saying, \"I'm here,\" you know, \"I'm here!\" and they can't hear him, and it's really quite terrifying. Sound only travels one way through an avalanche, I don't...[Audience laughter]. Anyway, I'll, let me read some poems about it, I'll...File of Uncertainties was written in a very short time and mostly about the same thing, and you'll find recurring images all the way through, stylistic things that are similar all the way through, and the poems, because they match together fairly tightly, I didn't even bother naming them, I just numbered them, because they're all part of the same sequence. This is number four. \n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:09:27\nReads \"File of Uncertainties: #4\" from File of Uncertainties.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:10:25\nReads \"File of Uncertainties: #3\" from File of Uncertainties.\n\nAndreas Schroeder\n00:12:13\nReads \"File of Uncertainties: #5\" from File of Uncertainties.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:12:54\nReads \"File of Uncertainties: #8\" from File of Uncertainties.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:13:50\nI took up sky-diving after I came back and, because...yeah, believe it or not, it had very similar illusions going for it again. When...it's much like the white-out. When you jump off an aircraft, and it banks away, generally to your left, then you suddenly lose all points of reference. And because the earth below you is much too far away to really mean anything, and your parachute is still on your back, in other words not opened, so you can't, you haven't got anything above you either, you suddenly get hit with this incredibly stony silence, and absolutely nothing happens. I mean, you don't fall, you're not moving, you're not even really thinking because it's so suddenly quiet. It seems like everything just freezes. And in fact you're falling at about three hundred feet a second, but you have no sense of it whatsoever. And you just stand there in the sky, and kind of look around, and nothing is going on. Which is why you're not supposed to be stoned when you skydive because, [audience laughter] sometimes people tend to forget, you know. So I wrote a poem about it, and, actually it's not...well anything. It's “#9”, is what it is. \n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:15:18\nReads \"#9\" [from File of Uncertainties].\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:17:31\nAlright, here's another poem from the north--\"#12\".\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:17:38\nReads \"# 12\".\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:18:29\nI think I'll just let that go for a minute there and go into some prose and then I'll just read some unpublished poems. This first story that I'm going to read is entitled \"The Tree\", and I wrote it after I met a very lovely old man down in Australia [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q408]. Very old. He was an aborigine, and we tried to communicate; he didn't know my language and I didn't know his, which is maybe why we got along so well, but anyway, I built a story up on him. This was on a coral island...of course all islands down there are coral islands. \n \nAnnotationAndreas Schroeder\n00:19:19\nReads \"The Tree\" [from The Late Man].\n \nAudience\n00:25:45\nApplause.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:25:54\nHere's another short one, entitled \"The Pub\", sort of a frenzied affair. They don't--it's sort of illegal to have fights in pubs, and in Vancouver I was the very happy observer of one, finally. Pub fights have sort of a beautiful ritualistic thing as long as you're not involved, like if you're just kind of watching, and the Cecil Hotel staged one one night and after that I wrote this, although it has nothing to do with that. \n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:26:23\nReads \"The Pub\" [from The Late Man].\n \nAudience\n00:31:28\nApplause.\n \nEND\n00:31:32\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\n\nandreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:00:00\nReads [“The Theft” from The Late Man]. \n \nAudience\n00:05:03\nApplause.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:05:09\nRight, just one more. This one is, is quite different. Quite different. In fact, if there is such a thing as a manifesto, I guess that's what it is. Or let's say it's a map or something about roughly where I'm at. It's called \"The Cage\".\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:05:32\nReads \"The Cage\" [from The Late Man]. \n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:15:11\nThat's all. \n \nAudience\n00:15:12\nApplause.\n \nAndreas Schroeder\n00:15:19\nI don't know how to get that off. \n \nEND\n00:15:24"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Year-Specific Information:\\n\\nMaxine Gadd had published air two the previous year (1971), and was living in a commune on Galiano Island. Backup to Babylon: poems 1972-1987 collects poems Gadd wrote in 1972.\\n\\nIn 1972, Schroeder had just finished publishing The late man and File of Uncertainties, was editing The Journal of Contemporary Literature in Translation, writing for the Vancouver Province, and was completing his M.A. from UBC.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"Local Connections:\\n\\nWhile shying away from mainstream poetic circles and public life, Gadd’s work and life has been deeply rooted in Canadian artistic discourse, creating a community and social activism. A Vancouver poet, Gadd was associated with other writers like Gerry Gilbert, Roy Kiyooka, bill bissett, and Daphne Marlatt. She met George Bowering, David Bromige and Lionel Kearns in Earle Birney’s UBC creative writing classes in the early 60’s.\\n\\nAlso a Vancouver writer, Schroeder has contributed over a dozen publications to Canadian literature, in poetry, prose, non-fiction, fiction, young adult non-fiction as well as contributing to CBC radio shows and Vancouver newspapers. A professor in Creative Non-fiction at the University of British Columbia, Schroeder has also represented writers in political positions and unions.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"4 reel-to-reel tapes>4 CDs>4 digital files\",\"type\":\"Preservation\"},{\"note\":\"Original transcript by Rachel Kyne\\n\\nOriginal print catalogue, introduction, research and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones\\n\\nAdditional research and edits by Ali Barillaro\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"http://www.thinkcity.ca/node/133\",\"citation\":\"“Andreas Schroeder”. Story Tellers. Think City: Ideas for the 21st Century Vancouver. Think City Society, Vancouver, B.C. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.annickpress.com/Contributors/S/Schroeder-Andreas\",\"citation\":\"“Andreas Schroder”. Authors. Annick Press: Excellence & Innovation in Children’s Literature. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.writersunion.ca/member/andreas-schroeder\",\"citation\":\"“Andreas Schroeder”. Members’ Pages. The Writers’ Union of Canada.  2009. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-companion-to-canadian-literature/oclc/605246871&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Davey, Frank. \\\"Schroeder, Andreas\\\". The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Eugene Benson and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press 2001. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/air-two/oclc/53868052&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Gadd, Maxine. air two. Vancouver: Air, 1971. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/lost-language-selected-poems/oclc/8919395&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Gadd, Maxine. Lost Language: Selected Poems. Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen (eds). Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982. \"},{\"url\":\"http://intermedia.vancouverartinthesixties.com/voices/012\",\"citation\":\"“Intermedia”. The Intermedia Catalogue. The Michael de Courcy Archive, 2009. \"},{\"url\":\"http://www.ccca.ca/history/ozz/english/authors/gadd_maxine.html\",\"citation\":\"(Maxine Gadd) “Maxine Gadd”. One Zero Zero: A Virtual Library of English Canadian Small Presses 1945-2044. Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art: York University, Toronto, 1997.  \"},{\"url\":\"http:// www.newstarbooks.com/author.php?author_id=3119\",\"citation\":\"“Maxine Gadd”. New Star Books website. Vancouver, British Columbia. \"},{\"url\":\"http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2008/01/12-or-20-questions-with-maxine-gadd.html\",\"citation\":\"McLennan, Rob. “12 or 20 Questions: with Maxine Gadd”. Rob McLennan’s Blog. January 11, 2008.\"},{\"url\":\"http://www.vancouverartinthesixties.com/people/31\",\"citation\":\"“People: Maxine Gadd”. Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Digital Archive of Artwork, Ephemera and Film.\"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/ozone-minotaur/oclc/806554234&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Schroeder, Andreas. The Ozone Minotaur. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1969. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/file-of-uncertainties-poems/oclc/421970309&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Schroeder, Andreas. File of Uncertainties: Poems. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1971. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/late-man/oclc/654160621&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Schroeder, Andreas. The Late Man. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1972. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670548949696512,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.477Z","digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\" https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/I0006_11_0109-1_tape.jpg\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"I0006_11_0109-1_tape.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-0cAe1GF8xZsc62jpUDXwgvyCd6ZmvSw\",\"title\":\"Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 1 - Reel\",\"credit\":\"Drew Bernet\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/I0006_11_0109-1_front.jpg\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"I0006_11_0109-1_front.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-0cAe1GF8xZsc62jpUDXwgvyCd6ZmvSw\",\"title\":\"Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 1 - 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Spine\",\"credit\":\"Drew Bernet\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://files.spokenweb.ca/concordia/sgw/audio/all_mp3/andreas_schroeder_1_i006-11-109-3.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3\",\"filename\":\"andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:31:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"75.7 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]\\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:00:01\\nOkay, we won't be using a flute this time, I think it's a bass trombone but I'm not sure.  It'll be up to Andy. I'd like to introduce to you Andy Schroeder.\\n \\nAudience\\n00:00:15\\nApplause.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:00:40\\nRight. Normally they hang you after a reading. Jesus. I'm going to read from, oh, just kind of a merry jaunt through various books. I think what I'll do is I'll read some of the, some poetry first, and then I'll slip over into fiction. I've just, two days ago, published a book called The Late Man of short fictions and extended prose poems and so on. The work that I've done is gone cyclic in terms of form. I started out with prose poems and went into much more of a linear poetry, and then went back to a fiction which was kind of a half prose poem, half short story, half God knows, film script. And right now I'm working hard at both styles. First book I published was called The Ozone Minotaur, and it was more surreal than anything I'm doing now. I really get very excited about illusions, and I guess that's probably what most of my work is all about. At first I was very interested in surreal illusions; now I'm very interested in real illusions, and I'm not sure there's any difference. Here's a prose poem from way back called \\\"Introduction\\\".\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:02:10\\nReads \\\"Introduction\\\" from The Ozone Minotaur.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:03:15\\nAfter I found out that you couldn't live by writing poetry, I took a job with CPAir [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q986941]. That doesn't really sound like a very logical progression, but anyway, it was a teletype machine that they put me on, I think I lasted about four days, but I got a poem out of it, and it's entitled \\\"Cables\\\".\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:03:35\\nReads \\\"Cables\\\" [from The Ozone Minotaur].\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:05:29\\nThis next book, File of Uncertainties, I supposed was kind of created when I woke up one morning and was overwhelmed with my own ignorance, so I decided to write a book about it. [Audience laughter]. And then I figured the best way to do it was to go up north and I did that, and I spent a winter up in Alaska [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q797]. And that was where I really got into this illusion thing, because, you know, all the different, very very strange things that happen there, like white-outs, which you probably are familiar with here, as well, where a man suddenly loses all sense of up and down and forward and backward. They have better ones than that, though. They have, until the snowmobile rolls around, when people used to mush with dogs, they'd continually have this happening: a man would set off from one village for another, with his dogs, and he'd be perfectly well-dressed and perfectly well-fed, and apparently perfectly sane, and the dogs would arrive, and the sled would arrive but the man wouldn't, and they possibly found him and possibly not. But no one could ever understand what would make a man suddenly step off his sleigh and walk off in an entirely different direction to die. When he certainly didn't have it on his list of things to do when he left. They still haven't figured that out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that man's body is made up of such an incredible percentage of water, and very strange things happen to water up there. [Audience laughter]. Anyway, I almost got caught by an avalanche, so I thought I'd check into it and I'd find out what you do if you do get caught by one, cause I figured by that time that survival was probably a good thing. So, they said, one of the things you do is, if you get caught by an avalanche, you make swimming motions with your hands. I guess the idea is that kind of tends to keep you close to the surface, which is a good place to be. Now...[audience laughter] the lovely illusion part, which really intrigued me, was that a man can survive under the snow up to a depth of approximately six feet, but only for a certain period of time, and apparently the closer you are to the surface, the better your chances are, and the way they dig for, well, it's not necessarily logical up there, at least it didn't seem like it, but the way they dig for a man like this is they use sounding rods, and these are very sensitive rods, like, almost like tuning forks, and they walk along, in a very definite rhythm, it's almost like a musical score, and they ram these poles in, one foot deep, about a foot at a time, and attempt to hit somebody that's buried underneath it. And then they go back again and they do it at two feet, and then at three feet and four feet to six feet, they don't go any deeper. Now the peculiar part of it is that they of course can't hear anyone, but the poor bugger that's under the snow can hear very, very clearly. And, you know, and he'll hear people saying, like I wonder where, I think there's a place he might be, and he'll be shouting in there, saying, \\\"I'm here,\\\" you know, \\\"I'm here!\\\" and they can't hear him, and it's really quite terrifying. Sound only travels one way through an avalanche, I don't...[Audience laughter]. Anyway, I'll, let me read some poems about it, I'll...File of Uncertainties was written in a very short time and mostly about the same thing, and you'll find recurring images all the way through, stylistic things that are similar all the way through, and the poems, because they match together fairly tightly, I didn't even bother naming them, I just numbered them, because they're all part of the same sequence. This is number four. \\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:09:27\\nReads \\\"File of Uncertainties: #4\\\" from File of Uncertainties.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:10:25\\nReads \\\"File of Uncertainties: #3\\\" from File of Uncertainties.\\n\\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:12:13\\nReads \\\"File of Uncertainties: #5\\\" from File of Uncertainties.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:12:54\\nReads \\\"File of Uncertainties: #8\\\" from File of Uncertainties.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:13:50\\nI took up sky-diving after I came back and, because...yeah, believe it or not, it had very similar illusions going for it again. When...it's much like the white-out. When you jump off an aircraft, and it banks away, generally to your left, then you suddenly lose all points of reference. And because the earth below you is much too far away to really mean anything, and your parachute is still on your back, in other words not opened, so you can't, you haven't got anything above you either, you suddenly get hit with this incredibly stony silence, and absolutely nothing happens. I mean, you don't fall, you're not moving, you're not even really thinking because it's so suddenly quiet. It seems like everything just freezes. And in fact you're falling at about three hundred feet a second, but you have no sense of it whatsoever. And you just stand there in the sky, and kind of look around, and nothing is going on. Which is why you're not supposed to be stoned when you skydive because, [audience laughter] sometimes people tend to forget, you know. So I wrote a poem about it, and, actually it's not...well anything. It's “#9”, is what it is. \\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:15:18\\nReads \\\"#9\\\" [from File of Uncertainties].\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:17:31\\nAlright, here's another poem from the north--\\\"#12\\\".\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:17:38\\nReads \\\"# 12\\\".\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:18:29\\nI think I'll just let that go for a minute there and go into some prose and then I'll just read some unpublished poems. This first story that I'm going to read is entitled \\\"The Tree\\\", and I wrote it after I met a very lovely old man down in Australia [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q408]. Very old. He was an aborigine, and we tried to communicate; he didn't know my language and I didn't know his, which is maybe why we got along so well, but anyway, I built a story up on him. This was on a coral island...of course all islands down there are coral islands. \\n \\nAnnotationAndreas Schroeder\\n00:19:19\\nReads \\\"The Tree\\\" [from The Late Man].\\n \\nAudience\\n00:25:45\\nApplause.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:25:54\\nHere's another short one, entitled \\\"The Pub\\\", sort of a frenzied affair. They don't--it's sort of illegal to have fights in pubs, and in Vancouver I was the very happy observer of one, finally. Pub fights have sort of a beautiful ritualistic thing as long as you're not involved, like if you're just kind of watching, and the Cecil Hotel staged one one night and after that I wrote this, although it has nothing to do with that. \\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:26:23\\nReads \\\"The Pub\\\" [from The Late Man].\\n \\nAudience\\n00:31:28\\nApplause.\\n \\nEND\\n00:31:32\\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\",\"notes\":\"Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971).\\n\\n00:01- Introducer (George Bowering?) introduces Andreas Schroeder. (As Andy).\\n00:40- Andreas Schroeder introduces reading and “Introduction”. [INDEX: The Late Man, prose poetry, form, short fiction, linear poetry, film script (genres melding together), first book The Ozone Minotaur, surreal illusions; from The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969).]\\n02:10- Reads “Introduction”.\\n03:15- Introduces “Cables”. [INDEX: CPAir job, teletype machine; from The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969).]\\n03:35- Reads “Cables”.\\n05:29- Introduces “File of Uncertainties: IV” and his next book, File of Uncertainties    (SoNoNis Press, 1971). [INDEX: creation of File of Uncertainties, ignorance, spent a      \\twinter in Alaska, illusions, avalanche, survival of man in an avalanche, sounding rods; from File of Uncertainties, (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]\\n09:27- Reads “File of Uncertainties: IV”.\\n10:25- Reads “File of Uncertainties: III”.\\n12:13- Reads “File of Uncertainties: V”.\\n12:54- Reads “File of Uncertainties: VIII”.\\n13:50- Introduces “Number IX”. [INDEX: Sky-diving experiences.]\\n15:18- Reads “Number IX”.\\n17:42- Introduces “Number XII”. [INDEX: poem from the North.]\\n17:38- Reads “Number XII”.\\n18:29- Introduces “The Tree”. [INDEX: prose, Australia, aborigine, coral island; from The Late Man (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]\\n19:19- Reads “The Tree”.\\n25:54- Introduces “The Pub”. [INDEX: Vancouver: illegal pub fights, Cecil Hotel; from The Late Man (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]\\n26:23- Reads “The Pub”.\\n31:32.07- END OF RECORDING\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/andreas-schroeder-at-sgwu-1972/#1\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://files.spokenweb.ca/concordia/sgw/audio/all_mp3/andreas_schroeder_2_i006-11-109-4.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3\",\"filename\":\"andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:15:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"37 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:00:00\\nReads [“The Theft” from The Late Man]. \\n \\nAudience\\n00:05:03\\nApplause.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:05:09\\nRight, just one more. This one is, is quite different. Quite different. In fact, if there is such a thing as a manifesto, I guess that's what it is. Or let's say it's a map or something about roughly where I'm at. It's called \\\"The Cage\\\".\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:05:32\\nReads \\\"The Cage\\\" [from The Late Man]. \\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:15:11\\nThat's all. \\n \\nAudience\\n00:15:12\\nApplause.\\n \\nAndreas Schroeder\\n00:15:19\\nI don't know how to get that off. \\n \\nEND\\n00:15:24\",\"notes\":\"Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971).\\n\\n00:00- Recording begins suddenly with Andreas Schroeder, potential first line “The living room was littered with papers, pens, bottles...” (short story).    \\n05:09- Introduces “The Cage”. [INDEX: manifesto, map.]\\n05:32- Reads “The Cage”.\\n15:24.10- END OF RECORDING.\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/andreas-schroeder-at-sgwu-1972/#2\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://files.spokenweb.ca/concordia/sgw/audio/all_mp3/maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3\",\"filename\":\"maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:38:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"92.7 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]\\n\\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:00:00\\nReads unnamed poem [recording begins abruptly].\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:02:20\\nReads unnamed poem.\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:11:10\\nThis is the thing that the guy that held onto the raft for fourteen days knew. This is what Armstrong [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1615], Collins [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q104859] and Reilley [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q739214] out there, those astronauts, this is what they saved up for. It had to be good. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:11:29\\nReads unnamed poem.\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:23:31\\nThat's the end of that one. \\n \\nAudience\\n00:23:33\\nApplause.\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:23:40\\nI think I made enough noise for a while, huh? My voice is getting sort of sore, or, you know, like that was a trip, so. I got a lot of poems, but...Did you feel like reading now or should we have a break or what? Do you think...do you think we should read some more or what? I got...You want to read some more? \\n \\nUnknown\\n00:23:59\\nAmbient Sound [voices].\\n\\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:24:03\\nDo you want to read some more? \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:04\\nI don't know. I've not nothing in particular form, just bits, that's the problem. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:24:12\\nYou can't do the one on the Goat-god....\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:13\\nOkay, I'll do the Goat-god. Well okay, do you want to try improvising to a trip that's here? I'll let you read it. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:24:22\\nSeriously, I'll do that? \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:23\\nYeah. It's just going to be some sounds. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:24:24\\nOkay. I don't know if I can…[unintelligible].\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:27\\nI gotta find it first. What's that? Are we on? Oh, sorry. God. \\n \\nUnknown\\n00:24:38\\nAmbient Sound [voices].\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:39\\nWhat? The flute? I think it's over there. For fun...the same message...I'm asking...Richard's going to make some noise with my flute. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:24:55\\nI'll make some noise if you'll give me a microphone. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:24:57\\nOkay. Which one do you want? Let's share it. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:01\\nGive me the [unintelligible].\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:25:02\\nIt goes with the poem. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:05\\nWhen'd you do that? \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:25:06\\nWhat?\\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:07\\nThis, this knot. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:25:08\\nI tied myself into it. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:11\\nOh, here we go. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:25:12\\nI don't even know if I can find it. All these little pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now how it goes, you have to keep quiet until...let's see now. He's never done this before.  \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:40\\nWhat did, yeah, what do you want me to do with it? \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:25:42\\nOkay, this is called \\\"Shore Animals\\\" and it's a speech piece with flute, and the flute has to listen. It can speak too. [Laughter]. You have to listen to it. You never heard it\\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:25:57\\nI think it's learning how to speak. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:26:01\\nIt's called \\\"Shore Animals,\\\" it's a speech piece with flute. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:26:07\\nReads \\\"Shore Animals\\\" accompanied by Richard Sommer on flute.\\n \\nAudience\\n00:30:13\\nAudience.\\n\\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:30:15\\nMaybe I'll try to try that one…[audience applause continues throughout].\\n\\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:30:24\\nI'll give you your microphone back. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:30:25\\nYes. How many minutes we got? \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:30:29\\nI don't know. [Unintelligible]. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:30:35\\nOkay, I'm going to read, I'm going to do, this one's totally mindless, okay? It's dedicated to my friend Gerry Gilbert [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5552756] who used to like to do those trips. And you can go to sleep or something, because that's what I want you to do. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:30:51\\nReads \\\"Cantaloup, 29 cents\\\".\\n \\nAudience\\n00:38:33\\nApplause. \\n \\nEND\\n00:38:37\\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\",\"notes\":\"Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished.\\n\\n00:00- Maxine Gadd reads, recording starts immediately, possible first line “Big there lady all come together...” [INDEX: from unknown source.]\\n02:20- Potential first line or continuation of last poem: “I promised to Hackett, though the        memory’s gone, of all I thought worthy to tell you, the person”.\\n02:29- Reads unknown poem, first line “The glistening tower in the ozone...”\\n11:10- Introduces unknown poem, first line “I am obedient to every sign...” [INDEX:    Armstrong, Collins, Riley, astronauts; from unknown source.]\\n11:29- Reads first line “I am obedient to every sign...”\\n15:48- Continues with “At this point there’s a maniac treading the stairs above my head...”\\n19:49- Continues with “No burn- the doctor promised this won’t hurt...”\\n24:12- Richard (Sommer?) asks for poem to be read, they sort out a collaboration with Richard and a flute [INDEX: God-goat poem, improvisation: music and poetry]\\n25:42- Gadd introduces “Shore Animals” [INDEX: from unknown source]\\n26:07- Reads “Shore Animals”, flute played by Richard\\n30:13- Sorting out of microphones, etc.\\n30:35- Introduces “Cantaloup, 29 cents” [INDEX: Gerry Gilbert; from unknown source]\\n30:51- Reads “Cantaloup, 29 cents”\\n38:37.60- END OF RECORDING.\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/maxine-gadd-at-sgwu-1972/#2\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://files.spokenweb.ca/concordia/sgw/audio/all_mp3/maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3\",\"filename\":\"maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:21:09\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"50.8 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]\\n \\nRichard (Dick)  Sommer\\n00:00:00\\nI'd like to introduce you to two poets who are Vancouver [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24639] friends of mine. Their poetry is quite different, as you'll discover. But from my own point of view, they...I owe both of them a debt that is similar in both cases though neither probably knows it. They've made me, in their own ways, rethink my own feelings about  what ought to constitute poetry and poems. And in the case of Maxine Gadd, this thinking went into a review which was then sent to the Firepoint which then folded. So you may never see that. And in the case of Andy Schroeder [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4755619], found its way into a long tape harangue between the two of us on the subject of form in poetry. Which I think is now in the Sir George Williams Library [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5159005], where any of you can endure it if you wish to. At any rate, the first of these poets to read will be Maxine Gadd. There will be a fifteen minute break, and then Andreas Schroeder will read. Maxine. \\n \\nAudience\\n00:01:32\\nApplause. \\n \\nRichard (Dick) Sommer\\n00:02:01\\nYou're plugged in. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:02:03\\nOh boy. Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do. I don't know how much to talk about the poetry. My connection is very loose to the mainstream I guess, because, I don't know, I'm just not socially related to what's going on maybe in the poetry reading. I guess my identifications with words are somewhat with a West Coast hippie trip. And between the country and the city, the first feeling being, you know, the desire for purity, you know when you're seventeen or eighteen years old and you've figured the country life is it. And later coming to realize the necessity of the communal life and the city. So I think that's a task I'm going to try to set myself right here. I...this...I'm going to read first of all the second \\\"well\\\" poem, which I did, experienced in the country, living in the country. I remember the first \\\"well\\\" poem, I don't remember where it's gone, because it didn't get published. I disregarded its importance, you know. I tended to take the judgment of editors, and you know, people that set themselves up as authorities, and that's why I'm here, you know. I've kept close enough to them, I guess. I remember the first one went something like, \\\"Wanting pure water I went to the well/too wonderful\\\"...and there was something about the oracle as the bucket clacked. This is the “Second Well Poem”. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:03:57\\nReads \\\"Second Well Poem\\\" [published later as “Well poem” in Lost Language].\\n\\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:04:41\\nWhich is about where I feel right now. But that's about where my connection to poetry is right now. I wonder if that...I wonder if that one's around. I don't think it is. I guess I'll just take it as it comes. There's some scheme in this. I guess, I got published by a cat, by bill bissett [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4911496] you might have heard, who did the thing, did the guru thing, the super-energy thing of getting a lot of work done, and getting a lot of people's work out, and a lot of his work out, a lot of it was real shit but he got it out, you know, and some of it worked and some of it didn't, but there was so much of it, you know...I'd like to have had that confidence, you know, I guess almost, most people write poetry, they've got it all in their trunk, you know, they don't get it out. But I guess that's what it takes. This is from one of his first, really cheap magazines. He put, he...it's typed, you know. Pretty good typing. His typing got worse, I get very angry, he makes lots of mistakes. But he did a lot of drawings and things, if anybody wants to look at it, you know.  I mean, he did it minimum, you know, he was living really poor. And a lot of people still read his stuff, so, I mean, to me he was a folk poet in that sense, a lot of people still read his stuff because he got the stuff out cheap, you know. \\\"Trip\\\".\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:06:05\\nReads \\\"Trip\\\".\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:07:47\\nI'm going to go over there. This one is to a poet who is in the, is in another world, okay? He looks like a silver lizard, and he's very beautiful, and he knows all about the Greek trip, and Eleusis, which is one's talking about in the first poem, okay, the oracles from under the ground, that belief you must start out with. It's called...and it's admiration, as well as a bit of terror.\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:08:22\\nReads unnamed poem. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:10:19\\nLeary, I should have mentioned, was Timothy Leary. Oh, I should have explained that before, yeah. Oh yeah, this is where I met...now I don't like it okay? And it's probably not a good poem. But that's, that's...you know, that's...the kind of art form I'd like to have seen as a collective art form, was what I yearned and hoped for. Poetry is what people write in rooms alone, and I don't like...I don't, you know, that's what I was stuck with. And I worked for a while with a group in Vancouver called, named, we called it \\\"Intermedia\\\". And I had the experience of working with a group, at one point there were five of us poets, you know, or what we called poets. And we'd go around to various places, we went to Edmonton [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2096] one time, and we tried things, we tried chanting and wailing, like, was it...who was that crazy old lady. Sitwell, Edith Sitwell [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q259921], remember her? And if you ever heard the sort of sing, the song, sing sing she used to do, you know, we tried that. And it really worked, you know, but you'd go around and you'd say, \\\"Do you dig the poems?\\\" and they'd say, \\\"I can't hear them, but we really like your voice.\\\" You know. [Audience laughter]. So, you know, left that, you got an ache in the gut or something.   \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:11:37\\nReads \\\"Ratio\\\".\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:12:48\\nI don't like it. I don't want to be there. Here's one from last year. I got into printing stuff myself, you know, and I do that--I wish, oh, you can't see it, can you? It was mimeograph, it was real cheap, you know? And you could take images, you could take newspaper articles, you could take scraps of anything you saw that you dug, you know, put 'em together, and to me that was a, that was a form of concrete poetry. Can't, of course, I don't know, you couldn't really say that one or any number of them. This one is half-said, okay. Behind it I put a map, I found a map of B.C. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1974]and Minster Island [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21906024] was a map, was an island I found once when I was working on a ship as a mess girl, on a freighter. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:13:46\\nReads unnamed poem.\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:15:33\\nAnd where that ended up was just over the name Bella Coola [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q815765], which is sort of where they do, can fish. There's no escape, though, you know? And...so then I want to read about Kitsilano [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4179275], where most of...I happened, you know, I grew up. Kitsilano's a sort of slum district of Vancouver. And it's disintegrating, and you probably all experienced this, you know, being city people, you know, they're bulldozing the places, there's no more cheap places to live, and so your friends, you know, you can't live there anymore, your friends can't live there anymore, so whatever you had, which was sometimes very heavy, you know, community's really beautiful, you know? I used to go over and play music with my friends. We had to move out, you know, because the city's being destroyed, and only the people who are well-to-do, who have some sort of stake in the city, you know, who are supporting the structure can stay. And this poem is about somebody who I met one day on the street, you know, and her story, she's sort of sick, just on the street, everything's falling to pieces. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:16:55\\nReads “bee-people on 4th avenue” [published later in Lost Language].\\n\\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:18:32\\nWho's singing out there? But here, on the next street, you know, I ran into a friend of mine. Her name's Martina. And, you know, we're about the same age, and we've been through a lot of things, and, we've been through some bad things, you know, lots of rejections and refusal, no, there's no food now, you can't have any, go away, you know, fighting over somebody or other. \\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:18:58\\nReads “4th ave” [published later in Lost Language].\\n \\nMaxine Gadd\\n00:20:49\\nUs old ladies. Okay, but that's not entirely true. I got involved into all that magic stuff, you know, the Sufis, and into politics, and like this summer I hope I'm going to start some sort of woman's centre, back where I live, you know. \\n \\nEND\\n00:21:09\\n[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].\",\"notes\":\"Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished. \\n\\n00:00- Unknown Introducer (George Bowering?) introduces Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd [INDEX: Vancouver poets, Firepoint magazine, tape interview between Schroeder and Introducer found in the Sir George Williams Library (not there anymore).]\\n02:03- Maxine Gadd introduces “The Second Well Poem”.  [INDEX: mainstream poetry, poetry scene (being outside of), country vs. city life, role of editors; perhaps published as “Well Poem” in Lost Language (1982).]\\n03:57- Reads “The Second Well Poem”.\\n04:41- Introduces “Trip”. [INDEX: Gadd’s connection to poetry, bill bissett publishing her    book, publishing poetry; from unknown source.]\\n06:05- Reads “Trip”.\\n07:47- Introduces unknown poem, first line “Robin has the horse in hand...”. [INDEX: Greek trip, Eleusis, oracles; from unknown source.]\\n08:22- Reads unknown poem, first line “Robin has the horse in hand...”.\\n10:19- Introduces “Ratio”. [INDEX: explains “Leary” from previous poem is Timothy Leary, \\tcollective art forms, working with Intermedia in Vancouver, poetry group traveled to Edmonton, Edith Sitwell.]\\n11:37- Reads “Ratio”.\\n12:48- Introduces unknown poem, first line “Heading up to Minster Island”. [INDEX: self        publishing poems, collages, form of concrete poetry, map of B.C., worked as a mess girl on a freighter.]\\n13:46- Reads unknown poem, first line “Heading up to Minster Island”.\\n15:33- Introduces “bee-people on 4th avenue”. [INDEX: Bella Coola, fishing, Kitsilano where she grew up, poverty and destruction of Vancouver; from Lost Language]\\n16:55- Reads “bee-people on 4th avenue”. \\n18:32- Introduces “4th ave.” [INDEX: friend of Gadd’s named Martina; from air two and Lost Language.]\\n18:58- Reads “4th ave.”\\n20:49- Begins to introduce another poem, unknown. [INDEX: Sufism, politics, hopes to start a  women’s centre.]\\n21:09.94- END OF RECORDING\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/maxine-gadd-at-sgwu-1972/#1\"}]"],"score":3.032301},{"id":"1300","cataloger_name":["Masoumeh,Zaare"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"source_collection_label":["SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Records Management and Archives"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_description":["The fonds consists of some administrative records of the SGWU Department of English and the Concordia Department of English between 1971 and 2000. It also consists of some SGWU Department of English records related to student academic activities in the 1940s and to public readings and lectures, and a few interviews, produced between 1966 and 1972. The fonds mainly includes minutes of departmental meetings and some course timetables. It also includes some student papers in bound volumes and 63 sound recordings (80 audio reels) mainly composed of poetry readings (see the Concordia SpokenWeb project which uses this material) but also a few lectures given at SGWU. There are also loose typed sheets describing some of the SGWU poetry readings."],"collection_source_collection_id":["I086"],"persistent_url":["http://archives.concordia.ca/I086"],"item_title":[" L.E. Sissman at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 7 April 1972"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_title_note":["\"TAPE #1 OF 1 L.E. SISSMAN MASTER I006/SR110\" written on the spine of the tape's box. \"I006-11-110\" written on sticker on the reel. \"L.E. SISSMAN APRIL 6/72 TAPE #1 OF 1 4-72--012-8 MASTER 3 3/4 ips 1/2 track\" written on the front of the tape's box"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["The Poetry Series"],"item_subseries_title":["Poetry 6"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Sissman, Louis Edward"],"creator_names_search":["Sissman, Louis Edward"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/65248808\",\"name\":\"Sissman, Louis Edward\",\"dates\":\"1928-1976 \",\"notes\":\"Born on New Year’s Day of 1928, poet Louis Edward (L.E.) Sissman grew up in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of thirteen, Sissman won the National Spelling Bee in Washington and was aired on national radio as a Quiz Kid. He entered Harvard at the young age of sixteen in 1944. In 1946, however, he was dismissed, got a job as a stack boy in the Boston Public Library, and began writing poetry. Sissman and a few of his classmates founded a literary magazine, Halcyon, which only ran for two issues, but nevertheless received contributions from e.e. cummings and Wallace Stevens. Sissman was readmitted to Harvard in 1948 and received Harvard’s Garrison Poetry Prize. He graduated cum laude in 1949, elected class poet. He then moved to New York and worked as a copy editor, until returning to Boston in 1952. By this time, he had stopped writing poetry. Sissman worked as an aide to John F. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign as well as various smaller jobs. In 1956 he was hired as a copywriter for the advertising firm of Kenyon and Eckhardt. By 1969, he was the vice president and creative director of the same firm. In 1963, he started to write poetry again. Sissman was diagnosed with the then-incurable Hodgkin’s disease in 1965, encouraging him to write more and more verse. He was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship in 1968, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1969. Sissman published his first book of poetry in 1968, Dying: An Introduction (Little, Brown and Company), and Pursuit of Honor in 1971 (Little, Brown and Company). He began writing reviews for the New Yorker, and in 1975 Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s was published (Vanguard Press). L.E. Sissman wrote up until his death in 1976. His unpublished poems were collected with previously published poems in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (Little, Brown and Company) in 1978.\\n\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\",\"Performer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Hoffman, Stanton"],"contributors_names_search":["Hoffman, Stanton"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Hoffman, Stanton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Series organizer\",\"Presenter\"]}]"],"Presenter_name":["Hoffman, Stanton"],"Series_organizer_name":["Hoffman, Stanton"],"Performance_Date":[1972],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/4 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"Scotch\",\"generations\":\"Master\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"Mono\",\"playing_speed\":\"3 3/4 ips\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"01:30:00\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"Half-track\",\"material_designation\":\"Reel to Reel\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Reel to Reel"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio"],"playback_mode":["Mono"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"1972 4 7\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"Date written on the front of the tape's box and in written announcement \\\"Georgian Happenings\\\"\",\"source\":\"Accompanying Material\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080570\",\"venue\":\"Hall Building Room H-651\",\"notes\":\"Location specified in written announcement \\\"Georgian Happenings\\\"\",\"address\":\"1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada\",\"latitude\":\"45.4972758\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57893043\"}]"],"Address":["1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"],"Venue":["Hall Building Room H-651"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["L.E. Sissman reads from his first three books, Dying: An Introduction (Little, Brown 1968), Scattered Returns (Little, Brown 1969), and Pursuit of Honor (Little, Brown 1971), as well as poems that were new at the time and published posthumously in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (Little, Brown 1978)."],"contents":["le_sissman_i006-11-110.mp3\n\nStanton Hoffman\n00:00:00\nL.E. Sissman's three books of poems are Dying: An Introduction, Scattered Returns and Pursuit of Honor. The poet James Atlas made the following observation about Scattered Returns that it \"engages a voice so casual, so tuneless that the depression which pervades each page is in danger of being overlooked. Not the shrill agony of despair, but the flat surfaces of the unfulfilled or what characterizes his diction\". But also I'd like to take a line from a Sissman poem out of context, \"evidently, even desperation leads a charmed life\". Ladies and gentleman, L.E. Sissman.\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:00:45\nThank you. Well let me begin by refuting one of those statements that Stanley just made, Stanton, I'm sorry, just made. I was not a singing vacuum cleaner salesman, that was a canard that was incorporated into my vita by my publisher, who misread a biographical note I wrote. I once worked for a vacuum cleaner company that made its salesmen sing pep songs before they went out to tackle the ladies in the neighbourhood, so we'd get up in the morning and sing all these ridiculous songs and then go out and try to sell vacuum cleaners but the two were not really related, it was just hyping oneself up for the gritty day of trying to sell these poor ladies on a vacuum cleaner. Now I've seen you've kindly reproduced, and incidentally you've been most kind here in Montreal, I've been received royally, more so than any place I've been lately to read poetry and I greatly appreciated, I feel it's kind of a homecoming since my mother is a Canadian, from Ontario [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1904], not Quebec [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q176], but I've been in Montreal [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q34] many times before and I'm very fond of this city and if I finally lose patience with the U. S. and A. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30] as Walt Kelly [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q933892] says in Pogo [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2100584] I'll migrate up here, I feel it an eminently sensible thing to do. So it's nice to have a pleasant reception here. And since you've kindly reproduced one of the poems from a group called \"Mouth Organ Tunes: the American Lost-and-Found\" on your mimeographed sheet, I thought I'd start off by reading that poem. I'm going to say a few words at the risk of being dull about what each one of these poems I'm going to read is for, what I meant it to mean. This particular one is talking about the well, kind of what James Atlas was talking about in his comment on my second book, this is in my third book, the terminal flatness and greyness of American life, United States life, and the attempts to alleviate this barrenness by all sorts of temporizing accommodations, going to Howard Johnson's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5919997] on a Sunday, or having a kinky party in New York [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60] to show off one's new paintings or celebrating the death of a genuine antique American and New Englander and looking at the house that he lived in and so on. Anyway the tune is called, the poem is called \"Mouth Organ Tunes\", and I use the mouth organ as an instrument here to suggest the, well the mouth organ is something that can be played in a band, but is better not, it's a very solitary instrument and to me it always conveys the loneliness of an individual against insurmountable odds. The poem is called \"Mouth Organ Tunes: The American Lost-and-Found\" and the first section is called, as promised, \"In a Ho-Jo's by the River\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:04:20\nReads \"Mouth Organ Tunes: The American Lost-and-Found, part 1: In a Ho-Jo's by the River\" from Pursuit of Honor. \n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:10:02\nLet me contrast that with a poem about Middle America in the best sense. The old Middle America of people who knew their own way and found their own way in the land, and lost their own way in recent years because of encroachments on the land. The poem is called \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" and it's dedicated to the memory of my half-brother, Winfield Shannon, itinerant farm worker, 1909-1969. And it has an epigraph by Basil Bunting [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2886803] which goes \"a mason times his mallet to a lark's twitter, ‘til the stone spells the name, naming none, a man abolished\".\n\nL.E. Sissman\n00:11:04\nReads \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\",  parts 1-5 [from Pursuit of Honor].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:21:25\nLet me change to a slightly lighter vein, and read a poem that is a joke, essentially. It's called \"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\" It's about a man I once roomed with in college, who was an Audobonophile, or whatever the word is, a bird nut and has since become a bird expert. Anyway, this is how the poem goes, it's called \"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:22:05\nReads \"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:22:55\nThat is also a description I should say, of the Least Bittern. This is another poem about being in college...good lord, twenty seven years ago, I can't believe this, 1945, yeah that is damn near twenty seven years ago. It's called \"A College Room, Lowell R-34\", a building at Harvard [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13371], 1945.\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:23:26\nReads \"A College Room, Lowell R-34, 1945\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:25:12\nAnd there's a footnote to this poem, dedicated to the maid, good lord, this is a long time ago, we had maids in those rooms. It was a very capable lady named Mrs. Circassian. And it's called \"Footnote, Mrs. Circassian\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:25:28\nReads \"Footnote, Mrs. Circassian\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\n\nAudience\n00:26:07\nLaughter.\n\nL.E. Sissman\n00:26:10\nThank you, she was a very nice lady, and deserved a much less ironic tribute than that, she was a home away from home herself. Let's see now, I've got all sorts of possible choices here. Why don't I read a poem about a shattering experience I had which I think maybe all of you may have had at one time or another, going back to a place where you had lived as a kid, and finding how puny it was and how destroyed it was by the passage of time. This is a poem about a place in Detroit where I had lived in the 30's and went back to in 1964 when the poem was written. It's called \"East Congress and McDougall Streets, Detroit, May 25\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:27:03\nReads \"East Congress and McDougall Streets, Detroit, May 25\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:29:30\nAnd finally, one more poem from this rue, if I can find it, called \"The Museum of Comparative Zoology\" and it is about indeed falling in love with an old beat up museum of Comparative Zoology, and finding one's place in the philia.\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:29:56\nReads \"The Museum of Comparative Zoology\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:32:19\nLet me get onto a poem that is now again a little bit more serious, although not ultimately so, I hope. It's about being very sick at the hospital and knowing one is in good hands. It's called \"A Deathplace\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:32:41\nReads \"A Death Place\" [from Scattered Returns].\n \nUnknown\n00:35:27\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\n\nL.E. Sissman\n00:35:28\nReads “Small Space” [from Scattered Returns].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:36:12\nNot entirely and seriously...I think this might be time to call a five minute break during which I will smoke a cigarette and get my wind back and then we will proceed. Ok? \n[Audience applause]. Thank you. I won't take all this junk off, if I do I'll be in serious trouble.\n\nUnknown\n00:36:46\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:36:48\nThis is a poem about the same thing the last poem was about, called \"Getting On\", and I'll read only one part of it since that's all I've written so far. It's called \"Grave Expectations\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:37:04\nReads \"Getting On: Grave Expectations\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:39:15\nAnd this is a poem that is sort of mysterious and I'm not sure that I understand it either but I'll read it, called, if I can find the end of it, yeah. \"On Meeting No One in New York\". This is about doing a very daring thing in middle age, not taking a girl up on it. \"On Meeting No One in New York\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:39:45\nReads \"The Mid-Forties: On Meeting No One in New York\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:41:46\nAnd finally, not finally, there are two more I think. One is a true story, the other is a dream, but they are both nice to end on April 7th, even though there still may be snow on the ground, with a note of spring. This really happened to a friend of mine in Berlin [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64] in 1945 in April, and it's called \"A Comedy in Ruins\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:42:24\nReads \"A Comedy in Ruins\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:45:39\nAnd finally, an all nice sweet, pleasant poem, except for the passage of time which none of us can do anything about, based on a dream. It's called \"Cockaigne: A Dream\".\n \nL.E. Sissman\n00:45:56\nReads \"Cockaigne: A Dream\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\n\nL.E. Sissman\n00:50:38\nThank you.\n\nAudience\n00:50:39\nApplause [cut off].\n\nEND\n00:50:52\n"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Year-Specific Information:\\n\\nSissman’s second book of verse, Pursuit of Honor was published in 1971; he was writing reviews for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"Local Connections:\\n\\nNo direct connections known between L.E. Sissman and Sir George Williams University, however Sissman was an important and influential poet in the 1960’s and 1970’s.\",\"type\":\"General\"},{\"note\":\"Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones\\n\\nAdditional research and edits by Ali Barillaro\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"},{\"note\":\"Reel-to-reel tape>CD>digital file\",\"type\":\"Preservation\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/l-e-sissman-at-sgwu-1972-stanton-hoffman/\",\"citation\":\"“Georgian Happenings”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 14 January 1972. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/american-poets-since-world-war-ii/oclc/489670821&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Mann, James. “L(ouis) E(dward) Sissman”. American Poets Since World War II. Donald J. Greiner (ed). Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol 5. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/dying-an-introduction/oclc/741688820&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Sissman, L.E.. Dying: An Introduction. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/hello-darkness-the-collected-poems-of-lf-sissman/oclc/468986004&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Sissman, L.E.. Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman, Peter Davison (ed.). Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/pursuit-of-honor-poems/oclc/136810&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Sissman, L.E.. Pursuit of Honor. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.\"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/scattered-returns-poems/oclc/59073716&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Sissman, L.E.. Scattered Returns. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969. \"},{\"url\":\"https://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-companion-to-twentieth-century-poetry-in-english/oclc/807465072&referer=brief_results\",\"citation\":\"Symons, Julian. \\\"Sissman, L(ouis) E(dward)\\\". The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Ian Hamilton (ed). Oxford University Press, 1996.\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“L.E. Sissman”. Poets of Cambridge, U.S.A.. Harvard Square Library, 2006.\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Poetry 6: Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Fifth Reading, L.E. Sissman”. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 1972. Found in “The Stephen Morrissey Papers, 1963 - 1998”, McGill McLennan Library, Special Collections and Rare Books, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670548958085120,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.477Z","digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/I0006_11_0110_tape.jpg\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"I0006_11_0110_tape.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-0cAe1GF8xZsc62jpUDXwgvyCd6ZmvSw\",\"title\":\"L.E. 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But also I'd like to take a line from a Sissman poem out of context, \\\"evidently, even desperation leads a charmed life\\\". Ladies and gentleman, L.E. Sissman.\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:00:45\\nThank you. Well let me begin by refuting one of those statements that Stanley just made, Stanton, I'm sorry, just made. I was not a singing vacuum cleaner salesman, that was a canard that was incorporated into my vita by my publisher, who misread a biographical note I wrote. I once worked for a vacuum cleaner company that made its salesmen sing pep songs before they went out to tackle the ladies in the neighbourhood, so we'd get up in the morning and sing all these ridiculous songs and then go out and try to sell vacuum cleaners but the two were not really related, it was just hyping oneself up for the gritty day of trying to sell these poor ladies on a vacuum cleaner. Now I've seen you've kindly reproduced, and incidentally you've been most kind here in Montreal, I've been received royally, more so than any place I've been lately to read poetry and I greatly appreciated, I feel it's kind of a homecoming since my mother is a Canadian, from Ontario [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1904], not Quebec [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q176], but I've been in Montreal [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q34] many times before and I'm very fond of this city and if I finally lose patience with the U. S. and A. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30] as Walt Kelly [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q933892] says in Pogo [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2100584] I'll migrate up here, I feel it an eminently sensible thing to do. So it's nice to have a pleasant reception here. And since you've kindly reproduced one of the poems from a group called \\\"Mouth Organ Tunes: the American Lost-and-Found\\\" on your mimeographed sheet, I thought I'd start off by reading that poem. I'm going to say a few words at the risk of being dull about what each one of these poems I'm going to read is for, what I meant it to mean. This particular one is talking about the well, kind of what James Atlas was talking about in his comment on my second book, this is in my third book, the terminal flatness and greyness of American life, United States life, and the attempts to alleviate this barrenness by all sorts of temporizing accommodations, going to Howard Johnson's [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5919997] on a Sunday, or having a kinky party in New York [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60] to show off one's new paintings or celebrating the death of a genuine antique American and New Englander and looking at the house that he lived in and so on. Anyway the tune is called, the poem is called \\\"Mouth Organ Tunes\\\", and I use the mouth organ as an instrument here to suggest the, well the mouth organ is something that can be played in a band, but is better not, it's a very solitary instrument and to me it always conveys the loneliness of an individual against insurmountable odds. The poem is called \\\"Mouth Organ Tunes: The American Lost-and-Found\\\" and the first section is called, as promised, \\\"In a Ho-Jo's by the River\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:04:20\\nReads \\\"Mouth Organ Tunes: The American Lost-and-Found, part 1: In a Ho-Jo's by the River\\\" from Pursuit of Honor. \\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:10:02\\nLet me contrast that with a poem about Middle America in the best sense. The old Middle America of people who knew their own way and found their own way in the land, and lost their own way in recent years because of encroachments on the land. The poem is called \\\"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\\\" and it's dedicated to the memory of my half-brother, Winfield Shannon, itinerant farm worker, 1909-1969. And it has an epigraph by Basil Bunting [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2886803] which goes \\\"a mason times his mallet to a lark's twitter, ‘til the stone spells the name, naming none, a man abolished\\\".\\n\\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:11:04\\nReads \\\"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\\\",  parts 1-5 [from Pursuit of Honor].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:21:25\\nLet me change to a slightly lighter vein, and read a poem that is a joke, essentially. It's called \\\"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\\\" It's about a man I once roomed with in college, who was an Audobonophile, or whatever the word is, a bird nut and has since become a bird expert. Anyway, this is how the poem goes, it's called \\\"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:22:05\\nReads \\\"The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.\\\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:22:55\\nThat is also a description I should say, of the Least Bittern. This is another poem about being in college...good lord, twenty seven years ago, I can't believe this, 1945, yeah that is damn near twenty seven years ago. It's called \\\"A College Room, Lowell R-34\\\", a building at Harvard [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13371], 1945.\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:23:26\\nReads \\\"A College Room, Lowell R-34, 1945\\\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:25:12\\nAnd there's a footnote to this poem, dedicated to the maid, good lord, this is a long time ago, we had maids in those rooms. It was a very capable lady named Mrs. Circassian. And it's called \\\"Footnote, Mrs. Circassian\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:25:28\\nReads \\\"Footnote, Mrs. Circassian\\\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\\n\\nAudience\\n00:26:07\\nLaughter.\\n\\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:26:10\\nThank you, she was a very nice lady, and deserved a much less ironic tribute than that, she was a home away from home herself. Let's see now, I've got all sorts of possible choices here. Why don't I read a poem about a shattering experience I had which I think maybe all of you may have had at one time or another, going back to a place where you had lived as a kid, and finding how puny it was and how destroyed it was by the passage of time. This is a poem about a place in Detroit where I had lived in the 30's and went back to in 1964 when the poem was written. It's called \\\"East Congress and McDougall Streets, Detroit, May 25\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:27:03\\nReads \\\"East Congress and McDougall Streets, Detroit, May 25\\\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:29:30\\nAnd finally, one more poem from this rue, if I can find it, called \\\"The Museum of Comparative Zoology\\\" and it is about indeed falling in love with an old beat up museum of Comparative Zoology, and finding one's place in the philia.\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:29:56\\nReads \\\"The Museum of Comparative Zoology\\\" [from Dying: An Introduction].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:32:19\\nLet me get onto a poem that is now again a little bit more serious, although not ultimately so, I hope. It's about being very sick at the hospital and knowing one is in good hands. It's called \\\"A Deathplace\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:32:41\\nReads \\\"A Death Place\\\" [from Scattered Returns].\\n \\nUnknown\\n00:35:27\\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\\n\\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:35:28\\nReads “Small Space” [from Scattered Returns].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:36:12\\nNot entirely and seriously...I think this might be time to call a five minute break during which I will smoke a cigarette and get my wind back and then we will proceed. Ok? \\n[Audience applause]. Thank you. I won't take all this junk off, if I do I'll be in serious trouble.\\n\\nUnknown\\n00:36:46\\n[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:36:48\\nThis is a poem about the same thing the last poem was about, called \\\"Getting On\\\", and I'll read only one part of it since that's all I've written so far. It's called \\\"Grave Expectations\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:37:04\\nReads \\\"Getting On: Grave Expectations\\\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:39:15\\nAnd this is a poem that is sort of mysterious and I'm not sure that I understand it either but I'll read it, called, if I can find the end of it, yeah. \\\"On Meeting No One in New York\\\". This is about doing a very daring thing in middle age, not taking a girl up on it. \\\"On Meeting No One in New York\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:39:45\\nReads \\\"The Mid-Forties: On Meeting No One in New York\\\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:41:46\\nAnd finally, not finally, there are two more I think. One is a true story, the other is a dream, but they are both nice to end on April 7th, even though there still may be snow on the ground, with a note of spring. This really happened to a friend of mine in Berlin [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64] in 1945 in April, and it's called \\\"A Comedy in Ruins\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:42:24\\nReads \\\"A Comedy in Ruins\\\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:45:39\\nAnd finally, an all nice sweet, pleasant poem, except for the passage of time which none of us can do anything about, based on a dream. It's called \\\"Cockaigne: A Dream\\\".\\n \\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:45:56\\nReads \\\"Cockaigne: A Dream\\\" [published later in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman].\\n\\nL.E. Sissman\\n00:50:38\\nThank you.\\n\\nAudience\\n00:50:39\\nApplause [cut off].\\n\\nEND\\n00:50:52\\n\",\"notes\":\"L.E. Sissman reads from his first three books, Dying: An Introduction (Little, Brown 1968), Scattered Returns (Little, Brown 1969), and Pursuit of Honor (Little, Brown 1971), as well as poems that were new at the time and published posthumously in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (Little, Brown 1978).\\n\\n00:00- Introduction by Stanton Hoffman [INDEX: Dying: An Introduction, Scattered Ruins,Pursuit of Honor, Poet James Atlas]\\n00:45- Introduction by L.E. Sissman of “In A Ho-Jo’s by the River” [INDEX: Sissman’s      mother from Ontario, Walt Kelly: Pogo, “Mouth Organ Tunes: The American Lost and     Found”, American Life, Howard Johnson Restaurant and Hotel Chain]\\n04:20- Reads “In A Ho-Jo’s by the River”\\n10:02- Introduces “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” [INDEX: Middle America, Winfield     Shannon: Itinerant farm worker, Poet Basil Bunting]\\n11:04- Reads “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”\\n21:25- Introduces “The Bird-man of Cambridge, Mass.” [INDEX: Bird life, Cambridge      Massachusetts]\\n22:05- Reads “The Bird-man of Cambridge, Mass.”\\n22:55- Introduces “A College Room, Lowell R-34” [INDEX: Least Bittern Bird, Harvard 1945]\\n23:26- Reads “A College Room, Lowell R-34”\\n25:12- Introduces “Footnote, Mrs. Circassian”\\n25:28- Reads “Footnote, Mrs. Circassian”\\n26:10- Introduces “East Congress and McDougal Streets, Detroit, May 25”[INDEX: Detroit in 1920’s and 1930’s]\\n29:30- Reads “East Congress and McDougal Streets, Detroit, May 25”\\n29:30- Introduces “The Museum of Comparative Zoology” [INDEX: Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard]\\n29:56- Reads “The Museum of Comparative Zoology”\\n32:19- Introduces “A Death Place”\\n32:41- Reads “A Death Place”\\n35:28- Reads “Small Space”\\n36:48- Introduces “Grave Expectations”\\n37:04- Reads “Grave Expectations”\\n39:15- Introduces “On Meeting No One in New York”\\n39:45- Reads “On Meeting No One in New York”\\n41:46- Introduces “A Comedy in Ruins” [Berlin, 1945]\\n42:24- Reads “A Comedy in Ruins”\\n45:39- Introduces “Cockaigne: A Dream”\\n45:56- Reads “Cockaigne: A Dream”\\n50:52.51- END OF RECORDING\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"Yes\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/l-e-sissman-at-sgwu-1972-stanton-hoffman/\"}]"],"score":3.032301}]