[{"id":"1543","cataloger_name":["Jason,Camlot"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Project Archives"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["\"Small Stones\": a work in poetry, sound, music and typography"],"item_title_source":["Kaie Kellough"],"item_title_note":["Kaie Kellough gave this title and subtitle to the work in email correspondence with Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot"],"item_language":["English, French"],"item_production_context":["Studio recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights_notes":["Permission from the Artist Kaie Kellough to present the sound and video on the Archive of the Present provided by email."],"creator_names":["Camlot, Jason","du Plessis, Klara"],"creator_names_search":["Camlot, Jason","du Plessis, Klara"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Camlot, Jason\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"Jason Camlot commissioned the work with funds from a SSHRC Connections Grant, and was an organizer and moderator of the event.\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"du Plessis, Klara\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"Klara du Plessis was an organizer of the production of the recording. \",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Kellough, Kaie","Sharp, Jason","Lasek, Jace","Lo, Kevin Yuen Kit","Auches, Sarah"],"contributors_names_search":["Kellough, Kaie","Sharp, Jason","Lasek, Jace","Lo, Kevin Yuen Kit","Auches, Sarah"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/68351676\",\"name\":\"Kellough, Kaie\",\"dates\":\"1975-\",\"notes\":\"Kaie Kellough created the text and performed the voices in \\\"Small Stones\\\".\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\",\"Author\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/316991827\",\"name\":\"Sharp, Jason\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"Jason Sharp created the music and played saxophones in the recording of \\\"Small Stones\\\".\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/317017115\",\"name\":\"Lasek, Jace\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Jake Lasek was the studio engineer who recorded and mixed \\\"Small Stones\\\".\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Recordist\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lo, Kevin Yuen Kit\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Kevin Lo was artist and designer of the video that comprises the visual component of \\\"Small Stones\\\".\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"https://sarahauches.work/\",\"name\":\"Auches, Sarah\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Sarah Auches did animation of typography in the video for \\\"Small Stones\\\".\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"performer_name":["Kellough, Kaie","Sharp, Jason","Lo, Kevin Yuen Kit"],"author_name":["Kellough, Kaie"],"Recordist_name":["Lasek, Jace"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-22\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"This was the date that sound and video work was first presented online to an audience at the SpokenWeb \\\"Listening, Sound, Agency\\\" symposium.  The dates when the sound recording session took place are May 7 and 8, 2021.\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.breakglass.ca/\",\"venue\":\"Breakglass Studio\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"7250 Clark #300, Montreal, Quebec\",\"latitude\":\"45.5314035\",\"longitude\":\"-73.6129724\"}]"],"Address":["7250 Clark #300, Montreal, Quebec"],"Venue":["Breakglass Studio"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["This studio-produced sound recording and video presents \"Small Stones\", a work in poetry, sound, music and typography.\n\n<a href=\"https://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/\" target=\"_blank\">Read Kaie Kellough's notes on creation of \"Small Stones\" on the SpokenWebLog (SWB)</a>"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1158943472\",\"citation\":\"Kellough, Kaie.  Magnetic Equator. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2019.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549136343040,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.772Z","digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/_/vid/small-stones.mp4\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"small-stones.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"This is the slightly compressed file version of the video to be used for presentation.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"Yes\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvYtadLE6CxLAihdEhMZNTDmrVDRZA5-/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 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Jason Sharp recording \\\"Small Stones\\\" at Breakglass Studio, Montréal, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"Yes\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/15bnbygATNZF4h5aUDQHXQtjxhRAxcivS/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-3.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Jason Sharp playing saxophone with amps in Breakglass Studios.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Jason Sharp playing saxophone with amps in Breakglass Studios, Montréal, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j55XpfH3MTvQPPHwSHjCs2Bada-Dwm0h/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-9.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Jace Lasek adjusting amps in Breakglass Studios.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"Jace Lasek adjusting amps in Breakglass Studios.\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Jace Lasek adjusting amps in Breakglass Studios, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/132H1l6x7jRYu6Ia4OSMqAfH70i-l6J9L/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-32.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Kaie Kellough lyrics on music stand.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"\\\"Small Stones\\\" printed text on music stand in Breakglass studios, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/13j9VQzE7U2cQT_P_exvTbChBJq8nkii5/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-1.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Kaie Kellough and Jason Sharp recording in Breakglass Studios.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"Kaie Kellough and Jason Sharp recording in Breakglass Studios.\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Kaie Kellough and Jason Sharp recording face to face in Breakglass Studios, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EqvBNh1hE1JutoKd4Wou3Z2xuzKecECt/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-44.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Jason Sharp playing saxophone.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"Jason Sharp recording baritone saxophone.\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Jason Sharp recording baritone saxophone in Breakglass Studios, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P4Wc6Fsx965O43rlM1-U949fj0_9emD5/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-43.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Kaie Kellough in vocal booth, Breakglass Studios.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"Kaie Kellough in vocal booth, Breakglass Studios.\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Kaie Kellough in vocal booth at Breakglass Studios during recording session of \\\"Small Stones\\\", 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OczJhz_b4WIN8-jWBFKr4gcqvCtXFtVw/view?usp=sharing\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1LKo90_nSDzvERZfw2ZbWFfrScnZzyues\",\"filename\":\"Ali Barillaro-Small Stones 20201-05-07-54.jpg\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"Kaigh Kellough, Jason Sharp and Jace Lasek, control room, Breakglass Studios.\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"Kaigh Kellough, Jason Sharp and Jace Lasek, control room at Breakglass Studios.\",\"credit\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"caption\":\"Kaigh Kellough and Jason Sharp watch Jace Lasek prepare rough mix of \\\"Small Stones\\\" in the control room, Breakglass Studios, Montréal, 7 May 2021.\",\"content_type\":\"Photograph\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/_/vid/small-stones-hq.mp4\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"small-stones-hq.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"This is the original, uncompressed version of the AV file.\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"No\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9281","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E4, Drum Codes [Part 1]: The Language of Talking Drums, 11 January 2021, Miya and Luyk"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/3146217844209142580\",\"name\":\"Sean Luyk\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0d03515b-c5f3-4c36-a680-33aa829dd3b1/audio/6facdb5e-1ccf-45ec-a136-c878d15c7429/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,192,736 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-11\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nBabalọla, Adeboye. “Yoruba Literature.” Literatures in African Languages, edited by B. W. Andrzejewski, S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 157–189.\\n\\nFinnegan, Ruth. “17. Drum Language and Literature”. Oral Literature in Africa. By Finnegan. Open Book Publishers, 2012, 467-484. Web. <http://books.openedition.org/obp/1206>.\\n\\nNgom, Fallou, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and Mustapha Hashim Kurfi. “The social and commercial life of African Ajami” Africa at LSE Blog, 1 Oct. 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/10/01/social-commercial-african-ajami-culture/.\\n\\nOwomoyela, Oyekan. The Columbia guide to West African literature in English since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. This is How We Disappear. Write Bloody North, 2019.\\n\\nStrong, Krystal. “The Rise and Suppression of #EndSARS.” Harpers Bazaar, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a34485605/what-is-endsars/.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. Edwardsville by Heart. Wisdom’s Bottom Press, 2019.\\n\\nVillepastour, Amanda. Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nAdédòkun, Olálékan. [various tracks].\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “My Mother’s Music.” Mother Tongue, Titilope Sonuga, 2013.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “This is How We Disappear – Titilope Sonuga.” YouTube, uploaded by Titilope Sonuga, 21 August 2017, https://youtu.be/JbLwsLYrjzw.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. “Ọláolúwa Òní reads “Being Yorùbá.” SoundCloud, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/kola-tubosun/olaoluwa-oni-reads-being-yoruba.\\n\\nSound Effects:\\n\\nBBC News. “End Sars protests: People ‘shot dead’ in Lagos, Nigeria – BBC News.” YouTube, 21 October 2020, https://youtu.be/Il5qL7YbawY.\\n\\nBloomberg Quicktake: Now. “Shots Fired in Lagos Amid #EndSARS Protests in Nigeria.” YouTube, 21 October, 2020, https://youtu.be/hu9FzU2TDvQ.\\n\\nThe Dinizulu Archives. “Asante Ivory Trumpets – Ancient Akan Music – Pt 1.” YouTube, 23 March 2009, https://youtu.be/P3XxEefvpr8.\\n\\nfelix.blume. “Dugout On The Niger River In Mali SOUND Effect.” Freesound, 20 January 2013, https://freesound.org/s/174933/.\\n\\nFilmOneNG. “Living in Bondage Trailer 1.” YouTube, 18 October, 2019, https://youtu.be/bQ9pUsXFqoA. \\n\\nLily Pope TV. “MAIN MARKET ONITSHA|| COME WITH ME.” YouTube, 9 July 2019, https://youtu.be/DJ3NyfV7tgs.\\n\\n“Nigerian Crowds – Lagos, native quarter with traffic & crowd atmosphere.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07015037.\\n\\n“Outdoor Clock – Church clock striking, 6 o’clock. (All Saints Church).” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07002268.\\n\\nPasadena Conservatory of Music. “African Roots, African American Fruits: A Musical Journey (Concert Highlights).” Vimeo, 8 March, 2016, https://vimeo.com/158205356.\\n\\nPatrickibeh. “Nigerian Young girls playing ‘Hand-clap’ game.” Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nigerian_Young_girls_playing_%27Hand-clap%27_game.webm.\\n\\nProtests.media. “Buhari Must Go Protest in Lagos, 17th of October 2020.” Vimeo, 27 October, 2020, https://vimeo.com/469395263.\\n\\nRueda, Manuel. “Oaxaca whistle language.” Vimeo, 2004, https://vimeo.com/77702616.\\n\\nMuir, Stephen. “City Street Winter Day – Toronto – Bay St And Cumberland St.” Dreaming Monkey Inc.“Wamba Indigenous Music – Repetitive tune using a two tone communication whistle(vocal).” Recorded by John Watkin. BBC Sound Effects, 31 March 1996, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU05003080.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549485518848,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For hundreds of years, the Yorùbá people of West African have used “talking drums” to send messages across great distances. West African languages are highly musical, full of rising and falling tones. The pitch of talking drums can be adjusted to mimic these tones, so drummers can “speak” to one another. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns, and in the process, poeticizes it. \n\nThis two-part podcast series explores talking drums as an art, a technology, and an important tool for speaking truth to power. In part one, poets, musicians, linguists and educators share their experiences of this fascinating musical instrument and its role in the fight to preserve local West African languages. In part two, airing next season, we sit down with a master drummer and learn more about how drums function as information compression tools.\n\n00:18\tTheme music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Here on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we have a fascination with language that goes beyond the novel or the codex and into the many texts and technologies that connect us through sound. This podcast itself is a way of connecting, of telling stories and building a community of literature lovers and sound fanatics across the country and around the globe. But there are many other sonic communication technologies beyond podcasts, radio, or even the humble telephone. And some are much older. For hundreds of years the Yorùbá people of West Africa have used “talking drums” to send messages and tell stories. The pitch of talking drums mimics the rising and falling tones of West African languages, allowing drummers to “speak”. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns and in the process turns them into poetic and political expression. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast produced by University of Alberta researchers, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk, we will hear from poets, musicians, linguists, and educators, as they reflect on the power and influence of this musical instrument, communication technology, and important symbol for West African cultures. The story of the talking drum connects to the story of written and spoken West African languages and the struggle to preserve them. This episode is part one in a two-part series about the talking drum. Here are Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk with Drum Codes [Part One]: The Language of Talking Drums. [Feature Audio Opens with Talking Drum Music]\n \n\n02:29\tChelsea Miya:\tLong before text messages, West African communities used drums to send messages from village to village. I am Chelsea Miya.\n \n\n02:38\tSean Luyk:\tAnd I’m Sean Luyk.\n \n\n02:41\tChelsea Miya:\tIn this episode, we consider the talking drum in the context of the struggle to preserve West African languages, and as a way to speak truth to power and protest oppression.\n \n\n02:55\tWisdom Agorde:\t[Drumming] Drumming for us goes beyond entertainment.\n \n\n02:59\tSean Luyk:\tWisdom Agorde is co-director of the University of Alberta’s West African music ensemble. [Drumming ends]\n \n\n03:04\tWisdom Agorde:\tDrumming brings us together for festivals, storytelling, funerals, maybe dedications and weddings and all of that. But beyond that, the drama, the divine drama connects to the ancestral world, which is the spirit world. And they help our priests and priestesses to get into trance and get information from the spiritual world, which is then communicated back to the living. So the drum could be seen as the bridge between the living and the dead.\n \n\n03:43\tSean Luyk:\tIn West Africa, there is a strong overlap between music and language. African languages, like Yorùbá, are highly musical. The Yorùbá language has three tones:low, mid, and high. Solfege symbols, names for musical notes, are used to teach these tones. Do. Re. Mi. The straps on a talking drum can be adjusted to mimic these tones and communicate messages. [Begin Music: Drumming] Listen to master drummer, Peter, one of our featured guests in episode two in the series, demonstrate the tones on his drum. [End Music: Drumming].\n \n\n04:18\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tSo this drum has ability to mimic my voice. It can speak. It can say your name. If I want to say your name as Chelsea, Chelsea Miya, I can do that. [Drumming] Yes. So look. [Drumming].\n \n\n04:36\tSean Luyk:\tSpeech surrogates are instruments that mimic the human voice so that players can speak to one another. The talking drum is just one example. Some communities also have traditions of using flutes [Sound Effect: Flute], trumpets [Sound Effect: Trumpet] and whistles [Sound Effect: Whistles] to communicate.\n \n\n04:52\tWisdom Agorde:\tYou know, in those days we didn’t have factories and industries. We didn’t have many cars. So the air was not polluted that much. So the talking drum is going to, is able to travel several kilometers. So, if there is a problem at home, let’s say there is fire at home. If the king wants people to run back home, because there was a problem, he uses the talking drum to call all the people to come back. The talking drum also announces if there is a death in the community. Once you hear the tone of it and the language in it, you know exactly that an elderly person had passed away. And if you know the appellation of that person, you will understand immediately who died.\n \n\n05:48\tWisdom Agorde:\tWhen I was in Ghana, I was quite young when my grandfather died and they were playing the royal drums in front of the family house. Normally when a royal dies, the royal drums will come out and we’ll play to send off that person to the land of the ancestors. So, the funeral started on Friday. So that Friday afternoon, we were preparing to bring the body from the morgue. And I was passing by and they were playing the royal drums [Begin Music: Drumming] and I had no clue. It just a nice sounding drum to me. And I know the drums are being played to honour my grandfather. So one of the elders called me [End Music: Drumming] and asked me my name. [Begin Music: Singing] And like, “is that not your grandfather whose funeral we’re having?” I said, “yes.” And he said, “and you were passing and they called you and you didn’t respond!?” [End Music: Singing].\n \n\n06:55\tWisdom Agorde:\tAt that time I was in the university. I had no clue. City boy doesn’t understand nothing. Apparently they were calling the family name on the drum. Man, I’m supposed to acknowledge that, but because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t respond as I should. So I was just walking by. I had no clue.\n \n\n07:20\tSean Luyk:\tHow are you supposed to respond?\n \n\n07:22\tWisdom Agorde:\tMost often you raise your hand. There are times also when, if you can dance, you will respond to the call through dance.\n \n\n07:32\tSean Luyk:\tOne time, Wisdom happened to see across a funeral procession for an important local chief. [Audio Recording: Crowd Chatter and Noise] He remembers watching the royal drummers on their way to the palace and realizing that they were telling the story of the chief’s life.\n \n\n07:44\tWisdom Agorde:\tI was in front of the palace, that there was a huge funeral. The funeral lasted for more than a week. And every day of the week specific people from different parts of the country came to pay homage to the dead chief. And this particular day I was there, the chiefs arrived from another region and they were in a procession walking to the palace to go pay homage to the body of the dead chief that was lying in state. And whilst they were passing, I realized that when they reach the front of the royal drums, the language of the drum changes. And immediately the language changes the visiting chief or king responds through different kinds of dances. And it was so beautiful. I don’t know what the drums were telling them, but definitely be understood what the drum was saying, and the drummer knows exactly who was arriving and we’ll call that person in name. The royal drummer is also a historian. So the royal drummer wasn’t just calling them. He was also telling history. What that person has done, what their ancestors have done, and how they have survived through the years. I am very sure that the divine drama might have learnt all the drum language from all the visiting chiefs and kings in order to appropriately acknowledge them. Unfortunately we the younger generation don’t know many of those songs right now. And there is that fear that some of these things are lost because during that funeral I saw certain performances I’ve never seen before.\n \n\n10:01\tSean Luyk:\t[Music Begins: Instrumental Drumming] Different communities have their own unique talking drum traditions, their own speaking styles interwoven with sayings and proverbs that have been passed down through the generations. The richness of the talking drum is reflected in the incredible language diversity of West Africa as a whole.\n \n\n10:17\tTunde Adegbola:\tMy name is Tunde Adegbola. I’m a research scientist. [Music Ends: Instrumental Drumming] I work in human language technology with emphasis on speech technologies. Also looking at the implications of speech surrogacy, which is the use of devices other than the human speech apertures, such as drums, whistles, and such to communicate.\n \n\n10:46\tSean Luyk:\tCan you tell us a bit about the history of West Africa and what made it possible for so many different languages to coexist and thrive in the same region?\n \n\n10:54\tTunde Adegbola:\tClose to one third of the 7,000-odd languages in the world are spoken in Africa. And West Africa seems to be an area where a lot of these languages are spoken. Some investigators have recognized up to about 512 various languages spoken in Nigeria. My hunch is that the Niger River [Sound Effect: Water Flowing], which deposits into the Atlantic Ocean in the Niger Delta, is a natural attraction of various peoples in West Africa or in Africa to congregate around and expand out of the Niger Delta, thereby bringing probably various languages that now have to co-exist and walk together. [Sound Effect: Crowd Bustling].\n \n\n11:50\tSean Luyk:\tNigeria is one of the most multilingual countries in the world, but over half of its languages are in danger of disappearing. Tunde is the founder of Alt-i, the African Languages Technology Initiative. His organization is searching for technological solutions to the language crisis. As he explains, colonialism fundamentally transformed West African languages chiefly through the introduction of written forms of communication.\n \n\n12:22\tTunde Adegbola:\tMost, if not all, West African languages had strong European influence in their writing systems. In languages like Hausa, for example, which is probably the second-widest spoken language in Africa, had long histories of exposure to Arabic literature. So there is a tradition of writing Hausa in Arabic script, popularity referred to as the Adjami script. [Sound Effect: Writing].\n \n\n12:59\tSean Luyk:\tAjami is an Arabic script for writing African languages and is about 500 years old. So, although there is an assumption that African cultures are purely oral cultures, written Yorùbá has actually existed for quite some time. It is true, however, that Yorùbá literature only really started to take off in the mid 19th century with the arrival of missionaries. [Sound Effect: Church Bells].\n \n\n13:26\tTunde Adegbola:\tThe coming of Europeans, particularly European missionaries, who saw a great level of importance in developing a literate people, because they were bringing a religion of the book to a people that were either oral societies or as Walter Ong would put it, a society with a high “oral residue”. So there was this need to develop literacy.\n \n\n14:05\tSean Luyk:\tAnd so, Yorùbá writing was reinvented once more, this time using the Latin alphabet. But the characters weren’t the only difference. The Yorùbá vocabulary itself was transformed to accommodate new ideas.\n \n\n14:18\tTunde Adegbola:\tI know that effect on the language and other various West African languages, is the fact that Christianity came in with new ideas. Ideas that were not embedded in the culture. So there was a need to develop words for them. And that also had great effect on the languages. The Yorùbá language that I speak, for example, does not take much account of gender. In the language you wouldn’t have such gender pronouns like he and her, uncles and aunties, nieces and nephews. Apart from fathers and mothers, everybody else is pretty the same. But with the advent of Christianity words for a brother in the fellowship, words for sister in the fellowship, some ideas came and was like [Yorùbá phrase] and [Yorùbá phrase] came into the language.\n \n\n15:35\tSean Luyk:\tSo, on the one hand, the writing system, the Latin alphabet reinforced Christian colonial ideas. But, on the other hand with the advent of writing also came a new generation of Nigerian authors.\n \n\n15:56\tAudio Recording:\tStreet Scene, People Speaking]\n \n\n15:56\tSean Luyk:\tThese are sounds from Onitsha, port city on the Niger River. Today, Onitsha is most famous for being the home of Nigerian cinema, nicknamed Nollywood.\n \n\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Film Clip:\tIf we go down, we go down.\n \n\n16:11\tSean Luyk:\tBut it’s also the birthplace of Nigerian print culture.\n \n\n16:15\tTunde Adegbola:\tImmediately after the European missionaries developed literacy, there was great enthusiasm in writing and lots of Yorùbá people try to write. And many printing presses were established in Ìbàdàn, the capital of Yorùbáland. And you saw a lot of printing presses rising up in small shacks. It was like a Gutenberg revolution in Yorùbáland at that time. And these also permeated the whole country seeping into other areas producing what was known as the Onitsha market literature.\n \n\n17:02\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] In the 1940s to 1960s, Onitsha was the home of the largest outdoor market in West Africa. Market stalls were packed with books and pamphlets all printed on hand presses. This was a period of intense creativity and of pride in one’s local culture. For the first time Nigerian authors were writing novels in Yorùbá and winning huge acclaim.\n \n\n17:24\tTunde Adegbola:\tBut somewhere along the line, [End Music: Instrumental] this excitement in writing in Yorùbá seems to be petering out, and less and less of Yorùbá literature is published these days. People tend to think, they see English as the language of administration, the language of officialdom, the language of education, the language of opportunity. And for that reason, people put lots and lots of efforts into getting their children to speak English, to the detriment of the Yorùbá language.\n \n\n18:07\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Singing] Speaking Yorùbá, instead of English came with consequences.\n \n\n18:11\tTunde Adegbola:\tI was punished throughout my young age for speaking Yorùbá in school. [End Music: Singing] My good fortune is that my parents were educators and they knew better. My mother taught in a teacher training college and students from the teacher training college would come for teaching practice in our school. My mother would come to supervise them and would speak Yorùbá to me when she met me along the path and the school. And everybody’s expressed surprise that Tunde’s mother who is the teacher of teachers is disobeying the law of not speaking Yorùbá. There was a time in Nigeria when institutions felt English is the way of development, English is the way of modernity, English is the way of opportunities. There was a time that there was a slogan in the educational system and the slogan was “fail in English, fail in all.” So if you took five papers, mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, and did very well in all this, if you failed in English, then you had to repeat the whole class because you failed in English. And this type of retrogressive thinking continues to pervade the educational system.\n \n\n19:48\tChelsea Miya:\t[Begin Music: Drumming and Singing] Yorùbá and other West African languages are continually evolving. The diaspora has been particularly influential. [End Music: Drumming and Singing].\n \n\n19:57\tTitilope Sonuga:\tThere’s always been this balancing that I’ve done between the English language and Yorùbá and recognizing that Yorùbá was acceptable in some spaces. Whereas it wasn’t in others.\n \n\n20:08\tChelsea Miya:\tTitilope Sonuga is a spoken word poet and performer based in Edmonton, Alberta. As she explains, her approach to writing and performing poetry is informed by her Nigerian heritage and her interest in the politics of language.\n \n\n20:25\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, in a household where we spoke predominantly English. Yorùbá, I would say, is a gift that my grandmother gave me. So my grandma was very particular about us speaking Yorùbá. And even though she spoke English, she always pretended like she couldn’t really understand what you were saying if you tried to speak English with her. So there was a way in which like Yorùbá was like the default language and my grandmother’s house. As a child, I regret to say, we were raised to kind of view our mother tongue, our native languages, as inferior to this other, this English language. Right. So there was a sense in which English was the official language that you spoke at school when you were trying to be proper and in certain spaces, the better your English was the more respected. So Yorùbá became relegated to the space of what you spoke at home behind closed doors or with family, but it was kind of an informal language.\n \n\n21:28\tTitilope Sonuga:\tIt took years for me to understand that as a kind of shaming [Audio Recording: Street Scene?] Then we moved to Canada, Yorùbá then became this bridge. It was the way in which we could communicate in public spaces without being understood by other people. It kind of became a refuge as well. So, I would say that my relationship to the language, this shuffling between English and mother tongue has been sort of the balance of my life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognize what a gift it was that my grandmother gave me. And what a connection it is to my roots and to who I am. I don’t write or create arts in Yorùbá, but I definitely feel like there’s a sensibility of how the language works that follows me. You know, these proverbs and dual meanings and things like that, that I carry. Even in my writing in English, I think Yorùbá is as much a part of me as anything else. And so it kind of, it comes out in my work. Always.\n \n\n22:33\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “My Mother’s Music”:\tMy mother sang when I was born, she welcomed me head first into melody. She chanted like a talking drum. She caught Godspell in gospel. And then she named me Titilope. An eternal love song to her creator.\n \n\n22:51\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI remember even as a kid, just being fascinated by the instrument and the way that it sounds. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched or listened to it being played. It sounds like a voice. Like that’s why it’s called the talking drum. Is that like, if you’re still and listen, there is a language that is happening there that is very similar to what it sounds like to tell a story, to speak out loud. I think to do it well, to do it beautifully is to connect to this ancient oral tradition that Nigeria is so rich with, that all of Africa really is so rich with. [Music Start: Instrumental] The proverbs, the prose, the sayings, the hidden messages, this drum kind of encompasses all of that. Music has been such a big and important part of my creating life. I don’t know a poem that I’ve written that wasn’t written to something playing in the background somewhere, or a song that I had heard that inspires something.\n \n\n23:58\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThis is how we disappear. We fall backwards into our mother’s mouths. Become them. Become the only stories we have ever been told. Stories about women who stay. Women who endure. Women who offer their bodies into the belly of the beast to protect their children. This is how we go missing. We tumble into… [Music End: Instrumental]\n \n\n24:26\tChelsea Miya:\tCan I ask about “This is How We Disappear”? So like a lot of your earlier work, I think it also has a really powerful, sonic or oral quality, but of a really different kind. How does sound or absence of sound factor in this work?\n \n\n24:43\tTitilope Sonuga:\tWell, that’s an interesting thing. I remember in an earlier edit of the collection, I had a line in there comparing the disappearance of the Chibok girls to like a tree falling in a forest. You know, if a girl disappears and nobody’s there to hear her, did she actually make a sound? The book is about disappearances. It’s about silences really, and silencing. But it is also about celebration and remaking ourselves, the ways that women do that, the world over. I would say when I started working on the manuscript itself, I was very heavily pregnant and had just had a baby. And a lot of those poems were written in the twilight hours. I remember listening to a lot of gospel and spiritual music. Somebody said recently to me about how the book feels like it has a lot of ghosts in it. And it definitely feels like a bit of a haunting. It’s interesting that you talk about silences and sound because there was a lot of both, there was these quiet moments in the world. There was me revisiting the ghost of these women who had disappeared the world over, but also there was this hum of this spiritual [Music Begins: Instrumental] sort of awakening that was happening for me as a new mother.\n \n\n26:13\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThese women who reinvented joy. Who snapped back our broken bones to the rhythm of a survival song, a song about the audacity of living and loving anyway. We became a whole new kind of creature. Something fearless and fierce. Something bold enough to call down even lightning and dare it to touch us. [Audience Cheering].\n \n\n26:36\tTitilope Sonuga:\tPerformance for me was never an option. It was just like, this is what I know. This is who I am. [Music Ends: Instrumental].,and not just performance to read the poems out loud, but performance that connects to a musicality that is grounded in the talking drum that is grounded in Yorùbá language, and Yorùbá songs, and Yorùbá names and naming. The first poets I knew were these people on the drums singing [unknown word] at weddings. Telling you of your entire lineage, the names and the names and the names of your father’s father, your mother’s mother. These people were my first experience of memorized poetry. They’re people who know, who at a glance can tell you who you are. And they know this stuff [Music Begins: Drumming] in their hearts and minds. They don’t need a page or a paper to tell them.\n \n\n27:40\tChelsea Miya:\tThe talking drum is in some ways inherently poetic. This is because of its unique grammar, which creates room for ambiguity. [Music Ends: Drumming].\n \n\n27:49\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún: :\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowels.\n \n\n27:58\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a linguist, poet, and cultural activist. [Audio Recording: Engine Revving] He recently worked with Google to create the Nigerian English version of Siri.\n \n\n28:07\tAudio Recording, Siri:\tNavigating to Hartfield.\n \n\n28:11\tChelsea Miya:\tBut before that, he was a language teacher. He won a Fulbright scholarship to attend grad school at Southern Illinois University in a small town called Edwardsville. While there, he taught Yorùbá to American students and wrote poetry about his experiences. This is a reading of his poem “Being Yorùbá”.\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Oláolúwa Òní, “Being Yorùba”:\tHow do you teach a state of being? You don’t. You teach instead tone. Do-Re-Mi. Like music on the tongue.\n \n\n28:43\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá explains how the talking drum strips away everything except for the tones, which means that the messages sent by the drummers can be interpreted many different ways.\n \n\n28:54\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowel. And tone is realized basically on the pitch level, on the vowel. So when it would like “igba’, is different from “igba” is different from “igba” is different from “igba”. These are different words. You have got “an egg”, you have “200”, you have “time”, you have “Calabash”. All of those things spelled the same way: I-G-B-A. Except for the tone that you put on it when you speak. So it makes Yorùbá very interesting, especially for those who are trying to learn it for the first time. In English, when you say “go”, it’s still go when you say “go” or “go” or “go” the only difference is when it comes at the end of a question. But in Yorùbá, it’s not just the sentence itself that it changes. It changes the character of the word itself. When you’re playing and talking drum it’s about the same.If I say “igba” on the drum, I can make the same sound, “Re. Me.” I mean, Yorùbá tones — Do. Re. Me. is the same three level tones as you have in music. Which makes [Music Begins: Drumming and Singing] the language sound very musical when you speak it. But what is fascinating, really, especially what makes the language more amenable to poetry [Music Ends: Drumming and Singing] and literary expression, is the idea that you’ve got a talking drum, you can’t see the words that is being said. You are playing a drum and all you have is a tone. And the person listening to it has to figure out from just the tone, what kind of words you’re trying to say. If I say “uh-uh” with a drum, I could be saying “igba”, I could be saying “ohwa” I could be saying “ideh”, a number of different things. But when you put that then in a sentence, or in a song, or in tune, then you leave like so many different possibilities that can happen. And in traditional Yorùbá communities, this has either been a cause of conflict, it has caused wars, or a source of entertainment for those who understand it, consternation for those who don’t.\n \n\n31:11\tChelsea Miya:\tThat’s interesting. So the drummer could be praising someone or complimenting them or insulting them, I guess it will depend on the context.\n \n\n31:21\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tIndeed. There is an example, actually, a famous example, in the 60s, I believe, when the radio Nigeria, the Nigerian Broadcasting Service started they were looking for a signature tune to play before the program starts in the morning. And it went like this, “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-deh-dum”. And it meant, “this is the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.” But that was the first time an English expression was played with a drum. So the people who are listening to the show, in the radio every morning, many of them literate in the drum culture, couldn’t figure out what he was saying, because it was not a recognizable tune and pattern. So they decided to make up their own interpretations for it. Some people said, it’s saying [Yorùbá phrase], which means “when the Yorùbá dies, who is next in line.” Or something like [Yorùbá phrase] like “your child is little by little becoming criminal”. And there were several interpretations people just made up. Some of them pleasant, some of the funny, some of them just plain insulting. And it caused a lot of consternation among the people, especially people who were in charge of the radio, who were from a different culture of upper class elites who didn’t care about or know about the drum culture, or the colonialists who were just there to have a radio that people can use to communicate. So that’s how sometimes just a simple piece of expression can have different interpretations just because you’re not sensitive or familiar with how it’s used in society,\n \n\n32:56\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Tunde explains, historically the talking drum has also functioned as a powerful tool of political expression. Because of the ambiguity of the messages, the drummers could use their music to critique leadership and speak truth to power.\n \n\n33:12\tTunde Adegbola:\tThere are lots of narratives around the talking drum. There’s a particular saying, [Yorùbá phrase], “that it is only the drummer that can say for sure what he is using his powerful drum drumstick to see.” There are lots and lots and lots of accounts in history where talking drummers have saved whole communities from unfair leadership, wicked leadership, by naming and shaming negative acts in society to the extent that as such people have had to stop what they were doing, because they could not punish the drummer because they had this facility for plausible deniability. And yet everybody knew that the leadership was being blamed for misbehaving.\n \n\n34:12\tAudio Recording, BBC News:\tNigeria’s president has called for calm and understanding after protests against police brutality turned violent on Tuesday evening, with soldiers reportedly opening fire on demonstrators in the country’s biggest city, Lagos.\n \n\n34:27\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá is well familiar with the role of art and poetry in exposing corruption and facilitating political change. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, close to where the #EndSAR’s protest took place. [Sound Effect: Crowd Protesting and Chanting] For months, young Nigerians [Sound Effect: Gun Shots] have gathered by the thousands in these city streets to protest against the notoriously corrupt and brutal police force known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad or SARS.\n \n\n34:58\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tSince September and since, especially this #EndSARS movement, the disappointments and outrage I feel about how the government reacted to the crisis has spurred me in a new direction, and I’ve been writing a couple of forms about that. I feel my despair, my hope, my aspiration. There was one that I wrote in the midst of anger at looking at the flag of the Nigerian nation drenched in blood. It was one of the symbols of the 20th, the outcomes of 20th of October when soldiers went [inaudible]. Nonviolent protestors were gathered at night and opened fire. Somebody bled on the, on the national flag and national flag is green, white, green, otherwise. And the white part was filled with blood and many people have changed their Twitter profile pictures to that image. So I wrote a poem called a “Blood Spangled Banner.” ‘In the white of a flag, the bleeding soul of the moment wept blood near the gaping toll/ Ghosts of the nation’s past haunts in the cries their bodies made in that horrid night, singing the words written to mock their hope/ On the streets, the marauders mark the ground with the cases of the killing rounds /picked up horridly to mask the proof that the promises of vain that leaders make/ that the land is still a butcher’s slab.’\n \n\n36:33\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá’s passion for advocating for local languages, including drum languages, is in a way a part of the same struggle. Much like the #endSARS protestors, he’s fighting for Nigeria to find its own voice.\n \n\n36:47\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tPeople don’t see this kind of literacy as equally as important as writing literacy or reading literacy. But it is a kind of literacy. When people mentioned, for instance, somebody who speaks only Yorùbá or writes in only Yorùbá is an illiterate, we forget that many of those people can actually learn, can actually understand and decode drum patterns, et cetera. So, I’m interested in how this kind of engines, a kind of civilization, survives along with modern ones as a way of moving the culture forward into the future. There are probably fewer people today who know how to read or listen to the drum as the way in the past, but I’m hoping that the medium of technology keeps them relevant and important for the next generation. [Music Begins: Drumming]\n \n\n37:45\tChelsea Miya:\tIn part two of this episode, airing next season, we’ll look more closely at how the talking drum functions as not just an art, but as technology.\n \n\n37:55\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tWhat makes a master drummer? It has to do with your years of experience, the ability to lead, and your impact on other people’s lives and society.\n \n\n38:06\tChelsea Miya:\tWe’ll also meet a talking drum master and learn about the art of drum making. [Music Ends: Drumming]\n \n\n38:23\tHannah McGregor:\t[Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A big thank you to Titilope Sonuga, Wisdom Agorde, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, and Tunde Adegbola for their generous contributions. And a special thank you to master drummer. Peter Olálékan Adédòkun who provided music for the episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spoken web.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We will see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9282","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E5, Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies, 1 February 2021, Camlot and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ff305f81-4e58-468c-a0f1-927c9318155b/audio/1b004284-35e0-4c38-b489-61f16a8c2b3d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,768,142 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-02-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Alexandra Sweny,  “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s Environments Series”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:  Original recordings of Montreal by Alexandra Sweny.\\n\\nSara Adams,  “Henry Mayhew and Victorian London”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: “Victorian Street.” British Library, Sounds, Sound Effects. Collection: Period Backgrounds.  Editor, Benet Bergonzi.  Published, 1994.\\n\\nAubrey Grant,  “Poe’s Impossible Sound”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.\\n\\nAndrew Whiteman,  “Bronze lance heads”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:\\n\\n—“Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)\\n\\n—“Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.\\n\\n— Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.\\n\\nReferences:\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun.  The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation.  Indiana University, 2007.\\n\\nHoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.\\n\\nKittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.\\n\\nKrause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.\\n\\nPeter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.\\n\\nMayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.\\n\\nPicker, John.  Victorian Soundscapes.  Oxford University Press, 2003.\\n\\nPoe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan.  Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.\\n\\nSiegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.  Fordham UP, 2015.\\n\\nStoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.  New York University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTeibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.\\n\\nWorld Soundscape Project – Sonic Research Studio – Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.\\n\\nAdditional Sound Clips:\\n\\nCamlot, Jason.  Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.\\n\\n“A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.\\n\\n“Big Ben clock tower of Westminster – striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o’clock” (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.\\n\\nbpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\nHumanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.\\n\\nNew, David, and R. Murray Schafer, “Listen.” National Film Board of Canada, 2009. https://www.nfb.ca/film/listen/\\n\\n“Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12” disc, 1916.\\n\\nNew, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.\\n\\nsbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.\\n\\nSpliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\n“Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.\\n\\n“The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.\\n\\nUdall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.\\n\\nWesterkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549488664576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does “listening” mean within the context of the literary classroom?\nIn this episode we join Director of the SpokenWeb Network and Professor at Concordia University – Jason Camlot – in conversation with SpokenWeb podcast supervising producer and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate – Stacey Copeland – to explore how sound studies is being taken up in the literary classroom. Together we listen back to select “Cylinder Talk” sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar – Literary Listening as Cultural Technique – the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Ends]\n00:00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. On the SpokenWeb Podcast, we talk a lot about different ways that sound and literature collide, whether that collision takes place in the SpokenWeb archives or through research symposiums, poetry, readings, and literary events. While past episodes have brought us into the university setting through interviews with professors and explorations of student work in the SpokenWeb network, we have yet to really explore how sound and literature collide in the classroom. Whether that’s high school, university, or elsewhere, what are the different ways that sound is being taken up as a learning tool in the literary community? We could even say we’re in a classroom of sorts together [Sound Effect: Classroom Chatter] here and now listening and learning in dialogue through the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n00:01:33\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Bell Ringing] And it sounds like class is about to begin. In this episode, we join director of the SpokenWeb network and professor at Concordia university, Jason Camlot in conversation with SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate, Stacey Copeland in exploring sound and listening in the literary classroom. Together, we’ll listen back to select “cylinder talks” created by Concordia graduate students and unpack the experiences, ideas, and discussions sparked by the production and study of sound across disciplines. A three-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s graduate course, Literary Listening as Cultural Technique, the cylinder talk draws on a rich history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with the study of literature. Here are Stacey Copeland and Jason Camlot with Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies. [Theme Music].\n \n\n00:02:31\tJason Camlot:\tHey Stacey.\n \n\n00:02:31\tStacey Copeland:\tHello. How are you?\n \n\n00:02:36\tJason Camlot:\tGood. Sorry about that. I was in the wrong room.\n \n\n00:02:40\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, that’s what happens when we have probably five or six different links we’ve used now for the podcast.\n \n\n00:02:47\tJason Camlot:\tExactly.\n \n\n00:02:47\tStacey Copeland:\tAll right, you want to get started? [Begin Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tLet’s go for it.\n \n\n00:02:56\tStacey Copeland:\tPodcast project manager, Stacey Copeland here. I’m joined In our podcast classroom of sorts, AKA Zoom video room, by Jason Camlot, director of the SpokenWeb research network, and likely a familiar voice if you listen to season one of the podcast. So being a student, myself, teacher, a sound scholar, I’m quite interested in the different ways that audio media production is being taken up as a learning tool across different disciplines. Whether that’s a project like SpokenWeb, or I think might be the case with the audio we’ll be listening to today, audio assignments that take students out of the traditional essay writing headspace and into a different mode of engaging with ideas in the classroom. But rather than me guessing at the inner workings of your graduate course, Jason, you’ve brought a selection of student assignments for us to listen to together. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the course, the assignments, and what we’ll be hearing today? [End Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:03:56\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. Well thanks Stacy. Very much. I’m entering our SpokenWeb Zoom classroom, as you describe it, both as a student and as someone who just taught a grad seminar called (Literary) Listening as Cultural Technique. I should say, I’ve been trying to teach with sound in my literature courses for about a decade now with varying degrees of success. I think the first few times that I taught sound recordings of literary performances in a classroom, I just played them and then expected something to happen and nothing happened because I found that in the students, and myself as well, we weren’t equipped to actually engage critically with those kinds of materials. And so. I called this course, (Literary) Listening, and literary is in parentheses. So it’s a very typographical title I suppose. Literary is really cordoned off from listening as cultural technique.\n00:04:49\tJason Camlot:\tAnd most of the seminar we’re reading theories of listening from disciplines that are not literary. As far as the assignments went, assignment for the entire seminar were really leading towards a final paper. And then there was this assignment that we’re talking about, which I called it the cylinder talk, right. And I’ve done this before. And the cylinder talk, the title, really comes from my own research fairly extensively in early spoken sound recordings and thinking about the implications of media formats in relation to what I would identify as literary forms. Right. So how did the constraints of a particular format inform what one can do in terms of delivering a story or a poem or an argument of some kind. Because cylinders, back in the day, in the acoustic period of sound recordings, sort of pre 1920 and usually much earlier than that —so from the 1890s on —generally held between two and four minutes of sound. The cylinder represents a time constraint as a result of preservation surface. So it’s using a material artifact on which sound was first recorded as a temporal constraint to begin with for an assignment. For the courses where I was doing these cylinder talks, they knew what a cylinder was and understood what the implications were because we’d studied them. So we’d listened to cylinder recordings, right. We’d studied late Victorian, early sound recordings where full Victorian novels were compressed into the timeframe of a three-minute cylinder. How do you deliver a David Copperfield in three minutes?\n \n\n00:06:25\tAudio Recording, “David Copperfield” performed by William Sterling Battis :\tMy dear Copperfield, come in. Come in! I —\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:28\tJason Camlot:\tEarly cylinder remediations of fiction mainly focused on either character sketches— that’s one way in which you compress a 400 page novel into three minutes — or they would focus on key transformation scenes. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —\n \n\n00:06:47\tAudio Recording, “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Performed by Len Spencer\tThe fiend is coming! Yes, aye, is here! [laughter]\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:57\tJason Camlot:\t— Or the mesmerism scene from George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby where Svengali is mesmerizing Trilby —\n \n\n00:07:01\tAudio Recording, “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby” performed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree\tAnd you shall see nothing ,hear nothing, thinking nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali…\n00:07:14\tJason Camlot:\t—or in a Christmas Carol when Ebeneezer Scrooge is transformed from a squeegee Scrooge into a benevolent generous person —\n \n\n00:07:28\tAudio Recording, “A Christmas Carol in Prose” performed by Bransby Williams:\tGod sent dreams to save me from meself. May God in this merry Christmastime be thanked for the reformation that you now begin with Ebeneezer Scrooge.\n \n\n \n\n00:07:42\tJason Camlot:\tAnd so the fiction cylinder, that’s the way they got around the question of constraint and compression. In this seminar, I wanted to have the students engage in a sort of, not a super demanding way, but just to have the experience of working with the digital audio workstation. Even if it means just having sort of two tracks and having to edit, select, engage with digitized sound, to think about both the media, through which we were encountering all of the sounds in the course, and I also wanted them to experience the kind of intensity that audio editing entails. Having to engage in that activity, I felt, represents a way of thinking about methodology. So that it’s sort of a form of listening that to some extent estranges you from the listening, because you may not know how to use the tools that well, so it’s not so natural to use them.\n00:08:32\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s a nice extension of the longer sort of theoretical discussions we’ve been having throughout the semester, about listening as a kind of audile technique or as a cultural technique. So it required them to produce a sound work. So that was sort of one of the goals. And the other constraints, apart from time alone, was they had to present a main idea, argument, or concept that they were going explore in the paper that they were writing. And they had to integrate at least one sound from the area that they were exploring. And I did imagine this not only as a kind of production oriented assignment, but I knew we were going to have a listening session, listening party of sorts in our very last class where everyone will get to hear everyone else’s cylinder talks, but also engage in responding to what they heard.\n \n\n00:09:20\tStacey Copeland:\tYou’ve brought in four talks from the course for us to listen to today, which will give everyone a bit more of a sense of what the students ended up with after engaging in this cylinder talk format. We’re going to play the full talk, which of course is only three minutes. It’s not too long for each one. And then we’ve chosen a bit of discussion to illustrate some of the critical thought that came after that listening experience together.\n \n\n00:09:46\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. As we were listening, of course we were on Zoom, so a bunch of squares showing everyone’s faces, everyone’s video is on. And that was one of the most enjoyable and interesting elements of the several hours that we spent listening together was just watching everyone’s reactions. This was the first time that everyone got to share something they’d made in this way. And so that was, I think, a really special aspect of this last listening session that we did together. So, which is the first one we’re going to listen to?\n \n\n00:10:14\tStacey Copeland:\tI think the first one I have queued up is Alexandra’s talk.\n \n\n00:10:18\tJason Camlot:\tSo Alexandra Sweny was thinking about and reading about environmental soundscape production. I think Alexandra — who is really working on Canadian poetry so this is not necessarily in her wheelhouse — really just became excited about some of the articles that were about environmental sound. And she pursued that topic.\n \n\n00:10:38\tStacey Copeland:\tAlexandra’s talk “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s, Environments Series”.\n \n\n00:10:44\tJason Camlot:\tYes.\n \n\n00:10:44\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:10:47\tAudio Recording, Alexandra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White noise to me has always sounded like falling snow. When I was little waking up after VHS always felt like falling asleep and waking up in the middle of a snow storm. I picture static like a blizzard that surrounds and disorients you. Every sound we hear it exists on a spectrum analogous to colours. White noise, like snowfall, has a wide frequency spectrum and clear tones, a narrow one. According to bio acoustician Bernie Krauss, in a healthy ecosystem in a healthy soundscape, the sound spectrum is full with living creatures, filling every frequency band. In altered and recently developed landscapes, such as clear cut forests or logging paths, the sound spectrum has notable gaps. [Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White  noise helps you forget about all that. Snowfall is an ambient sound and it blankets what it covers audibly just as it does visually. Snow absorbs noise and it isolates and insulates. I use recordings of snowfall to study, read, and write. In a library, snowfall through my headphones would dull the sounds of rattling coffee cups and scraping chairs. It began when I encountered Irv Teibel’s Environment Series, a set of set of 11 long playing records created in the ’60s and ’70s. “Alpine Blizzard” is the title of the A-side on the last record. I could imagine myself isolated as if on top of a mountain, piling text on a page while the snow piled high around me. But this isn’t how the sounds were recorded. Rather than setting the top a prime peak and letting the natural world do the work, colleagues of Teibel recall how he viewed nature as an obstacle to be tackled, wrestled, and refined.\n00:12:51\tAudio Recording, Alexndra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\tRather than any old beach sound, for instance, he wanted the perfect beach sound. A track he eventually mixed with samples across 12 different locations, which were ultimately processed using localizers and equalizers. The sounds broken down into new recombinations and new synthetic waves to cover this places. The result was his first track “Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” In my essay, I want to contend with the ethics of Teibel’s Environments series, which are among the first and most contentious field recording compositions to be sold in mainstream markets. I ask what are the risks of psychologically ultimate sounded field recordings, which are designed to soothe and calm, but which distance us from the psychologically and acoustically disruptive noises of anthropocentric contact and occupation? How do these ambient and curated soundscapes made for the human, but without the human, frame our relationship to the landscape, both imaginary and real? What are we to make of soundscapes that allow us to forget our place in the world, rather than which remind us of it? [Sound Clip: White Noise].\n \n\n00:13:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tGreat job, Alexandra.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAny first thoughts for us on it?\n00:14:14\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah, I guess I got on thinking about it from one of the additional readings on the bibliography of listening that talked about other field and sound recordings that have come up in the past years and just how the composer stance to the original recordings have changed. I think the article was talking about Derek Charke’s “Falling from Cloudless Skies”, which recorded the sounds of glaciers cleaving and melting. [Sound Effect: Glacier Break] And then songs of the humpback whale also mentioned that article. So I was just thinking about how field recordings have changed to reflect the attitudes that we’re having towards the natural world since the ’60s.\n \n\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tMichael.\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tI thought that the thing was, in some ways, very objectively beautiful because you have this white noise, and then the idea is that all of these —not only these ideas that you’re talking about are like being evoked out of the white noise, but you also have this really — I guess this is what meditation tips in general do is that they have white noise and then they have people evoking landscapes out of them that you’re supposed to visualize. But here you actually told us that they were coming out of the white noise itself, which is really interesting. It literalized the trick that I think that those, that meditation tapes usually used.\n \n\n00:15:18\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Michael Menezes.\n \n\n00:15:19\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you. Yeah. Meditation tapes, just even as a whole, would be a really good example of this that are just designed to put you to sleep and really zone out. I’ve listened to those also in the past.\n \n\n00:15:27\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAndrew Whiteman\n00:15:29\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman\tOn that, what I was thinking, what you were doing is you have sound behind you [Sound Clip: White Noise] and then it fades out and then you bring the sound back again [Sound Clip: White Noise]. And I thought you were tricking it. I thought you were playing us something from the LP series you were talking about. And then I thought you were fading on actual white noise because I find a lot of sort of new laptop based composers or are trying to make fake natural sounds using the sounds that are only available inside the digital audio workstation playing with the nature-culture thing there.\n \n\n00:16:00\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah. And no, that was that was just a recording on my fire escape with the bells that came in right at the end. And I figured I’d put them in because those are very much, they take me out of whatever I’m doing and remind me like exactly what time it is and where I am.\n \n\n00:16:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah. Just to build on everything that everyone’s been saying, I thought it was a wonderful example of a kind of anti-meditation tape or a meditation tape that makes you reflect on all the ethical issues surrounding what meditation tapes are trying to do perhaps. But also I thought rhetorically the way you brought us into the description of what a natural soundscape and it’s sort of diverse frequency spectrum would normally entail going to the silence that memetically performs that. And then when you say white noise makes us forget about all that, rhetorically that whole sequence was really, really effective and powerful because you brought us into like, “Oh, okay, we’re going to hear this sound over and over again, but we’re not going to hear it the same way” because you’re teaching us how to hear it differently. And sort of the implications of what we’re hearing.”\n \n\n00:17:01\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tThe images you actually evoke are not — you start by saying that there are these beautiful nature landscapes but then the white noise is something that is blocking out global catastrophe, like glacier slipping off of mountains. And, I don’t know, the songs of humpback whales was also a very good image.\n \n\n00:17:18\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, I never thought I would hear a student referencing Bernie Krause in a literature course, but there we go. So what is it like listening back to this discussion for you, Jason?\n \n\n00:17:31\tJason Camlot:\tIt brought me right back into the moment of sort of the excitement immediately after hearing the piece for the first time. I really did think that Alexandra’s cylinder — more than others —had a kind of almost ASMR quality to it. Really it was very tactile and also the way she delivered her text was really interesting because she allowed for a lot of space in between sentences. It almost sounded like a poem. So I think I was hearing a little bit more the form of the piece even more than I had the first time. Her selection of sounds really did get to the core of some of the ethical issues that she was interested in exploring.\n \n\n00:18:08\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, before the discussion came in, my mind was already churning all around all the possibilities of what you might’ve been listening to in the course because that sort of close recording, that very ASMR, tactile quality that the white noise track has in Alexandra’s piece really reminded me of Hildegard Westerkamp’s work—\n \n\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tThese are the tiny, the intimate voices of nature. Of bodies, of dreams, of the imagination.\n00:18:38\tStacey Copeland:\t— particularly her Kits Beach piece, which does also have a very poetic flow in the vocal performance. And then the very close recording and very tactile sensation of listening to the barnacles on Kits Beach in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:18:54\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tYou’re still hearing the barnacle sounds. And already they’re changing.\n00:18:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd this recording brought me right back there. So then I was so surprised to hear in the discussion that Alexandra just recorded this on her fire escape. And then also the bells, because then I was thinking, well, if you were listening to R. Murray Schafer, maybe the bells were intentional and kind of an ode to 1970s acoustic ecology, but no, it was just her everyday experience.\n \n\n00:19:22\tJason Camlot:\tThere was a longer discussion about the bells after, cause we talked about bells an awful lot in our seminar from Schafer, but also because one of the earliest sort of documentary recordings was of Big Ben tolling [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”] in London in 1890 so, we talked about what, what that meant, what it means to record a bell, what a bell is, especially a publicly heard bell as a means of something that many people in an area can hear, how the bell measures time, et cetera. So yeah, we thought about bells a lot and yet there they areright, just in her neighborhood and she integrated them. We really didn’t do much listening to soundscape recordings in the seminar. The majority of the recordings we listened to were still voice-based in one way or another, even though they may have been quite experimental, but that was all Alexandra following her interest and discovering sounds.\n \n\n00:20:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI love this first example, because it really illustrates some of the ways that thinking through sound studies, regardless of whether you’ve listened to specific acoustic ecologists or sound recordist, like Hildegard Westerkamp and thinking about the World Soundscape Project, and you had a bit of introduction in the course for students around R. Murray Schafer, and round soundscape and those ideas.\n \n\n00:20:43\tR. Murray Schafer from “Listen” (NFB 2009):\tWe are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us and we can improve it or we can destroy it. We can add more noises or we can add more beautiful sounds. That’s all up to us.\n \n\n00:20:58\tStacey Copeland:\tThink about how reading those ideas can then lead to very similar sonic aesthetics in this particular cylinder talk. It’d be interesting to see how that translates across different disciplines as well.\n \n\n00:21:10\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s such a great question. And coming from literature, one of the challenges is to move away from the semantic signal when you’re listening to voice recordings. Alexandra’s interest in moving away from sounds with semantic meaning was a fulfillment of what we were often trying, but failing to do in listening to some of the literary recordings. Another thing that I think I heard in the responses to Alexandra’s was a real interest in trying to identify what Michel Chion would call “causal listening”. I thought you were making the sounds do this, but actually it turned out to be that. And that also is an ongoing sort of frame for our course — thinking about what it means to identify sound as objects or with particular sources.\n \n\n00:21:56\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of see some similar overlaps in these ideas of sonic environment and our relationship to the soundscape and the way that these kind of core ideas that come out of cultural sound studies have been taken up by your students through this literature course. And we hear these themes come up again in the next Cylinder Talk that you’ve chosen for us.\n \n\n00:22:18\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. So this is Sara Adams. This is probably in some ways the most challenging of the projects, because most of the sounds that she wants to write about can never be heard again. Her world is set in the 1840s in Victorian London. Sara is a PhD student and she’s a 19th century scholar. I’m a Victorianist first and foremost, I suppose, still. And so she’s come to work on Henry Mayhew, who was journalist, also an early ethnographer, oral historian, data collector about, I guess, marginal peoples living in urban environments in the 19th century. His best-known work is called London Labour and the London Poor, which is a remarkable, extensive, and expansive document of interviews with people who are living and working in London, but not necessarily in recognized jobs or positions. So many of them are doing things, doing the work in the city that is rendered invisible to anyone above the lower middle classes. The street sweepers, the garbage collectors, people who are selling wares in the streets. A very famous figure for Mayhew who that gets anthologized for some reason, the watercress girl is the one that that gets repeated and anthologized a lot.\n00:23:31\tJason Camlot:\tMayhew —half of his work, or more than half of his work are actual transcriptions of interviews that he held. He writes them in the voices of the people he interviewed. We don’t know how accurate and there’s been a lot of sort of critique of sort of him as a mediator of these voices. So those are sounds that Sara was very interested in exploring as sounds. So actually I don’t think she had thought of them as sounds previously that informed her new investigation for her, I think, and for me, cause I hadn’t thought about Mayhew this way, either. Thinking about where different people who make certain sounds as a result of the labour they pursue, whether they’re perceived as noise or as a kind of meaningful signal in certain ways.\n \n\n00:24:13\tStacey Copeland:\tGreat. Let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:24:14\tAudio Recording, Sara Adam’s Cylinder Talk:\tOver the course of the 19th century, Victorian London experienced an unprecedented growth in population size. Consequently Britain’s largest city was not only choked with dirt and dust, but it was also overwhelmingly “alive with sound.” [Sound Clips: Victorian Street] In the city street markets, butchers, fishmongers and other street sellers shouted over each other, trying to catch the attention of passers by. The raucous symphony of London streets was also filled with bamboo flute players, Oregon grinders, and other street musicians, as well as the clomping of horses hooves, the clattering of carriages and carts, and the distant roar of the new railway. It was truly an “age of osculation” as John Picker argues, full of careful and close listening to a noisy and rapidly changing modern world. While some 19th century writers and intellectuals try to escape from the piercing sounds of the city streets, the journalist Henry Mayhew embraced them, diving headfirst into London’s East End and interviewing street vendors and other impoverished street folk in order to compile an encyclopedic archive entitled: London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851. London Labour was ultimately an unfinished multi-volume work that recorded the everyday living and working conditions of London’s marginalized, urban poor. Mayhew was explicitly interested in reproducing in print form the real and “unvarnished” voices of London street folk “from the lips of the people themselves.” By deploying carefully detailed and mimetic description while also striving to transcribe his subjects interview answers verbatim, Mayhew attempted to create a literary work that faithfully sounded and re-sounded like a phonograph. Not only did Mayhew seek to bear witness to and preserve the voices of a rapidly disappearing population, but his project also simultaneously pushed the boundaries of what print could do. In my paper, I will explore how Mayhew uses sound to immerse his middle-class audience in the urban underworld of outcast London. How does Mayhew’s use of sound in the text create the conditions of possibility for hearing? What kind of ear witnessing does Mayhew perform in the text and what novel aesthetic ethical or political realities does this osculate of work make possible? I find it fascinating that Mayhew’s text reverberates, not only with the sights of the city, but also equally with it’s sounds, creating an immersive reading experience that grounds its reader firmly in a stable spatial and temporal setting. Mayhew’s text is also striking because it not only records the everyday noises of the city’s quotidian hustle and bustle, but it also trains its ear and by extension it’s reader’s ear on individuals and their personal stories of loss, struggle, and small moments of joy. In this way, Mayhew conditions his readers to differentiate sound from noise, listening from hearing, a sonic and sympathetic movement with profound ethical and political possibilities.\n \n\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tThanks guys. I guess I’m always interested in like, what does it mean to listen? What does it mean to hear? What conditions specifically political arise out of certain kinds of listening? And also what do they not make possible or what does incomplete listening or partial or warped? I mean, it’s always mediated through all sorts of things. And I think in those clips there’s so many different levels of my mediation and like interpretation, but then also Mayhew trying to get towards like an authentic kind of unvarnished, untouched, idea of someone’s sound and someone’s story, but we just know that’s not possible. Right. We know that that mediation fundamentally does distort and that there are implications for that.\n \n\n00:28:39\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\tI’m not too familiar with Henry Mayhew —\n \n\n \n\n00:28:42\tJason Camlot:\tAubrey Grant.\n \n\n00:28:42\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\t—but I know that within that context of the different social reformers at that period, there was a lot of talk of questions of sanitation and cleanliness, of the dangers that the poor brought onto society in terms of illness, in terms of also smells as well and all this stuff. But thinking about in terms of noise — I was wondering there was like a connection between a kind of discourse, the sanitation and a discourse of noise.\n \n\n00:29:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. I guess for both, I was sort of connecting them and actually I’ve done a lot of work on waste and sanitation during this period. So that’s why I was sort of like, “Oh, I never thought of the sonic qualities.” I’ve thought of like material pollution in the terms of like dirt and dust and human waste, decaying weight matter, whatever, but not in terms of noise pollution. A lot of those people and places have been extinguished and have been made obsolete by industry and by industrial processes and by modernity. And that’s actually a really big part of Mayhew’s project was actually to record these people’s voices, and their everyday lives and the details about their mundane to-ings and fro-ings because they all like disappeared basically. Slowly. Like police were more —there’s more police around so there was more policing of like the city and making people move around more and not letting them just sell wherever. There were more laws about street music and who could play where. We have that today still with like red zoning people who are on the sides, on the streets, like asking for money, policing the poor and all sorts of ways,\n \n\n00:30:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tIs sound in any of his [statistical] tables? I don’t recall.\n00:30:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. So they’re not. The closest would be like, he talks about how many carriages are on the road, how many more carriages there are now than there were before. Like for me it feels like he’s kind of putting that osculation, like that idea of like the stethoscope, he sort of applying it to the body politic or at least a very small part of it, of the urban poor in London taking its heartbeat.\n \n\n00:30:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tI just called up cause you were talking about it sort of one of my favorite methods of categorization that Mayhew uses of the population. Right. And it could be interesting to think about what sounds did these four sectors of the population create or do they tend to create right. He calls them the enrichers, the auxiliaries, the benefactors and the servitors. And the thing about Mayhew that’s so cool, right, is that it’s very leveling these categories it’s based on your instrumental contribution rather than your social status. Servitors are the actors, the servants, all of the London poor that you’re talking about, like the street sweepers and scavengers — but the queen is considered a servitor as well. And members of parliament. To think about songs sonic emanations, according to some of these attempts at categorizing populations and the spaces they use, obviously, cause space and going back to Aubery’s point thinking maybe sound is more important to me. I’d really —I’m really excited to look back and think about the status of sound in relation to the other senses in Mayhew.\n \n\n00:31:33\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s great. Listening back to this discussion, you can really hear how excited you are about this topic.\n \n\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Well it reintroduced Mayhew to me in a whole new way. So I was super excited about what —where Sara was going with her work and there’s been some excellent sort of sound studies oriented work in Victorian studies. She mentioned John Picker and John Picker’s book, Victorian Soundscapes does a lot of excellent sort of analysis of noise pollution in the Victorian period and how it relates to identity formation and different sort of […], and  especially the bourgeois subject. But I don’t think he talks about Mayhew — and I really hadn’t thought about Mayhew. And in so many ways it’s such an obvious text to think about from a sonic perspective.\n \n\n00:32:14\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. And I mean, in this discussion, I mean, this is just like a little slice of the very in-depth discussion that the students were having after listening to Sara’s cylinder talk around ideas of noise and the politics of what is defined as noise versus sound, how that relates to the Victorian era, but then also talking about contemporary politics of noise and sound and policing. And it was such a rich conversation to hear coming out of this application of sound studies ideas to say, Henry Mayhew in this particular era. And I was also curious — we hear this politics of noise come up from scholars like Jennifer Stover when we’re thinking about the sonic colour line and the racialized ways that sound is defined as noise in relation to identity. And so it should be —I would think, I mean, maybe I’m just so nerdy that I’m excited about it— quite fascinating to see how these kinds of identity politics unfold in Henry Mayhew’s discussions of sounds and noise in this particular era.\n \n\n00:33:15\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you’re exactly right in your instincts about sort of where some of this may have come from. We talked about Stover, we read Sun Eidsheim’s work The Race of Sound.. And that was a very important book I think for students in the seminar as was Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, which was amazing. The very first thing it does is take down R. Murray Schafer on this question of noise, right. Basically his account of Inuit throat singing as kind of awful noise, right. And so the politics of what is called noise and what isn’t called noise in relation to identity formations and identifications was much discussed throughout the seminar. And I think that Sara was sort of bringing some of that back to the Victorian works that she’s really interested in writing about.\n \n\n00:34:02\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of got on the topic of bells earlier. And this next cylinder talk that you’ve brought in for us brings up to the idea of bells yet again.\n \n\n00:34:11\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. So this is a cylinder talk by Aubrey Grant on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells.” There is actually a very recent article in PMLA, which is sort of like one of the major literature journals of the modern language association, on this poem that I assigned for the course, it was published just last year, 2020. So really very recent by Peter Miller called “Prosody Media and the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.” Aubrey really dove into readings around prosody, which was sort of a new area to him. So thinking about literary prosody, so the sound in the printed word, right. That’s one way to describe what prosody is —these are things you learn in high school assonance and consonance and rhyme, right. Those are ways of thinking about how sound functions in poetry off the page, but the combination of our course and his discovery of prosody and his already quite mature thinking around signification and theories of language resulted in kind of a mind blowing reading of this poem, using language and signification techniques to communicate sound in ways that he argues are quite unique to Poe.\n \n\n00:35:21\tStacey Copeland:\tSo here is Aubrey’s talk titled “Poe’s Impossible Sound.”\n \n\n00:35:28\tAudio Recording: Aubrey Grant’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Begin/Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”  underplay] In a short story from 1919, Rilke describes his mysterious fascination with a skull he has brought home from an anatomy lesson. Where once it contained within its narrow confines, a brain and an unbounded subconsciousness, it now appeared to him as a hollow structure, an empty vessel. One evening as he passed it flickering in candlelight, he was struck by the realization that he had seen the coronal suture once before. That jagged zigzag pattern of connective fibers that joins the front of the skull to the back was the very same pattern he had seen inscribed on an equally hollow wax cylinder. When, as a child, he had listened to his own voice in all its sonic ephemerality separated from his body for the very first time. What kind of sound would issue from the skull, Rilke wondered, if a phonograph needle were to trace the contours of the coronal suture? What primal sound would be produced if, rather than simply tracing the graphic inscription of a sound that already existed, the phonograph could play the as yet unheard lines, grooves, cuts, and graphemes of nature itself? Setting aside speculation of whether the sound would be noise or music, Rilke’s perspective is decisive. It is only by means of mechanisms, machines, and techniques that it becomes possible to listen, to really listen to the unsounded sounds of the real. More broadly, the phonograph itself and its cylinder of which this talk is a simulation, points to the fact that listening has always been a technique for intervening in the real. In this way, the phonograph is merely the technological exteriorization of a practice of signal processing with its own history. A history which revolves around the question of how we listen. That is, of the techniques we use to filter sounds out of noise, to produce something that we can hear. In my essay, I argue that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” articulates a transformation in listening techniques marked by a shift from a regime of signs to a regime of signal processing. Taking Friedrich Kittler’s media technical a priori as a starting point, I argue that Poe’s poem is a kind of phonograph avant la lettre, which is both invested in print culture and sonically undermines it. Arguing along lines set out by Eliza Richards, Peter Miller, and Jerome McGann, I will begin by situating Poe’s attention to the mechanics of prosody within 19th century print culture and industrial reproduction. In this reading Poe’s poems are prosodic machines that not only produce an infinite variety of performances, but are themselves technologically reproducible. In a manner analogous to Benyamine’s analysis of cinema it is the very reproducibility of the poetic machine that constructs the cultural modalities of listening in the mid 19th century. However, while holding onto this theory and historical context, I believe that a close reading of “The Bells” will reveal Poe’s attention to a kind of listening that exceeds the boundaries set by written signs and human voices. My reading will center around the orally evocative deployment of onomatopoeia in the poem. Although Poe’s use onomatopoeia to emphasize themes and enhance the musicality of performance has been well-documented, what has escaped notice is the fact that the word bells is not itself onomatopoeic. Rather, it is only through his use of repetition that it becomes so. Like a real bells percussive clapper, which makes its hollow interior ring and resound, the repetition of this mechanical supplement empties the word of signification while retaining its acoustic qualities. What occurs, I argue, is that the graphic inscription becomes an empty vessel. Like Rilke’s skull which channels uncoated frequencies of a primal sound concealed in the materiality of the letter. In other words, the noise of the real and impossible inhuman sound that the signifier normally articulates into signs becomes audible for the first time in Poe’s poem. From sign to signal, this sourceless acousmatic sound may well be the music of the printed words own disillusion into the noise of the coming phonographic age.[End:Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”underplayed]\n \n\n00:39:57\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\tYeah. Talk about repetition.\n \n\n \n\n00:40:03\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tYes, exactly. Exactly. So just a couple of things. Yeah. The sound that I used in the back, I think we’re all familiar with that. We listened to it actually at the beginning of the course, it’s the ending segment of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. The reason that I wanted to use that segment was because I had intended to actually base part of my thing on that. Cause what I was looking at was like, what is the sound that is sort of like hidden in the voice and how is it revealed or made present through this kind of structure of like repetitive feedback looping and how it dissolves articulation into pure noise.\n \n\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nYeah. Michael.\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Michael Menezes:\tI just thought that your cylinder was like very symbolically lovely. I think that you set up — I mean obviously the background noise thing, it felt like someone turning a large wheel of music in some ways when the wheel makes one revolution of the sound, of the piston hits the thing. And the piston, obviously from your presentation, the piston reminds me of like the mechanical aspect of the bell. And the sound reminds me of the individual trying to like capture this beautiful sonorous noise, just having them connected directly in one machine with no like feeling of humanity in between. And only the skull was like a, was a great image.\n \n\n00:41:12\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tI love the Gothic media theory stuff. I mean, this stuff is great. Ultimately, Michael that’s sort of what I was aiming at. I wasn’t thinking of it as much as a piston, although that works too. Thinking about the way in which like a record [Sound Recording: Surface Crackling] as it turns, or a cylinder, as it turns is a kind of cyclical repetition. And that repetition doesn’t have to just like a bell ringer, like a hammer banging and going like laterally, but it’s actually like a cyclical process.\n \n\n00:41:40\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nA couple of things that came to mind I — just thinking about the relationship between the sign and sounds so really —and the idea of being able to, in a sense, play something like a skull or something in nature. So basically how the sound reproduction technologies seem to evoke and suggest these new possibilities of turning any sign into sort of sonic content. And this is talked about in an article by Theodore Adorno called “The Curve of the Needle.” For him, piano rolls, right, were seen as that source of potential sound [Piano roll music].\n \n\n00:42:20\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nHis way of thinking about it’s sound recording and sort of the bumps on a cylinder or a flat disc are still indexical to original things that made sounds that caused the air pressure to record them, but the piano roll in so far as it was generating sound just from punched holes, suggest the possibility of creating sounds out of nothing. Right. In sense, or just out of random — it made me really think of digital processes. And so this link is to Patrick Feaster’s work, and he —rather than talk about his work as about sound reproduction, he calls it eduction to reduce this, to bring out elicit, develop from a condition of latent, rudimentary, or merely potential existence. So the repetitious sound of your sound piece, in a way is one of the base necessities for educing something because it has to be moving and cyclical in order to generate a sense of continuous sound or sonic quality. So you can’t just have sort of random symbols there has to be some kind of ultimate pattern assigned. Just the concept of sonification in a way is one that it seems could be useful for you to be thinking about in relation to your project.\n \n\n00:43:31\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat are you hearing in listening back to this piece and the discussion, Jason?\n \n\n00:43:35\tJason Camlot:\tOh, it’s funny. I haven’t — the first thing I said when it was done was “talk about repetition”. Right. But what I was referring to there actually was a discussion we’d had about Poe’s “The Bells” previously, which is a poem that is built on repetition. Right. And as Aubrey points out one of the main things that’s repeated is the word “the bells” [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”]. So there are full lines of the poem that are just bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.\n \n\n00:43:59\tJason Camlot:\tSo, just to continue with your idea that really starting with what is not an overly respected poem, Poe’s piece. It was like a recitation staple it’s seen often as not a very deep poem, very surface-y. And that’s one of the points that interests Aubrey very much actually. Discovering prosody, literary prosody as a kind of field of technical discourse around the analysis of poetry and then filtering it through some of these other disciplinary fields like media history in particular, that was extremely productive and generative for him. And I think having to engage in this sound piece exercise also expanded his way of thinking. I mean, I don’t really know, but I’m not sure that he would have taken his thinking as far as he did, if he hadn’t had to go through the process of actually making a sound work himself.\n \n\n00:44:54\tStacey Copeland:\tI do have quite an appreciation for this poem. I think because it was one of the poems that I had to read in high school, very in depth. And I think we took turns reading it aloud in the class, these kinds of things. But at the time, I hadn’t really been thinking about the ways in which Poe is really very thoughtful and thinking about the different textures and materials and the different actual soundings of these different bells. As we were listening to this, I had to pull up the poem again, to jog my memory about some of the descriptive language that he’s using. And some of the, again, prosody and techniques that we might think about and the ways that he’s describing silver bells and golden bells and brazen bells and iron bells. So I think this is really a great poem to go to almost as one of the starter texts you can think about in applying sound studies, concepts, and techniques to poetry and to poetry readings.\n \n\n00:45:46\tJason Camlot:\tI think that’s right. And I think what Aubrey and the discussions we had in this seminar did for my thinking about the poem was to move it out of sort of the elocutionary realm, which is where I would normally sort of stay in thinking about this poem, because like I said, it was a recitation manual staple in the 19th century, which means that people would find it in these parlor recitation books that they would do for their own amusement at home. Right. And this was one of the poems that they would readily read. And there were tons of parodies of the poem as well, cause it does lend itself to that. Right. But it was a kind of staple piece for the performance, the demonstration of virtuosity in elocutionary performance and ability to innocence sound the poem and do justice to the various qualities, tonal qualities of the different metals, for example, that you mentioned. How do you do that with your voice? So you could think of it as if it were a song in the 1990s, it would be a great piece for like Celine Dion to perform, right? Because it would really allow her to show off her voice and in all of its virtuosity. But I think moving it into the realm of thinking about it from the pointof view of signification and of media as Aubrey really pursued it, like you say, made this poem a kind of obvious staple for a literature slash sound studies course.\n \n\n00:47:02\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s definitely a cover that I would love to hear — Celine Dion doing a song version of Poe’s “The Bells.” [Audio Clip: Stacey vocal as Celine] But talking about covers that actually brings us perfectly to the final cylinder talk that you’ve brought for us to listen to today.\n \n\n00:47:19\tJason Camlot:\tThis piece was done by Andrew Whiteman. So Andrew, among all the students in the seminar has the most training in sound recording media. He’s a professional musician and has been for the last 20 years. And so he didn’t attend my workshop on audacity because he really, he knows how to work with digital audio workstations and make sound. But also he’s very interested in engaging in doing sound pieces that involve poetry. So he has a whole art practice that’s around this. Anyways, he sort of fell upon finally a topic that seemed like it would be a good one to pursue and essentially boils down to the question of the idea of the cover. We talk about cover songs — can we talk about cover poems? Or the idea of the poet’s cover as he phrases it. And so, because he was interested in oral poetry, let’s say The Odyssey— like Homer Homeric bardic poetry. He started thinking about an opening canto of Pound’s “Cantos”  which is kind of a cover of a short section of the Odyssey, and then pointed him to PennSound’s archive, where there are recordings of Pound reading that opening “Canto I”as well as some other poets reading portions of it. And so he had a sort of mini archive that he could work with that brought in his interest in a bardic poetry, sort of oral poetic forms, which are formulaic forms. So we can’t think of doing a cover in the same sense because the poem changes every time a bard re-performs it versus the question of someone reading the printed already sort of fixed version of a poem differently, and thinking about that as a kind of cover. And so he focused on Robert Duncan’s sort of lecture on Pound in which he performs Canto I.\n \n\n00:49:06\tStacey Copeland:\tHere is Andrew Whiteman with “The Poetic Cover.”\n \n\n00:49:10\tAudio Recording, Andrew Whiteman’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Audio Clip: Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound] Hi. When I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community. And that is that it’s total interest in Mr. Ezra Pound seems to have faded. [Music Begins] [Sound Overlapping with Ezra Pound recites “Canto I” ] My initiation and the counters. How did I come to hear it? Set keel to breakers forth from a godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also/ Heavy with weeping, [Duncan] I found myself in the prep and a terrifying presence of mighty blue stocking who knew the entire modern scene, which made her vastly superior to the [Pound overlap returns] [inaudible] and in one fell swoop I was initiated to the mysteries of [inaudible] trembling and running [inaudible] Ezra Pound on Telegraph Avenue. Elliott. And found there the 30 cantos, what was then the avant garde. [Enter Filreis interview] A very confused domain of something one might call voice. Which in Pound, one doesn’t know whether voice is sort of actual or metaphorical. Especially — [Dunan returns] And I opened the page and then went down with the ship [Pound returns]And then went down to ship [Dunan] I can’t bear it. This is too much! For a whole week I went — [Pound] And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breathers, forth on godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship/ [Duncan] But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You go to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah [Reverb effect] . You find it the way they find it in music — [Pound] cadaverous dead, of brides/ Of youths of the olde who had borne much; [Duncan] Most people can’t find it [Pound] Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads/ [Duncan] When Pound’s recordings were made we each found out something we could not know [bell] when we read in the thirties, the forties and so forth. And that is that Pround intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of, a sort of singing, intoning to the line. “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea [music rises]…” [Pound] Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms/ [Overlapping voices] These many crowded about me with shouting/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads read [Overlapping voices] [Duncan] Our American trouble with men, many. I mean, we have what we do that word men many. A man is difficult enough when you get that many in there, men, many mauls with bronze lance — and so. So, I don’t always find the most elegant reading. [Filreis interview?] [Inaudible] Olga’s husband says well, “Sound like you never got out from under the influence of Yates or something like that.” And Pound is really hurt [Small voice: He doesn’t like that] and leaves the room and take his —and then the next day reads in a completely different fashion. Much more relaxed and much more conversational. And you have the two readings there. [Small voice: He took it to heart!] [Duncan] We can overlap so the thing plays a double role. Now. [Filreis interview] He took it to heart. It’s really interesting the first high Yatesian reading, and then the next much more kind of casual and incidentally superior reading. It’s a really interesting. [Small voice: That’s great, and where did you find this thing ?] She sent them to me. [Small voice: Oh fantastic.] [Overlapping voices] [inaudible] [Small voice: I wonder if other stuff will start to surface.] Well I’m hoping. [Duncan] If you don’t find the music you have not found the elegant solution. [End music]\n \n\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah, Aaron.\n \n\n \n\n00:53:17\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aaron Obedkoff\tI find it an incredibly potent and effective way to tackle Pound’s enormous influence. I mean, he’s kind of like — when it comes to modern contemporary poetry, he’s like the wizard of Oz behind the screen, he’s just everywhere. And so the way you made him disappear into his progeny, his voice kind of being subsumed under Duncan’s and the like, I found it very, very effective.\n \n\n00:53:39\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Aaron Obedkoff\n \n\n00:53:41\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tWe always get this image of Pound, Aaron as you’re saying, as the wizard of Oz. But in that talk where Olga’s husband, who’s British, who says, “Oh, well, gee, you really can’t get away from Yates can ya?” It’s like, Oh my God, the ghosts, like whether you find them this horrible fascist monster or whether you find him — in whatever way, he looms so big. And this is like a little [Pop Sound] it pricks, the bubble in this image of poor Pound going away with his book and then coming back the next day and changing his reading style. But what’s interesting is we don’t know, like the sound of Pound that we have there where he’s like, this [Imitates Pounds dramatic style] is that him toned down? Like, there’s a whole question there. Was even worse before? Like was even more before? We don’t know.\n \n\n00:54:28\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tWe’re really interested in the way you used space panning and also accelerating to differentiate between — sort of continuing Aaron’s observation about where Pound’s voice was in the mix of his “after-Pound era.” The way where you were using it as a way to actually make your arguments. If you, if you want to talk a little bit about like, whether there was much intentionality or whether you were just going with what sounded good, but I also liked the way you took the Filreis conversation, the talk, which is like one contemporary manifestation of continuing to engage with these recordings, the effect of speeding it up, almost highlighted it’s gossipy nature, or sort of relegated it to a less important discursive register that actually accelerating suggests belittling or something like that.\n \n\n00:55:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tYeah. I think you’re Dr. Freud-ing me really well now because — and also trying to make them talk to each other that’s probably the big thing. I like trying to make different eras to talk to one another where they don’t belong. And so where Duncan says “I was in the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking”, like whoever that is! Someone who initiated him, he uses the word initiate three times, which I put in there because he places himself in vis-a-vis Pound in a religious place. And so when he says “the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking” I have Pounds “Aphrodite. Golden girdle.” Or whatever, to just try and emphasize Duncan’s position as an initiate. And then that is what my paper’s about. How Duncan says the exact same words that Pound says, but his cover of “Canto I” is completely different and signifies in a completely different way.\n \n\n00:56:18\tStacey Copeland:\tThis one has — it’s just so rich. It really is more of a soundscape composition. And this really does show the range that your students brought to the table when they were thinking about the idea of a cylinder talk, where here we have Andrew’s cylinder talk that doesn’t have his voice in it at all. It’s really engaging with the archive and engaging with these ideas of covers, and covers almost as layers of sound layers on top of each other through time through space, through these different contexts that he’s grappling with in these different poetic covers. Tell me a bit about listening back. What’s coming forward for you?\n \n\n00:56:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. I’ve been thinking more like, as you were just saying about what a cover is. Cause I think one of the things that his cylinder talk does so successfully is exactly what he said he was going for, which is communicate the ways in which the same sort of text can not only sound differently, but also through that sound represent an entirely different worldview, literally worldview. So ideology in relation to the world, but also sort of literary worldview, meaning what literature and what talking about literature and what performing literature is supposed to be accomplishing. He layers them for us to sort of understand that we can only partially see or know the meaning of what a sounding of a poem would mean in a particular historical context. That’s one of the things that I hear in this piece.\n \n\n00:57:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, every time I listened to this, I feel like I’m hearing something else and it could just be me projecting, but I feel like we are experiencing a bit of Andrew’s personal experience of grappling with these archival sounds. We get the sort of disorientation and listening to the harsh panning back and forth in the first half of the cylinder talk there. And then we also have this comedic moment with the speeding up of the voices, which again could be, I mean, for me evokes the feeling of the monotony and maybe the hilarity that ensues after listening to hours and hours and hours of archival tape in real time. Right. Because its sound. You have to listen and you have to digitize in real time and it can make you a bit loopy.\n \n\n00:58:28\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s what he was referring to when he said I was Dr. Freud-ing him, like, I think he was sort of the point he was making is that he —you can hear his own himself in the positioning that he gives to the sounds in the piece, but he’s also positioning them in relation to how he feels about what he’s doing right now.\n \n\n00:58:45\tStacey Copeland:\tInviting students to engage in audio production — one of my hopes and what I think sound does really well is opening up the doors to allow students to grapple with and experience and describe and share their own embodied experience of engaging with these ideas outside of the very traditional essay writing format that we get engrained with in high school and then carries forward into their undergrads and haunts us later in our academic careers as well.\n \n\n00:59:14\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really true. And I think we’ve heard some of that through the various comments in response to all of the cylinder talks that we listened to. It’s somewhat different from the formulae of knowledge production that they’re used to engaging in. And so I think that’s very quickly associated with putting themselves out there a little bit more, right. That there’s more of themselves in the decisions they’re making, because the decisions haven’t been sort of pre-made for them as to what an essay is supposed to be or what this kind of knowledge production is supposed to have in it. And then also as you point out that it is a very embodied experience because it involves listening. It involves bodily fatigue because that work can really take a long time when you’re sitting at the computer doing the sound editing.\n \n\n00:59:57\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then it makes me think also about the relevance of calling this a cylinder talk assignment rather than a podcasting assignment, because no one knows what a cylinder talk is. Right. It’s sort of a made up idea as a constraint. And I add some—and we did have discussions like say, well, what is a cylinder talk? So that they knew what they could sort of engage in. But people have ideas about what a podcast is already. So in some ways a podcasting assignment would allow them to lean a little bit more on models than an assignment where they have to do a cylinder talk where there aren’t really aren’t any precedents for this. In retrospect, I think that was a productive aspect of the assignment was that there wasn’t even a kind of sonic generic precedent that they could rely upon.\n \n\n01:00:40\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the cylinder as a —.\n \n\n01:00:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah.\n \n\n01:00:44\tStacey Copeland:\t– a very simple constraint that has a very material aspect to it as well. Versus I think if we thought about podcasting more in that way, we might start to create some more interesting things.\n \n\n01:00:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Yeah. Possibly.\n01:00:57\tStacey Copeland:\tI was curious listening through some of the cylinder talks that your students made, how you see this kind of assignment being applied to other courses that you teach, or maybe in the future, other disciplines as well.\n \n\n01:01:10\tJason Camlot:\tI guess it all starts with an exercise in the use of constraints, to generate really interesting creative solutions. The cylinder talk, it’s a cipher or an empty container in a lot of ways. And yet a very restrictive constraint simultaneously, right.The idea of having assignments of constraint and maybe of unfamiliar constraint could be extremely productive across the disciplines. I mean, this seminar was really about engaging with theories of listening from many different disciplines and then thinking about our own discipline from the respective of those readings. But I think the sound assignment was getting at that question [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] and problem and goal in a different way, in a much more practice and sort of embodied way.\n \n\n01:01:56\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the different ways that we can approach our pedagogy. What other assignments can we bring in to kind of shake students awake a little bit? So I guess at this point now it’s my turn to go and listen back through the that we just had.\n \n\n01:02:20\tJason Camlot:\tSorry, we talked too much!\n \n\n01:02:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Maybe we should put out an extended cut.\n \n\n01:02:27\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n01:02:28\tStacey Copeland:\tThis has been a pleasure listening to some of the work that your students put out because this is one of the frustrations always is both as a student and as an instructor, students create these wonderful works and only everyone in the course gets to hear it. And no one else. I’m glad we got to share some of these out in the world for others to enjoy as well. [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n \n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor:\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Stacey Copeland of Simon Fraser University and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Alexandra Sweeney, Aubrey Grant, Sara Adams, Andrew Whiteman, and all the students of English 604: Literary Listening as Cultural Technique for their cylinder talks and discursive contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourselves and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9284","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E6, Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 1 March 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/a9212c02-0491-458c-9d5a-eae284bc37f3/audio/3d08da82-0039-4ad4-8ed7-f1377e559fd8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,822,300 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/11/29/grippes-and-poche\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p.39 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/03/16/a-painful-affair\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/09/13/a-flying-start-2\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/25/in-plain-sight\\n\\nkyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549494956032,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["On February 14, 1984, Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University. She did a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1982  — her ninety-fifth work in the magazine. Containing the full recording of her reading, which includes Gallant’s live commentary as she reads, “Mavis Gallant Reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU” celebrates Gallant’s voice in print and audio. \n\nPart one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What is your favourite way to hear a story? How does a written work change when it’s read aloud, interrupted, or framed by moments of laughter and applause? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are always considering what transformations happen in the conversions between printed words, live events, and our un-archiving of recorded stories. These questions frame today’s episode, which will be a special treat for Canadian literature fans of prose and the short story. We present you with a full audio edition of a 1984 recording of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story “Grippes and Poche” at Simon Fraser university. This story was originally published in the New Yorker magazine in 1982. Our episode producers, Kate Moffatt, Candace Sharon, and Michelle Levy are researchers of book history.\n00:01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThey contextualize Gallant’s reading and invite you to consider the physical lives of her stories. How do we respond differently to this recording of a live reading, as opposed to engaging with a printed work? What do you hear in Gallant’s reading voice and her comments as she reads? This is part one of a two-part series based on this recording of Mavis Gallant. In June, part two of the series will guide us in a deeper exploration of the characters in the short story, the author, and recorded questions from the event we will hear today. We hope you enjoy this audio edition. Here are Kate, Kandice, and Michelle with [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Episode Six of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:02:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLike all people who read or perform – I’m a fetishist. The watch has to be there and not there. And you see, that’s why I’m doing all this fiddling. Can you all hear me?\n00:02:36\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Accordion] goes into background piano] On February 14th, 1984, acclaimed short story writer Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University to do a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche”, which was printed in the New Yorker in 1982. My name is Kate Moffatt.\n00:02:56\tKandice Sharren:\tI’m Kandice Sharren.\n00:02:58\tMichelle Levy:\tAnd I’m Michelle Levy.\n00:02:59\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as three members of the Simon Fraser University SpokenWeb team, we are inviting you to come back in time with us 37 years to February 14th, 1984, to attend Gallants reading of her story [Audience Chatter].\n00:03:11\tKate Moffatt:\t“Grippes and Poche” was published in the New Yorker in November of 1982. The print publication spans nine pages [Sound Effect: Page Flipping] and includes what one expects from the New Yorker: cartoons on every page, a poem partway through, and the beginning of the next section of the magazine on the last page, which reads “social notes from all over” and includes an announcement for a Susquehanna County Sunshine Club meeting of which municipal police chief Charles Martel and his police dog will be the guests. Gallant’s reading, of course, includes none of this. And in fact, she did not read from a New Yorker copy of “Grippes and Poche”. She mentions partway through the event that she’s reading from proofs.\n00:03:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tI have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? [Laughs] Yes. These are proofs.\n00:03:56\tKate Moffatt:\tThe recording provides us with an opportunity, not only to hear the author read her own work, but to hear a version of the story unavailable to readers complete with her inflections and added commentary. Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant is one of Canada’s most noteworthy writers, known for short stories, novels, plays and essays. During the 1940s, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard where she began publishing some of her early stories, before moving to Paris in 1950 to pursue writing full-time, and where she remained until her death in 2014. The year after she moved to Paris, saw the beginning of her lifelong relationship with the New Yorker. Between the publication of “Madeline’s Birthday” in 1951 and “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” in 1995, she published over 116 stories in the magazine. “Grippes and Poche” embodies the complex linguistic, political, and national cultural spaces Gallant occupied. Although her family was Anglophone, she was educated at a convent where only French was taught. Gallant explained that she learned to write primarily through her reading of English books. And by the age of eight, she writes, English was irretrievably entrenched as the language of imagination. Born in Canada, but living in and writing about postwar France in English for an American magazine “Grippes and Poche ” speaks to the multiple cultures and histories her writing navigates. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:05:15\tMichelle Levy:\tAt the time of this SFU reading, Gallant was an established and critically successful writer. “Grippes and Poche” was her 95th story to appear in the New Yorker. Published on November 29, 1982, the story is the third in a four-part series with recurring characters. Previously, Henri Grippes has appeared in two stories, “A Painful Affair”, March 16, 1981, and “A Flying Start” September 13, 1982. Stories that recount Grippes literary rivalry with the English author, Victor Prism, and detail their early encounters with their American patroness. In 1985 these three stories were reprinted in Overhead in a Balloon, a collection that brings together 12 stories set in Paris. Nearly a decade after “Grippes and Poche”, she returned to Grippes for her final installment in the series: “Within Plain Sight”. A story that takes us forward to an aging Grippes recounting his refusal to accept the advances of his long suffering neighbor Madame Parfait, and his troubled past in Nazi occupied central France. Importantly, Gallant collected the four stories together under the titular character’s name in 1996. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:06:31\tKandice Sharren:\tThe audio cassette containing this recording is housed in the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department, where it is accompanied by a poster advertising the event, which was hosted by the now defunct Canadian Studies program in Images Theatre, a lecture hall on the Burnaby campus. Michelle unearthed this recording because of her interest in Gallant. However, once listening, we were struck by the story itself with its sharp jabs at French bureaucracy, which were emphasized by the clarity and dramatic range of Gallant’s voice on a tape recording from the 1980s. In addition to our work on SpokenWeb, Kate, Michelle, and I research 18th and 19th century book history. And in our conversations about how to approach this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we were struck by the impact of material circumstances on the recording, both in the clues it provides as to what those circumstances were and the way it imposes them on us.\n00:07:25\tKandice Sharren:\tOur framework for working with print also impacted our interpretation of this reading. Throughout Gallant interrupts herself to explain French words or phrases, or to provide additional contextual information. Independently, all three of us began referring to these asides as akin to footnotes, even though for a listener, they are not marginal commentary that can easily be ignored or skimmed, but rather are fully integrated into the reading. As you listen to this recording, we invite you to think about the places where print and audio performance intersect as well as where they diverge. What are the gains and losses of hearing the author read the story rather than reading it yourself in print. What evidence exists within the recording about the event itself? How big does the room sound and how full is it? How many people seem to be present? How does Gallant respond to their presence, reshaping her proofs along the way? Our interpretation of the recording was also impacted by the material form of the cassette, which only allows for 45 minutes per side. This means a break occurs roughly 35 minutes into the reading that attendees of the event would not have experienced. We’ll check back in with you at this break to talk more about its significance. For now, we’ll leave you with Gallant “Grippes and Poche” in 1984.\n00:08:41\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThis is a story called “Grippes and Poche”. Henri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It’s just a very gentle send up. The Poche in question is the income tax man in Paris.\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt an early hour for the French man of — [Aside] if you can’t hear just say something and I’ll do the best I can — At an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Gripes, it was a quarter to nine and an April morning. He sat in a windowless brown painted cubicle facing a slight mop headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The men wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and buttoned up blazer. His signature was O. Poche.\n00:09:46\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHis title on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read sweating was: controller. He must be freshly out of a civil service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dung-coloured folder with not much in it. A letter from Grippes full of delaying tactics and copies of his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets. Anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale and as case-hardened as Grippes. At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes spent in blithe writer-in-residence-ship in California.\n00:10:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tReturning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden under the fifth Republic for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scrapped and converted to francs at bottom rates, and of course counted as personal income. Grippes’ unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out. Straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury Direct Taxation Personal Income. That was Poche. What Poche had to discuss, a translation of Grippes’ novel, the one about the French teacher at the American university and his doomed love affair with his student Karen Sue, seemed to embarrass him. Observing Poche with some curiosity, Grippes saw unreeling scenes from the younger man’s inhibited boyhood.\n00:12:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sensed, then discerned the Catholic boarding school in bleakest, Brittany. The unheated 40 bed dormitory and nightly torment of unchaste dreams with astonishing partners. A daytime terror of real hell with real fire. Human waywardness is hardly new, said Grippes, feeling more and more secure now that he had tested Poche and found him provincial. It no longer shocks anyone. It was not the moral content of the book he wished to talk over, said Poche, flaming. In any case, he was not qualified to do so. He had flubbed philosophy, had never taken modern French thought. He must be new, Grippes decided, he was babbling. Frankly, even though he had the figures in front of him, Poches found it hard to believe the American translation had earned its author so little. There must be another considerable sum placed in some other bank. Perhaps Monsieur Grippes could try and remember.\n00:13:11\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe figures were true. The translation had done poorly. Failure plagued Grippes’ advantage reducing the hint of deliberate tax evasion to a simple oversight. Still, it hurt to have things put so plainly. He felt bound to tell Poche that American readers were no longer interested in the teacher-student embrollio. Though, there had been some slight curiosity as to what a foreigner might wring out of the old sponge. Poche gazed at Grippes. His eyes seem to Grippes as helpless and eager as those of a gun dog waiting for a command. Encouraged, Grippes said more. In writing his novel, he had over the essential development. The airing professor was supposed to come home at the end. He could be half dead limping on crutches. Toothless, jobless, broke, impotent. It didn’t matter. He had to be judged and shriven. As further mortification, his wife during his foolish affair would have gone on to be a world-class cellist under her maiden name.\n00:14:18\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWife had not entered Grippes cast of characters, probably because Poche didn’t have one. He had noticed Poche did not wear a wedding ring. Grippes had just left his professor driving off to an airport in blessed weather, whistling a jaunty air. Poche shook his head. Obviously it was not the language he was after. He began to write in a clean page of the file taking no more notice of Grippes. What a mistake it had been, Grippes reflected, still feeling pain beneath the scar, to have repeated the male teacher-female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Fleaubair, his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. The novel had not done well in France either. Poche still had to get around to that.\n00:15:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe critics had found Karen Sue’s sociological context obscure. She seemed a little removed from events of her time, unaware of improved literacy figures in North Korea. Never once mentioned. Or that since the advent of goalism, it costs 25 centimes to mail a letter. The Pill — that’s the Pill —was still unheard of in much of Europe. Readers could not understand what it was Karen Sue kept forgetting to take, or why Grippes had devoted a contemplated a no-action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. The professor had not given Karen Sue the cultural and political enlightenment one would expect from the graduate of a preeminent Paris school. It was a banal story, really, about a pair of complacently bourgeois lovers. The real victim was Grippes, seduced and abandoned by the American middle-class.\n00:16:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was Grippes’ first outstanding failure, and for that reason, the only one of his works he ever re-read. He could still hear Karen Sue. The true, the original, speaking of every vowel a poignant question. “I’m Karen Sue. I know you’re busy. It’s just that I don’t understand what you said about Flaubert and his young niece.” He would call her with tolerance, the same tolerance that had weakened the book. Grippes was wise enough to realize that the California Bank affair had been an act of folly, a conman’s aberration. He had thought he would get away with it knowing all the while he couldn’t. There existed a deeper treasure for Poche to uncover well below public treasury sites. Computers had not yet come into government use. Even typewriters were rare. Poche had summoned Grippes in a cramped, almost secretive hand. It took time to strike an error, still longer to write a letter about it. In his youth, repaid received from an American patroness of the arts three rent bearing apartments in Paris, which he still owned.\n00:17:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe patronness has had been the last of a generous species, Grippes one of the last young men to benefit from her kind. He collected the rents by devious and untraceable means, stowing the cash obtained in safe deposit. His visible way of life was stoic and plain. Not even the most vigilant controller could fault his under-furnished apartment in Montparnasse shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents. He showed none of the signs of prosperity public treasury seemed to like, such as membership in a golf club. [Aside] And this is not a joke — on French income tax form you’re asked if you belong to a golf club. It puts you in another bracket.\n00:18:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter a minute of speculative anguish and the airless cubicle, Grippes saw that Poche had no inkling whatsoever about the flats. He was chasing something different. The inexistent royalties from the Karen Sue novel. By a sort of divine even handedness, Grippes was going to have to pay for imaginary earnings. He put the safe deposit out of his mind so that it would not show on his face, and said, “What will be left for me when you finished adding and subtracting?” To his surprise, Poche replied in a bold tone, pitched for reciting quotations, “what is left? What is left? Only what remains at low tide when small islands are revealed emerging.” He stopped quoting and flushed. Obviously he had committed the worst sort of blunder, had let his own personality show, had crossed over to his opponents ground.\n00:19:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It sounds familiar,” said Grippes, enticing him further. “Although to tell you the truth, I don’t remember writing it.” “It is a translation,” said Posche. “The Anglo-Saxon British author, Victor Prism.” He pronounced it Priss-um. “You read Prism,” said Grippes, pronouncing correctly, the name of an old acquaintance. “I had to, Pris-sum was on the preparatory program. Anglo-Saxon commercial English. They stuffed you with foreign writers, Sigrid with so many of us having to go to foreign lands for a living.” That was perilous. He had just challenged Poche’s training, the very foundation of his right to sit there reading Grippes his private mail. But he had suddenly recalled his dismay, when as a young man he had looked at a shelf in his room and realized he had to compete with the dead: Proust, Flaubert, Balzack, Scondale, and on into the dark. The rivalry was infinite, a Milky way of dead stars still daring to shine. He had invented a law, a hand on publication that would eliminate the dead, leaving the skies clear for the living.\n00:20:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAll the living? Grippes still couldn’t decide. Foreign writers would be deported to a remote solar system where they could circle one another. For Prism, there was no system sufficiently remote. Not long ago, interviewed in “The Listener,” Prism had dragged in Grippes saying that he used to cross the channel to consult a sear in Halfmoon Street, hurrying home to sit down the prose revealed from a spirit universe. Sometimes I actually envied him, Prism was quoted as saying. He sounded as though Grippes were dead. I used to wish ghost voices would speak to me too, suggesting ribbons of pure prism running like ticker-tape round the equator of a crystal ball. Unfortunately, I had to depend on my own creative intelligence, modest though I’m sure it was.\n00:21:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not know about this recent libel in Anglo-Saxon commercial English. He had been trying to be nice. Grippes made a try of his own. “I only meant you could have been reading me!” The trouble was that he meant it ferociously. Poche must’ve heard the repressed shout. He shucked the file and said, “this is too complex for my level I shall have to send it up to the inspector.” Grippes made a vow that he would never let natural peak get the better of him again. “What will be left for me?” Grippes asked the inspector, “when you have finished adding and subtracting.” Madam De Pelle did not bother to look up. She said “somebody should have taken this file in hand a long time ago. Let us start at the beginning. How long were you out of the country?” When Poche said send up, he’d meant it literally. Grippes looked out on a church where Delacroix had worked in the slow summer rain.\n00:22:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt the far end of the square a few dark shops displayed joyfully trashy religious goods. Like the cross set with tiny seashells Madame De Pelle wore round her neck. Grippes had been raised in an anti-clerical household in a small town, where posing factions were grouped behind the schoolmaster, his father, and the parish priest. Women, lapsed agnostics, sometimes crossed enemy lines and started going to church. One glimpsed them in grey creeping along a grey-walled street. You were free to lodge a protest against the funds said Madame De Pelle, but if you lose the contestation your fine will be tripled. That is the law. Grippes decided that he would transform Madam De Pelle into the manager of a brothel catering to the foreign legion, slovenly in her habits, and addicted to chloroform. But he found the idea unpromising. In due course, he paid a monstrous penalty, which he did not contest, for fear of drawing attention to the three apartments.\n00:23:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was still believed he had stashed away millions from the Karen Sue book, probably in Switzerland. As summons addressed by old Poche’s shrunken hand the following spring showed Grippes he had been tossed back downstairs. After that, he forgot about Madam Dupel except now and then. It was at about this time that a series of novels offered themselves to Grippes, shadowy outlines behind a frosted glass pane. He knew he must not let them crowd in altogether or keep them waiting too long. His foot against the door, he admitted one by one, a number of shadows that turned into young men, each bringing his own name and address, his native region of France portrayed on coloured postcards, and an index of information about his tastes in clothes, love, food, and philosophers. His bent of character, his ticks of speech, his attitudes to God and money, his political bias, and the intimation of a crisis about to explode under foot.\n00:24:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAntoine provided a Jesuit confessor, a homosexual affinity, and loss of faith. Spiritual shilly-shallying runs long. Antoine’s covered more than 600 pages making it the thickest work in the Grippes canon. Then came Thomas with his spartan mother and a Provisal fruit farm rejected in favour of a civil service career. Bertrand followed adrift in frivolous Paris tempted by neo fascism in the form of a woman wearing a bed jacket trimmed with Marabou. Renee cycled round France reading Chateau Brianne when he stopped to rest. One morning, he set fire to the bar and he’d been sleeping in leaving his books to burn. This was the shortest to the novels and the most popular with the young. One critic scolded Grippes for using crude symbolism. Another begged him to stop hiding behind Antoine and Renee, and to take up the metaphysical risk of revealing Henri. But Grippes had tried that once with Karen Sue, then with a roman a clef mercifully destroyed in the confusion of May, 1968.\n00:25:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe took these contretemps for a sign that he was to leave the subjective Grippes alone. The fact that each novel appeared even to Grippes to be a slice of French writing about life as it had been carved up and served the generation before made it seem quietly insurrectional. Nobody was doing this now. No one but Grippes. Grippes for a time uneasy, decided to go on letting the shadows in. The announcement of a new publication would bring a summons from Poche. When Poche leaned over the file now, Grippes saw amid the mop of curls at coin-size tonsure. His diffedent steely questions tried to elicit from Grippes how many novels were likely to be sold and where Grippes had already put the money. Grippes would give him a copy of the book inscribed. Poche would turn back the cover, glance at the signature to make certain Grippes had not written something compromising and friendly.\n00:26:53\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe kept the novels in a metal locker fastened together with government issue webbing tape and a military looking buckle. It troubled Grippes to think of his work all in a bundle in the dark. He thought of old fashioned milestones, half hidden by weeds. The volumes marked time for Poche too. He was still a controller. Perhaps he had to wait for the woman upstairs to retire so he could take over her title. The cubicle needed paint. There was a hole in the brown linoleum just inside the door. Poche now wore a wedding ring. Grippes wondered if he should congratulate him, but decided to let Poche mention the matter first. Grippes could swear that in his string of novels, nothing had been chipped out of his own past. Antoine, Thomas, Bertrand, Renee and by now Clement, Didier, Laurent, Hughes and Yves had arrived as strangers, almost like historical figures. At the same time, it seemed to Grippes that their wavering ruffled reflection should deliver something he might recognize.\n00:27:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWhat did he see bending over the pond of his achievement? He saw a character close mouthed, cautious, unimaginative, ill at ease, obsessed with particulars. Worse, he was closed against progress, afraid of reform, shut into a literary reactionary France. How could this be? Grippes had always insincerely voted left. He had proved he could be reckless, open-minded, indulgent. He was like a father gazing around the breakfast table suddenly realizing none of the children are his. His children, if he could call them that, did not even look like him. From Antoine to Eve, his reflected character was small and slight with a mop of curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. Grippes believed in the importance of errors. No political system, no love affair, no native inclination, no life itself would be tolerable without a wide mesh for mistakes to slip through. It pleased him that public treasury had never caught up with the three apartments. Not just for the sake of the cash piling up and safe deposit, but for the black hole of error revealed. He and Poche had been together for some years.\n00:29:22\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAnother blunder, usually controller and taxpayer were torn apart after a meeting or two so that the revenue service would not start taking into consideration the client’s aged indigent aunt, his bill for dental surgery, his alimony payments, his perennial mortgage. But, possibly, no one except Poche could be bothered with Grippes, always making some time-wasting claim for my new professional expenses, backed by a messy looking certified receipt. Sometimes Grippes dared believe Poche admired him, that he hung onto the dossier out of devotion to his books. This conceit was intensified when Poche began calling him maitre. Once, Grippes won some city of Paris award and was shown shaking hands with the mayor and simultaneously receiving a long cheque-filled envelope. Promptly summoned by Poche, expecting a discreet compliment, Grippes found him interested only in the caption under the photo, which made much of the size of the cheque. Grippes later thought of sending a sneering letter, “Thank you for your warm congratulations,” but he decided in time it was wiser not to fool with Poche. Poche had recently given him a 33% personal exemption. 3% more than the outer limit for Grippes category of unsalaried earners. According to Poche, a group that included as well as authors, door-to-door salesmen and prostitutes. The dung coloured Gaulist-era jacket on Grippes’ file had worn out long ago and being replaced in 1969 by a cover in cool banker’s green — that is with the advent of a Pompidou who had been connected with a bank — green presently made way for a shiny black and white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early ‘70s Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder, “Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn.”\n00:31:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not ask what culture. He continued, bravely, ” Food for the cats. They depend on me.” said Grippes, but they had ready, settled the cats as dependents. And for all Poche drooped over Grippes is smudged and unreadable figures. Grippes tried to count the number of times you’d examine the top of Poches’ head. He still knew nothing about him, except for the wedding ring. Somewhere along the way, Poche had tied himself to a need for retirement pay and rich exemptions of his own. In the language of his generation, Poche was a “fully structured individual”. His vocabulary was sparse and to the point, centered on a single topic. His state training school, the machine that ground out pelles and Poches all sounding alike, was in Clermont-Ferrand. Grippes was born in the same region. That might’ve given something else, them —excuse me —something else to talk about. Except that Grippes had never been back. Structured Poche probably attended class reunions as godfather to classmates, children jotted their birthdays in a leather covered notebook he never mislaid.\n00:33:01\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tUnstructured Grippes could not even remember his own age. Poche turned over a sheet of paper, read something Grippes could not see, and said, automatically, “We can’t”. “Nothing is ever as it was,” said Grippes, still going on about the marbled effect folder. It was a remark that usually shut people up, leaving them nowhere to go but a change of subject. Besides, it was true. Nothing can be as it was. Poche and Grippes had just lost a terrifying number of brain cells. They were an instant closer to death. Death was of no interest to Poche. If he ever thought he might cease to exist, he would stop concentrating on other people’s business and get down to reading Grippes while there was still time. Grippes wanted to ask, “Do you ever imagine your own funeral?” But it might’ve been taken as a threatening, gangsterish hint from taxpayer to controller. Worse, far worse than an attempted bribe. Folders of a pretty mottled peach shade appeared — that accompanied [inaudible] rain.\n00:34:10\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche’s cubicle was painted soft beige. The torn linoleum repaired. Poche sat in a comfortable armchair remember—resembling the wide leather seats and smart furniture stores at the upper end of Boulevard St. Germain. Grippes had a new straight metallic chair that shot him bolt upright and hurt his spine. It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading. Grippes and Poche had not advanced one inch toward each other. Except for the paint and the chairs and maitre, it could have been 1963. No matter how many works were added to the bundle in the locker, no matter how often Grippes had his picture taken, no matter how many Grippes’ paperbacks blossomed on airport bookstalls, Grippes to Poche remained a button.\n00:35:07\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe mottled peach jacket began to darken and fray. Poche said to Grippes, ” I asked you to come here, maitre, because we have overlooked something concerning your income”. Grippes’ heart gave a lurch. “The other day, I came across an old ruling about royalties. How much of your income do you kick back?”\n00:35:29\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Excuse me?”\n00:35:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“To publishers to bookstores,” said Poche. “How much?”\n00:35:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Kickback?”\n00:35:35\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“What percentage?” said Poche, “Publishers, printers?”\n00:35:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“You mean”, said Grippes, after a time, “how much do I pay editors to edit, publishers to publish, printers to print, and booksellers to sell?” He supposed that to Poche such a scheme might sound plausible. It would fit his long view over Grippes’ untidy life. Grippes knew most of the literary gossip that went round about himself. The circle was so small, it had to come back. In most stories, there was a virus of possibility, but he had never heard anything as absurd as this or as base.\n00:36:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche opened the file, concealing the moldering cover, apparently waiting for Grippes to mention a figure. The nausea Grippes felt he put down to his having come here without breakfast. One does not insult a controller. He had shouted silently at Poche years before and had been sent upstairs to do penance with Madame Dupell. It is not good to kick over a chair and stalk out. “I have never been so insulted!” might have no meaning from Grippes, keelhauled month after month in some lumpy review. As his works increased from bundled to heap, so they drew intellectual abuse. He welcomed partisan ill treatment as warming to him as popular praise. “Don’t forget me,” Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table of La Hune, the left bank bookstore, looking for his own name and those quarterlies no one ever takes home. “Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead.”\n00:37:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tBut even the most sour and despairing and close-printed essays were starting to mutter acclaim. The shoreline of the ‘80s, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left wing heartbeat could be heard loyally thumping behind the armor of his right wing traditional prose. His re-established hero had curly hair, soft eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, dimples, and a fully structured life. He was pleasing to both sexes and to every type of reader, except for a few thick-ribbed louts. Grippes looked back at Poche, who did not know how closely they were bound. What if he were to say, “this is a preposterous insinuation, a blot on a noble profession and on my reputation in particular,” only to have Poche answer, “too bad maitre, I was trying to help.” He said as one good natured fellow to another, “well, what if I own up to this crime?”\n00:38:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It’s no crime,” said Poche.” I simply add the amount to your professional expenses. “To my rebates?” said Grippes. “To my exemption?” “Depends how much.” “At third of my income!” said Grippes, insanely. “Half!” “Ohhh—reasonable figure might be 12 and a half percent.” All this for Grippes. Poche wanted nothing. Grippes considered with awe the only incorruptible element in a porous society. No secret message had passed between them. He could not even invite Poche to lunch. He wondered if this arrangement had ever actually existed. If there could possibly be a good dodge that he, Grippes, had never even heard of. He thought of contemporary authors for whose success there was no other explanation. It had to be celestial playfulness or 12 and a half percent. The structure, as Grippes is already calling it, might also just be Poches innocent indecent idea about writers.\n00:39:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche was reading the file again, though he must have known everything in it by heart. He was as absorbed as contented and somehow as pure as a child with a box of paints. At any moment, he would raise his tender bewildered eyes and murmur,”four dozen typewriter ribbons and a third of the fiscal year, Maitre we can’t. Grippes tried to compose a face for Poche to encounter. A face above reproach. But writers, considered above reproach, always looked moody and haggard, about to scream. “Be careful,” he was telling himself, “don’t let Poche think he’s doing you a favour.” These people set traps. Was Poche angling for something? Was this bait? Attempting to bribe a public servant. The accusation was called. Bribe wasn’t the word. It was corruption the law mentioned; an attempt to corrupt. All Grippes had ever offered Poche were his own books formally inscribed, as though Poche were an anonymous reader standing in line in a bookstore where Grippes wedged behind a shaky table sat signing away.\n00:40:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Your name?” ” Whose name?” “How do you spell your name?” “Oh, the book isn’t for me. It’s for a friend of mine.” His look changed one of severity and impatience until he remembered that Poche had never asked him to sign anything. He had never concealed his purpose: to pluck from Grippes’ bright plumage every bright feather he could find. “Careful,” Grippes repeated, “careful. Remember what happened to Prism. Victor Prism, keeping pale under a parasol on the beach at Torremolinos, had made the acquaintance of a fellow Englishman. Pleasant, not well-educated, but eager to learn, blistered shoulders, shirt draped over his head, pages of the Sunday Express around his red thighs. Prism lent him something to read because his sunburn was keeping him awake. It was a creative essay on three emigre authors of the 1930s in the reviews so obscure and ill-paying that Prism had not bothered to include the fee on his income tax return.\n00:41:42\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPrism had got it all wrong, of course. Putting Thomas Mann to die in the charity ward of Paris hospital, sending Stefan Swag to be photographed with movie stars in California, and having Bertolt Brecht, who’s playing name Prism could not spell, win the Nobel Prize and savour a respected old age in a suburb of Zurich. As it turned out, none of Prism’s readers knew the difference. Prism might’ve got off with the whole thing if his new friend had not fallen sound asleep after the first lines. Waking refreshed, he had said to himself, “I must find out what they get paid for this stuff.” A natural reflex, he was at the inland revenue. He’d found no trace, no record. For inland revenue purposes death and exile did not exist. The subsequent fine was so heavy and Prism’s disgrace so acute, that he fled England to spend a few days with Grippes and the cats in Montparnasse.\n00:42:44\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sat in a kitchen chair while Grippes, nose and mouth protected by a checked scarf, sprayed terrored cockroaches. Prism weeping in the fumes — prism, excuse me, pronouncing it in French! — Prism weeping in the fumes, wiping his eyes, said, “I’m through with queen and country!” — something like that — “And I’m taking out French citizenship tomorrow.” “You would have to marry a French woman and have five male children,” said Grippes through the scarf. He was feeling the patriotic hatred of a driver on a crowded road seeing foreign license plates in the way. “Oh, well then.” Said Prism, as if to say, “I won’t bother.”\n00:43:26\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Oh, well then.” Said Grippes, softly, not quite to Poche. Poche added one last thing to the file and closed it, as if something definite had taken place. He clasped his hands and placed them on the dosier. It seemed shut for all time now, like a grave. He said, “Maitre, one never stays long in the same fiscal theater. I have been in this one for an unusual length of time. We may not meet again. I want you to know I have enjoyed our conversations.” “So have I,” said Grippes with caution. “Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time.”\n00:44:09\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s 2021 again. And at this point, the cassette holding Gallant’s reading needs to be flipped. The recording on Side A has neatly stopped after Poche’s comment, and the tape now has 12 blank seconds before it ends. We’re none of us listening to this reading by playing a physical cassette, but at this pause where I had to close the digital file with the recording of Side A and open the digital file for the recording of Side B, we were made aware of physical limitations of the cassette holding the recording that resides in the SFU archives. If you were listening to a physical copy of this cassette on an old tape player, you would be pressing the eject button to open the little plastic door, pulling the tape free, flipping it, and inserting it again, before closing the door with its soft click.\n00:44:49\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd here time grows fuzzy. We’re listening to Gallant reading in 1984, not reading her work from a page. And that brings with it an altered experience of “Grippes and Poche”. We can hear Gallant’s inflections, her commentary that doesn’t appear in print, the audience’s laughter, all the evidence alive event. We don’t see the New Yorker cartoons on every page, or Roberta Spear’s poem “Diving for Atlantis”, which appears halfway through, or the traditional New Yorker layout that looks much the same for short stories printed in the magazine today…which makes Gallant print publication in 1982 less obviously indicative of its age than the cassette recording of her reading in 1984. Even the recording itself asks us to consider the circumstances of its creation more than 30 years ago. The 12 second pause following Poche’s complete comment suggests interference by a critical editor or recorder of the reading, someone as aware as we are of the necessity to flip the tape from Side A to Side B and aware, too, of how moving from the end of one complete sentence to the beginning of another is a very different experience than hearing only the first half of a sentence and having to fumble your way towards the second.\n00:45:51\tKandice Sharren:\tThe fact that this break does not occur mid-sentence made us suspect that the recording may have been transferred from reel-to-reel. Although our attempts to learn more about how this reading was recorded turned up little solid information, they did draw our attention to a piece of SFU trivia: that many of the events held at SFU during this period were recorded by the highly regarded Vancouver-based recording engineer, Kurtis Vanel. While we have been unable to turn up definitive evidence about who recorded Gallant, our deep dive into SFU’s AV history served as an important reminder of the often unseen human hands that shape archival materials. Conversely, the unanswerable questions this break raises reminds us of the fragmentary nature of the archive as theorized by Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire. No document, whether paper or sound, can fully capture a live lived event or practice. It is with these considerations of time and form that we return to 1984, to Gallant’s reading, where her voice is shaping the story. And we’re Poche has just told Grippes that…\n00:46:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time —” [Sound Effect: Cassette Tape Deck Open and Close] “So you have read them,” said Grippes, with an eye on the locker. “Why, I read those I bought,” said Poche. “But they’re the same books.” “No. One book belongs to me. The other was a gift. I would never open the gift. I have no right to.” His voice rose and he spoke more slowly. In one of them when what’s-his-name struggles to prepare his civil service tests —and now he quotes something, presumably from one of the books — “the desire for individual glory seemed so acquisite suddenly in a nature given to renunciation.” “I suppose it is a remarkable observation”, said Grippes. “I was not referring to myself.” He had no idea what that could be from and he was certain he’d never written it.\n00:47:56\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not send for Grippes again. Grippes became a commonplace taxpayer filling out his forms without help. The frosted glass door was reverting to dull white. There were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in. A new French fashion for having well-behaved Nazi officers shore up Western culture gave Grippes a chance to turn Poche into a tuberculer poet trapped in Pari, by poverty and the occupation. Grippes throughout the first draft in which Poche joined a Christian-minded resistance network and performed a few simple miracles. Unaware of his own powers, he had the instinctive feeling that a new generation would not know what he was talking about. Instead, he placed Poche sniffling and wheezing in a squalid hotel room, cough drops spilled on the table, a stained blanket pinned around his shoulders. Up the feeted staircase came a handsome German colonel, a Kurt Juergen’s type smelling of shaving lotion, bent on saving liberal values, bringing Poche buttered cognac, and a thousand sheets of writing paper.\n00:49:09\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter that Grippes no longer felt sure where to go. His earlier books, government tape and buckle binding them into an oeuvre, had accompanied Poche to his new fiscal theatre. Perhaps, finding his career blocked by the woman upstairs, he had asked for early retirement. Poche must be in a gangster-ridden Mediterranean city, occupying a shoddy boom period apartment he’d spent 20 years paying for. He was working at black market jobs, tax advisor to the local mayor, a small innocent cog in the regional mafia. After lunch, Poche would sit in one of those Southern balconies that hold just a deck chair, rereading in chronological order all Grippes’ books. In the late afternoon, blinds drawn, Poche totted up mafia accounts by a chink of light. Meanwhile, Grippes was here in Montparnasse facing a flat, white, glass door. He continued to hand himself a 45 and a half percent personal exemption.\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe astonishing 33, plus the unheard of 12 and a half. No one seemed to mind. No shabby envelope holding an order for execution came in the mail. Sometimes in Grippes’ mind, a flicker of common sense flamed like revealed truth. The exemption was an error. Public treasury was now tiptoeing toward computers. The computer brain was bound to wince at Grippes and stop functioning until the Grippes exemption was settled. Grippes rehearsed: “I was seriously misinformed”. He had to go farther and farther abroad to find offal for the cats. One tripe dealer had been turned into a driving school. Another sold secondhand clothes. Returning on a winter evening after a long walk ,carrying the parcel of sheep’s lung wrapped in a newspaper, he crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse just as the lights went on. The urban moonrise. The street was a dream street, faces flat white in the winter mist.\n00:51:20\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt seemed Grippes that he had crossed over to the 1980s, had only just noticed the new decade. In a recess between two glassed-in sidewalk cafes, four plain clothes cops were beating up a pair of pickpockets. Nobody had to explain the scene to Grippes, he knew what it was about. One prisoner already wore handcuffs. Customers in the far side of the glass gave no more than a glance. When they got the handcuffs on the second man, the cops pushed the two into the entrance of Grippes’ apartment building to await the police van. Grippes shuffled into a cafe. He put his parcel of lights on the zinc-top bar and started to read an article on the wrapping. Somewhat unknown to him, a new name, pursued an old grievance. “Why don’t they write about real life anymore?” “Because to depict life is to attract it’s ill-fortune,” Grippes replied.\n00:52:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe stood, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. Four gun-bearing young men in jeans and leather jackets were not final authority. Final authority was something written. The printed word. Even when the word was mistaken. The simplest final authority in Grippes’ life had been O. Poche. What must’ve happened was this: Poche, wishing to do honour to a category that included writers, prostitutes, and door-to-door salesmen, had read and misunderstood a note about royalties. It must’ve been in italics at the foot of the page. He had transformed his mistake into a regulation and it never looked at the page again. Grippes climbed three flights of dirty wooden stairs to Madam DuPell’s office — I have an editorial query here: Is he imagining this? Yes. [Laughs] These are proofs. — He observed the small— the seashell crucifix and a broach he had not noticed the first time: a silver fawn curled up as nature had never planned. A boneless fawn. Squinting, Madam DuPell peered at the old dung-coloured Gaullist-era file.\n00:53:33\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe put her hand over a page, as though Grippes were trying to read upside down, and said, “It has all got to be paid back”. “I was seriously misinformed!” Grippes intended to answer. Willing to see Poche disgraced, ruined, jailed. “I followed instructions. I am innocent!” But Poche had vanished leaving Grippes with a lunatic exemption, three black market income-bearing apartments he had recently unsuccessfully tried to sell, and a heavy reputation for male-oriented, left feeling, right thinking books. This reputation Grippes thought he could no longer sustain. A socialist government was, at last, in place. Hence his hurry about unloading the flats and his difficulty in finding takers. He wondered about the new file covers. Pink? Too fragile. Look what happened with the mottled peach. Strong denim blue, the shade standing for giovinezza workers overalls. It was no time for a joke, not even a private one. No one could guess what would be wanted now in the way of literary entertainment.\n00:54:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe fitfulness of voters is such that having got the government they wanted, they were now reading nothing but the right-wing press. Perhaps it’s steady right-wing heartbeat ought to set the cadence for a left-wing outlook, with a complex bravely conservative heroine contained within the slippery, but unyielding walls of left-wings style. He would have to come to terms with the rightest way of considering female characters. There seemed to be two methods, neither of which suited Grippes’ temperament. Treat her disgustingly, then cry all over the page, or admire and respect her. She is the equal at least of a horse. The only woman his imagination offered with some insistence, was no use to him. She moved quietly on a winter evening to St. Nicolai du Chardonnay, the rebel church at the lower end of Boulevarde St. Germaine —that is the conservative-led church— where services were still conducted in Latin.\n00:55:58\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe wore a hat ornamented with an ivory arrow, and a plain gray coat, tubular in shape, and a narrow fur collar. Kid gloves were tucked under the handle of her sturdy leather purse. She had never heard of video games, push button telephones, dishwashers, frozen fileted sole, computer horoscopes. She entered the church and knelt down and brought out her rosary, oval pearls strung on thin gold. Nobody saw rosaries anymore. They were not even in the windows of the traditional venue across the square from the tax bureau. Believers went in for different articles now. Cherub candles, quick prayers, and plastic cards. Her iron meekness resisted change. She prayed constantly into the past. Grippes knew that one view of the past is just as misleading as speculation about the future. It was one of the few beliefs he would’ve gone to the stake for.\n00:56:55\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe was praying to a mist, to mist-shrouded figures. She persisted in seeing clearly. He could see the woman, but he could not approach her. Perhaps he could get away with dealing with her from a distance. All that was really needed for a sturdy right-wing novel was its pessimistic rhythm. And then, and then, and then, and death. Grippes had that rhythm. It was in his footsteps coming up the stairs after the departure of the police van, turning the key in his triple- bolted front door. And then, and then, the cats padding and mewing, not giving Grippes time to take off his coat as they made for their empty dishes on the kitchen floor. Behind the gas stove, a beleaguered garrison of cockroaches got ready for the evening sortie. Grippes would be waiting, his face half-veiled with a checked scarf. In St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, the woman shut her missal got off—off her knees scorning to brush her coat.\n00:57:59\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe went out to the street, proud of the dust marks, letting the world know she still prayed the old way. She escaped him. He had no idea what she had on besides the hat and coat. Nobody else wore a hat with an ivory arrow or tubular coat or a scarf that looked like a weasel biting its tail. He could not see what happened when she took the hat and coat off, what her hair was like. If she hung the coat in a whole closet that also contained umbrellas, a carpet sweeper, and a pile of old magazines. If she put the hat in a box and a shelf. She moved off in a gray blur. There was a streaming window between them Grippes could not wipe clean. Probably, she entered a dark dining room, fake Henri Quatre buffet — [Aside] that means something especially hideous —bottles of pills next to the oil and vinegar cruets.\n00:58:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLace tablecloth folded over the back of a chair, just oil cloth spread for the family meal. What could he do with such a woman? He could not tell who was waiting for her or what she would eat for supper. He could not even guess her name. She revealed nothing, would never help. Grippes expelled the cats, shut the kitchen window, and dealt with the advanced guard from behind the stove. What he needed now was despair and excitement, a new cat and mouse chase. What good was a computer that never caught anyone out. After airing the kitchen and clearing it of poison, Grippes let the cats in. He swept up the bodies of his victims and set them down the ancient cast-iron shoot. He began to talk to himself as he often did now. First he said a few sensible things, then he heard his voice with a new elderly quaver to it, virtuousand mean. “After all it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”\n00:59:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tNow that was untrue. And he had no reason to say it. Is that what I’m going to be like now? He wondered. Is this the new era Grippes? Pinch-mouthed? It was exactly the sort of thing that a woman in the dining room might say. The best thing that could happen to him would be shock. A siege of terror. A knock at the door. A registered letter with fearful news. It would sharpen his humour, strengthen his own private, eccentric heart. It would keep him from making remarks in his solitude that were meaningless and false. He could perhaps write an anonymous letter saying that the famous author Henri Grippes was guilty of tax evasion of the most repulsive kind. He was moreover a callous landlord who had never been known to replace a door knob. Fortunately, he saw he was not yet that mad. Nor did he really need to be scared and obsessed. He had got the woman from church to the dining room and he would keep her there, trapped, cornered, threatened, watched until she yielded to Grippes and told her name. As in his several incarnations good Poche had always done. [Audience Applause] [Begin Music: Accordion]\n01:01:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Piano and Strings] In the June episode of this podcast, we’ll be returning to Mavis Gallant’s reading of this story in an attempt to reconstruct this event from the surviving archival and textual materials, as well as the fallible recesses of human memory. This episode had us thinking about the many connections visible in the archival recording of the reading between the story itself and Gallant’s storytelling, between Gallant’s voice and the clarity of the recording and the hands that shaped it during the recording, editing, and archival processes. In June, we’ll be thinking about these connections in terms of what they can tell us about the event itself. We’d love to hear from our listeners about what caught your attention and what questions you have about Gallant’s reading on February 14th, 1984 at Simon Fraser University.\n01:02:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n01:02:16\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb [Music Begins: Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9285","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E7, Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word, 5 April 2021, Fong and O'Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/1856e0ce-b7c4-459b-a647-fda358f5396a/audio/784305a8-060a-4ebe-8a56-4876884a0869/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"56,532,367 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses\\n\\nTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray (Old phonograph “Cabaret”)\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret\\n\\nNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax\\n\\nBlur the World by Tagirijus\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world\\n\\nQueer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta \\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise\\n\\nThe following are spoken word performance clips\\n\\nMathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.\\n\\n“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books. \\n\\nHartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text, \\n\\nT.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549498101760,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode is a series of interviews with Humanities scholars Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L. Cowan about their approaches to the ethics of listening in their own research. We join Deanna Fong and Mike O’Driscoll as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio. \n\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tHi! Hannah McGregor here. Before we get into our episode today, I want to tell you about our new partner podcast [Start Music] , New Aural Cultures: The Podcast Studies Podcast. If you like the sound studies episodes of SpokenWeb, you’ll love this in-depth but accessible take on podcasting culture with hosts, Dr. Dario Linares, featuring interviews with internationally renowned podcast producers, academics, and critics, New Aural Cultures delves into the medium in all its complexity. New Aural Cultures is also a distribution network for one-off podcasts, ongoing series, and sound-based projects of all kinds. If you have a sound based project or idea that you think would lend itself to becoming a podcast, reach out on Twitter @NewAural, that’s aural as in A-U-R-A-L. To listen to the show, head over to anchor.fm/NewAuralCultures or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll even hear episodes featuring SpokenWeb members like Stacey Copeland, Jason Camlot, and me! And now onto our episode. [End Music]\n \n\n01:30\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWord Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What does ethical mean to you? Perhaps you took an ethics course in school where they taught you about Aristotle or Kant, about ethics as a system of rules or theories concerned with what is good for individuals in society. O.r perhaps ethical is something tied more to the way you live each day, your interactions with loved ones and strangers, your choices in what food to buy or political cause to support. But how does ethics apply to the way we listen? And in particular, the way we listen to the spoken word? Poet Robert Duncan once described himself as a poet who “listens as his poetry pictures his listening”. A reminder that poetry is, in its first instance, a record of sonic performance, an artistic practice that takes place as much on the stage in front of a listening audience, as on the page. What’s more, poetic performance is at its heart about attunement and attention. About a response, or a responsibility, to the world enacted through sound. We can think of listening as ethics or “po-ethics”, as the composer John Cage often said. In this episode, we joined SpokenWeb contributors, Deanna Fong, and Mike O’Driscoll, as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them. Here is Deanna and Mike [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] with “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n04:01\tMusic:\t“Take Me to the Cabaret” by Billy Murray\n04:16\tDeanna Fong:\t[Continue Music] Hi, I’m Deanna Fong.\n \n\n04:16\tMike O’Driscoll:\tAnd I’m Mike O’Driscoll. In her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Gemma Corradi Fiumara remarks that genuine listening creates ever new spaces in the very place it is carried out. We’d add, it’s a site for the emergence of something radically new. [End Music] New forms of care, new ways of relating to our environments and to each other. Like her, we believe that listening is a revolutionary activity.\n \n\n04:48\tDeanna Fong:\tOver the next hour, we will introduce you to four speakers who cultivate that creative space of listening in their practice: T.L. Cowan, Mathieu Aubin, Treena Chambers, and Clint Burnham. Each introduces us to a sound recording that is important to their work and takes us through what attentive, ethical listening means to them. As you listen to this podcast, we invite you to be attuned to your own listening by considering the following questions. What are you listening for in the space of this podcast? At what points is your attention fixed and at what points does it wander? What is the material situation of your listening? Where does it take place? What else is going on? How does listening feel in your body?\n \n\n05:30\tMike O’Driscoll:\tBy giving special attention to these cues, we hope that this episode will prompt you to reflect on your own ethics of listening by considering how you listen and what is important to you when encountering the spoken word and other sounds.\n \n\n05:47\tDeanna Fong:\tI’m going to guess that when most of us imagine what listening sounds like, we imagine nothing at all. Silence. But for queer cabaret performer and professional spokeslady Trixie Cane, also known as Professor T.L. Cowan, it sounds a lot more like this.\n \n\n06:02\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tIt’s not too late. You can [Audience Laughter] eat me today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n06:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tHi T.L. Thanks for joining us today. Can you begin by telling us a bit more about that clip and why it’s important to you?\n \n\n06:38\tT.L Cowan:\tSure. Thanks. And thanks for having me. This is just fabulous. This was my performance at the final cabaret of the Edgy Women Festival, which was a festival of feminist performance –performance art that was organized and curated by a really awesome person named Miriam Zenith GA in Montreal from 1994 to 2016. So a 22 year run of this feminist performance festival. And so this was the very last show of that festival and it was called Left Fe and the cabaret was hosted by Edgy Women superstars, Dana McLeod and Natalie Clode, and the festival or the cabaret itself was a kind of funeral awake and a celebration of life of The Edgy Women Festival. And Natalie and Dana as the hosts took us through the stages of grief. So I was invited and commissioned –invited to perform, commissioned to make a piece.\n \n\n07:35\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so I was performing as my alter ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane. And Mrs. Trixie Cane is –she’s a character who I perform in drag. And she is a professional spokeslady, and I was performing alongside my partner Jazz Rock, who is a very good cello player. And Jazz and I play together as a duo called Mrs. Trixie Cane and Her Handsome Cellist. And it was called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. That was the title of the performance. But what you’re listening to now is the very end of that performance. And this was happening at the Leon D’or Cabaret in Montreal.\n \n\n08:20\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tHi. [Audience Laughter] I’m Trixie King. [Audience Laughter] I’m here tonight to talk to you about an exciting new fundraising initiative called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. [Audience Laughter] Or, “EW-MILF-PAPT-GO-OFFE.” [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:06\tT.L Cowan:\tSo that clip is important to me because I have been a performer for many, many years, and I’ve performed in lots of different kinds of venues, but, the thing that I have found the most remarkable about a performance life is when it feels like the audience is just really picking up what you’re putting down and that they’re like, they’re in it, they’re listening, they’re following along. They get all of the stuff that you’re trying to do with your look, with your gestures, with your texts, with your movement, with your sexy cellist – all of those kinds of things. And when you’re a feminist performance artist, it’s not that often in the world that you feel “gotten” that you feel like people really get what you’re doing. Usually, in my professional life, I always kind of joke that I feel like I’m the fire-breathing lesbian in every in every professional meeting, for example.\n \n\n10:09\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so, usually the way –our ways of being in the world are kind of at a weird raw angle to a kind of mainstream straight non-feminists way of doing things. And so, when we bring our performance selves into these spaces and get that kind of applause, it’s like the best mental health medicine ever. Because it’s a moment where you feel seen and heard, understood and that you share a sense of set of references and that you share a set of aesthetics and understandings [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] and that people get what you’re doing.\n \n\n10:54\tDeanna Fong:\tThis reminds me of your recent article on the avidly channel of the LA Review of Books, which is a great series, right? It’s writing with intense eagerness [Laughs] and that essay, “Holding for Applause: On Queer Cabaret in Pandemic Times”, you wrote –there’s a quote here: “Applause is necessary. It makes us feel seen and arguably safe, loved. Applause is the audio equivalent of the sweaty crush upon crush, a bodily affirmation that you can hear. ” And I love that implication of like the sonic importance of applause there. So – how does applause and all of the other sort of like audio accoutrement of heckling and cheering and callback and all these sorts of things – how in your mind does that relate to an ethics of listening in the context of live cabaret performance?\n \n\n11:43\tT.L Cowan:\tWell kind of coming back to what I was saying earlier about the applause that I got for that – my Edgy Woman performance in 2016, I would say that that kind of applause indicates that the audience was paying attention. And that you have not been ignored. You’ve not been dismissed, you’ve not been overshadowed, you’ve not been written off as the kind of flamey queer in the room. Or as I said earlier, that like kind of fire-breathing lesbian in the room, or the angry feminist or whatever it is. But instead by bringing those elements to the stage, and bringing them into that trans feminist performance scene that you are –and telling your stories – that you’re taking a risk to a certain extent, right? That you are hoping that the audience will love what you’re doing, that they will pick up what you’re putting down.\n \n\n12:41\tT.L Cowan:\tBut you never really know. So it’s always a risk. You’re always making yourself vulnerable. And trans, feminist, and queer people know the experience of vulnerability and risk so well because almost anytime that we are ourselves, that we’re not kind of a muted down version of ourselves, in the ways that we need to mute ourselves to generally survive in our everyday lives – that by bringing the kind of full self, the flamboyant self into the space, and then for the audience to be like, “Yeah, that was amazing. I see what you’re doing!” That means that you’re being paid attention to and that not only that, but that what you have to offer is needed, not just tolerated. And so that what you’re bringing into that space is something that people need and want. And that when people give you that kind of applause back, it’s a kind of building a relationship of that kind of intensity that kind of need that kind of caregiving. So a performer giving that kind of performance is a way of caring for her or their, or his community. And for audiences to give back with that amount of attention and love, I think is a kind of ethical engagement with not just the work, but in building these spaces where these stories can be told in a way where they’re going to be supported and appreciated and attended to, and not met with a kind of like cool indifference or or derision or anything like that. But that, that you really are going to feel like your work is needed and loved, and that you are not going to be judged in a way that leaves you feeling like shit – sorry – about yourself afterwards. That you’re going to end up feeling like, “Oh yeah, I can bring my – I can bring what I’ve got here. I don’t have to tone it down.” [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] And so when audiences also don’t tone it down, then that produces a kind of reciprocity of a queer fabulousness and flamboyance and over-the-top-ness that many of us need to thrive and survive, but don’t get in our everyday lives.\n \n\n14:47\tMusic:\tTake Me to the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n15:16\tMusic:\tNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\n \n\n15:16\tDeanna Fong:\tT.L Cowan reminds us that an audience’s response, applause, cheering, and other forms of vocal affirmation are not only acts of listening, they’re also acts of care. But how does that care extend beyond the live space of the performance, into the collection and interpretation of participants’ memories of those events? To put it differently, how can historical listening also enact an ethics of care? To answer this question, we turn to our next guest, Mathieu Aubin.\n \n\n15:43\tMike O’Driscoll:\tMathieu Aubin is a scholar of print and performance cultures in Canada. He’s working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture, and his work on queerness and literary communities in Vancouver has been published in the Journal Canadian Literature. Here’s Mathieu at work interviewing legendary poet, bill bissett.\n \n\n16:11\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tI was so grateful for Warren’s support of me. There was a television station then I think called CKVU.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOkay.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nI think –\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWas that a local Vancouver station?\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nYeah.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOk.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tAnd I did a reading on it and Robin Blaser was there supporting me and saying wonderful things about me. And I lived in secret and I was, everything was kind of very bizarre and wonderful, the possibilities of things getting better. And then after that, like my phone number was listed. And after that I had death threats about five times a day –.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWow.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\t– just from that TV appearance, I was only chanting. It’s like, people are, it’s like still, I mean, Trump mobilizes those kinds of people. They’re so addicted to everything being the same. And that’s not a judgment at them. They get that way probably because they haven’t read enough books. They’re not informed enough. They hadn’t had an education. Maybe they’ve been very frightened when their children, by something awful that happened to them. And now they can’t handle anything. And it was only musical chanting that I was doing. It was based on the honey chant. And maybe I read a couple of love poems, you know? [Music Begins: Night on the Docks – Sax] And everyone in the house I was living in, they all knew that I was living there secretly, they came down in the apartment, we all watched it together. They thought it was fine [Laughs] but not everyone.  [Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n17:49\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThanks for being here with us today, Mathieu. To begin, can you give us a bit of context about the clip that we just heard?\n \n\n17:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this clip is from an interview that I conducted with bill bissett in April, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. And at the time I was really interested [Music Ends: Night on the Docks – Sax] in this reading series called The Writing and Our Time reading series that happened in 1979. And so I had the chance to meet with him in Kitsilano, a neighborhood of Vancouver. And we had met a few times beforehand, so we already had some rapport and we’ve been working together a few years. But the main interest was really about the series and thinking about perhaps its role as a form of queer cultural activism. The reason why I was thinking about that is because the series was started as a way of organizing people together and getting them to raise funds for bill bissett who’s press, blewointment press, Canada Council funding had been cut. And as you know, small presses definitely depend on that money to be able to survive.\n18:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo the issue, in part, was a result of accusations in the House of Commons in the year prior and the year before that – so ’70, ’77, ’78 – that we’re calling poetry by bill bissett as well as that by Bertrand Lachance pornographic. So the issue really was that there was this huge debate that led to a lot of backlash. And when I was asking you about the role of homophobia in those events and the House of Commons, as well as the sort of galvanizing movement around challenging what I thought was homophobia with the reading series, he told me about a CKUTV reading, and that happened in ’78 –September ’78, – that was organized by Juan Tolman and attended by many other poets. And so, what you hear in the recording here is basically him describing what happened – [Start Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod] obviously the excitement of the event, but also the kind of negative backlash that happened afterwards.\n \n\n20:06\tDeanna Fong:\tSo I know a lot of your research and also your pedagogical interests revolve around something that you’ve called listening queerly or queer listening. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the techniques and practices of queer listening?\n \n\n20:21\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this is something that I’ve been working on for a few years now, even more closely as a postdoc at Concordia. And to me, queer listening entails basically attending to how LGBTQ+ people interpret or articulate their lives. And that means like friendships, family, intimacy, politics, artistic expression, really all different kinds of facets, but from a queer position. And so, what I’m often listening for and where I’m listening for is often audio recordings of literary events or conversations, but also in oral history interviews. But when I’m thinking about old recordings, I’m mostly interested in thinking about how they’re articulating queer codes, and how they’re connecting with other LGBTQ+ writers in the room, people who are presenting an audience members, or how they also introduced their works, discuss the works and even just the works themselves, obviously, it seems like the most obvious point, but it’s not just about the work itself, but also around it. And how is it actually shaping what we’re listening for?\n21:31\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd with a quick reference to the clip that I shared with you just before we started recording, there’s one moment I – it makes me smile now listening back again, because – not the condition that he had to go through, but like when he says “living in secrecy” I know what that means, but somebody who might not quite understand the context would not be able to understand the resonances of that. And so for me, it’s thinking, okay, well, 1978-79, bill bissett gay poet, who is under the – has been targeted by the Canada parliament, excuse me, Canadian parliament – I wass going to say the Canada Council, but that wasn’t the case. And then, and also getting death threats. And so living in secrecy for him meant survival at a time when homophobia, wasn’t just something that people were like, “Oh, we’re homophobic, but we hide it.”\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s like this was public and overt. And for him it meant survival. So living in secrecy – if he is mentioning something like that – is speaking much louder from a queer positionality, if you’re listening and attending to those concerns. Or another thing could be him reading a poem about RCMP surveillance. Sure, he was arrested for possession of cannabis, but he was also surveilled for other reasons. And part of that was his own sexual identity. So, when he reads a poem about queer surveillance and the RCMP, you know that means more than simply just police state. So, what does that mean about that time period? And what does it mean to be able to share that in that moment to a public audience?\n \n\n23:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut in an oral history interview, queer listing, for me entails something not quite the same, but quite similar at the same time. And it’s about how that person, how they –they would probably identify as LGBTQ+ – how they’re interpreting whatever facet of their lives from a queer positionality and how that might resonate differently for queer listeners. So it’s not just about listening to the past, but it’s thinking about how are they interpreting that time in their life today. And that’s why I think like that moment of secrecy – living in secret system. Okay. Well, what does it mean? And maybe along the person to unpack that a little bit, or even just keeping it at that. Not letting it just be a queer code. [Transition Music: Night on the Docks – Sax]\n \n\n24:07\tDeanna Fong:\tAnd so, what sort of ethical considerations have been important in your work – especially as you say that you’re listening for the articulation of these kinds of queer codes, connections between members of communities, perhaps intergenerationally, especially when queer subjects had been the target of so much censure and violence? And I guess maybe one more, very specific question is: in that case, do you feel that there is an ethical impetus to make those codes legible outside of a queer community? Is that part of your task as an oral historian or is there a different kind of ethics that those sorts of artifacts and conversations demand?\n \n\n24:57\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think your questions are right on point. They’re important things that I’m thinking about at the moment. Some of my ways of thinking about this have been – two key ethical principles have been one – and we talked about this last week– which is non extractive listening where things like Dylan Robinsons work – but here more in the queer context because with the measure of the RCMP using tape recorders to literally record people who would be identified as queer today to incriminate them or blackmail them, how do you today listen to this from a position of white privilege and power at the institutions that we work with, and not reproduce that kind of violence? So how do you listen, not extractively but listen with or hopefully from a respectful position. And I think that part of that work – like you’re saying –is thinking about it for me through the queer context, through works that have been written about that period by people who are reflected by that time period.\n \n\n26:07\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut, “who is this for?” is a question that I keep asking myself. Am I writing this to inform the general public, or is this for the communities themselves? And I think it’s a bit of both, but always first and foremost, the queer community itself, because if you’re doing the work for others, how are they going to benefit whatsoever from listening and interpretation and oral history telling. But I think that the general public also needs to know when there’s a lack – like when they don’t understand what it is – the experiences of queer people over the last 50 years, let’s say.\n \n\n26:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat’s interesting to me is when I share these kinds of historical events with people who would identify as maybe an ally or who would try to not be homophobic [Begin Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod], they’re always – they’re often surprised by the stuff that I document for them, about this time period and share with them. So, I think that’s like – the ethics is like how do you do that in a way that’s not just meant to like reproduce the power structures? [End Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n27:26\tMike O’Driscoll:\tListening, much like the language we listen to and for can be structured by uneven relations across social forms, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. Mathieu shows us how queer codes land differently for different listeners, depending on their position in relation to heteronormative power structures. For our next guest Métis writer, scholar, and organizer, Treena Chambers, language offers us a vantage to critique and dismantle structures of colonial power, and also to heal through storytelling and deep listening. [Music start: Blur the World] Thanks again, Treena, for agreeing to meet with us. You’ve worked extensively with the Hartmut Lutz’s collection of interviews with Indigenous writers, which has been made available on the People and the Text site, listening to them, cataloging them, digitizing them, and even traveling to Germany to work with the collection. It seems that so many stories about the archive begin by encountering a box of tapes. Can you tell us that story and what that encounter was like for you?\n \n\n28:47\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah, I’m happy to. So, I was working with Dr. Deanna Reader and she had some money and was trying to go through Dr. Hartmut Lutz’s library. So, she found myself and Rachel Thomas and Thompson, and sent us to Germany [End Music:  Blur the World by Tagirijus] to go through his archives because he was getting ready to retire. And, in going through all his books and all his paraphernalia, we came across this box of tapes and low and behold, open it up, and there are interviews with all sorts of people. Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, Thompson Highway, there was just so many. And so we looked at these and immediately tried to figure out how we can save them– because very quickly, looking at the box– when you pull out a box from the 1960s and 1970s, you’re like, “Uh-Oh!” [Laughs]. Technology has changed, tapes degrade, all of that.\n \n\n29:46\tTreena Chambers:\tSo immediately we’re like, how do we, as quickly as possible get these into some sort of format that we can use? And the only thing we could do at that point was get them back to Canada and hopefully work with the library. So I packed them into a backpack and carried them through Germany and through Portugal because I was making a stop. And then back to Vancouver.\n \n\n30:10\tMike O’Driscoll…:\tHow did it feel, the first moment you got to start listening to them? What did – what was that like for you?\n \n\n30:18\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. I grew up outside of a strong Indigenous community. I had a very strong Indigenous family who understood its self as Indigenous inside those sort of walls of our home. But we grew up in a very white, small town in Canada that was proud of its mining roots and settler roots. And so there was always a conflict with how you understood being Indigenous within that context. And so sitting down and going through those tapes, was a really interesting exercise for me to think through who I was and the sort of dichotomy that I lived within. And so the tapes were really – yeah I just loved hearing [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] these people, these thinkers that I had heard at the kitchen table being heard in a larger context. [End Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n31:23\tTreena Chambers:\tOur goal was to bring them back to Canada. As soon as we saw what they were, we really wanted people to be able to hear the voice of Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous writers, and to hear them here on our shore and to give them the respect that a German scholar gave them, but nobody in Canada had given them in the past. So to bring them home, preserve what we could, document what we could, and make them available for Indigenous scholars, for settler scholars, and to bring them back to the land that they spoke of.\n \n\n32:01\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. And so I think you mentioned that you’ve listened to about 25% of this quite large collection of interviews is that right?\n \n\n32:08\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah. Yeah. It’s been a really interesting project. I mean, we were really lucky that once we got them back to Canada, there were so many other people who were willing to help us digitize them, willing to help us work towards transcripts and that. So a lot of my job became, connecting all of those different groups. So I really got to listen to just the ones that drew me [Laughs] into everything.\n \n\n32:37\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah, of course among those is Maria Campbell’s interview with Hartmut Lutz, which you’ve selected an excerpt for us to listen to today. So, would you mind giving us a little bit of context about that choice and why that tape spoke to you?\n \n\n32:51\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. So, I was lucky enough–doing the work of preserving them, that I was able to put them on my phone and listen to them as I was commuting back and forth back pre COVID days where we had to commute further than our bedroom to our living room. And so I was commuting from Burnaby to downtown Vancouver. I was doing my Master’s in –or am still doing my Master’s in public policy at SFU. And, there’s nothing quite as colonial as public policy school. And so having these – the Maria Campbell in particular interview in my ears as I was going to school was a really interesting experience, to hear her talk about her experiences in Canada, and to understand her as a strong Métis woman who really defined community for so many years for so many of us. Yeah, so it was a beautiful moment to think through what she was saying about how we tell stories, and the obligation of stories, and the work that stories do before I would go into a school that started to talk about, “Oh, we’re all neutral and we’re data driven” and I’d be like, [Laughs] I know you’re not! And I heard someone tell me that on the way to school!\n \n\n34:13\tDeanna Fong:\tNo language is neutral. No data is neutral.\n \n\n34:18\tTreena Chambers:\tExactly.\n \n\n34:18\tDeanna Fong:\tSo why don’t I play? I’ll play the clip for us here. I’ll just share my screen.\n \n\n34:24\tAudio Recording, Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, Maria Campbell:\tSo one of the things that’s very difficult for me is I don’t, I don’t think of myself as a writer. My work is in the community. Writing is just one of the moves that I use in my work as an organizer. If I think that something else will work better than I’ll, you know, so I’m, it’s multimedia kinds of things. I do video, I do film and I do oral storytelling. I do a lot of teaching. Well, I don’t like calling it teaching, but it’s facilitating. And, I work a lot with elders, so it’s not like I’m a writer and I’m bopping around all over reading and talking about the great literature or anything. I’m not a – I don’t think of myself as an authority on –in fact, I get quite embarrassed when I – if I have to speak from the point of view of a writer, because I really don’t know what that is. I know what a storyteller is. And a storyteller is a community healer and teacher. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n35:40\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. So fantastic recording and so much to talk about. Can we just start by asking you why this particular recording or this particular excerpt of this recording is important to you?\n \n\n35:54\tTreena Chambers:\tWell, I think –so in the work that I do, I’m trying to challenge the way we use language within public policy. We often talk about things like Crown land and stuff like that, but we don’t need interrogate what that means. And particularly in British Columbia, there’s no such thing as Crown land really. There’s unceded land and there’s treatied land, but the Crown [End [Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] has not established a real legal claim to the land here. And so I think often about the work that the story that we tell ourselves both in how we envision the birth of what we call Canada, how we envision our obligations to each other and what story can do. And I think in particular, Maria Campbell has taken that very, very seriously and built story and done story work that has really worked to heal many people’s experiences on the land, but also challenge our assumptions about what words mean, what story does and, how we relate to each other. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n37:13\tTreena Chambers:\tSo most of the listening that I do is done just to experience it. It’s not done with this end goal of, okay, this is my conception of this author, or of the speaker, of this process, or product. Therefore I need to listen specifically for things that relate to that. So when I’m listening, I listen just to listen. And that’s not to say that my own internal biases and my own processes and ideas don’t influence what I hear, but I don’t go into much of what I’m listening to with a specific question in mind. I don’t have a research question that I am exploring. I don’t have a specific understanding of the people that I’m listening to. That influences what I’m listening for. I try and listen just to hear what they have to say. And, for me, that allows me to experience what I’m hearing, but also to maybe hear things differently.\n \n\n38:25\tTreena Chambers:\tI think the interesting thing is when we were listening to the Maria Campbell interview, the types of quotes that people pick out and the moments like the moments that you picked out as important were ones that I’m like, nah, that’s kind of a throw away for me. Because it just wasn’t something I was listening for. The Canadian literature scene is not my scene, particularly. I have lots of friends who are in it and I love being there, but I wasn’t listening to hear Maria Campbell’s critique of, or experience of being in groups of other writers. I was just listening to see what she had to say. And in particular, I guess for me about what she had to say about community. And so that’s one of the beauties of just sort of promiscuous listening, I think, is that you don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for –just for the sake of listening that you don’t have to be made better for it. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]  You don’t have to learn from it. You can just listen and be.\n \n\n39:44\tDeanna Fong:\tWe can listen attuned to the resonances of historical context and the dynamics of power as Mathieu Aubain asks us to do, or we can listen through response as T.L. Cowan invites us as a fundamental practice of careful relationships and community building, or we can listen simply to be fully present and enjoy as Treena Chambers reminds us. But it’s listening always unequivocally a good thing? To address that question. We turn to Clint Burnham, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and a cultural theorist who brings the writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to our conversation on the ethics of listening. [Music: queer noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n40:25\tClint Burnham:\tI want to do two things. First of all, I want to hold that up and think about, or add or critique. I still believe in the idea of critique, the notion, that listening is an unalloyed good. And then secondly, I want to say, listen, if listening is not great, it’s also not, not great. So part one, we’re told in the era of #MeToo that we should listen to women. We were told in the era of reconciliation that we should listen to residential school survivors’ stories. Let me be clear that what I am not saying is that we should not listen to survivors. Yes, should we should read and listen to testimony. You have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We should read and listen to their stories and songs and novels and poems about that horrible continued history of cultural genocide in our settler colonial past and present.\n \n\n41:14\tClint Burnham:\tAnd yes, we should listen to our loved ones, our colleagues, our students, and our public figures when they talk about acts of sexual assault and improprieties. But, I also want us to think more about what listening means, what it entails. I want us to consider how listening is often the activity of the powerful. Think of the judge in a courtroom who listens to testimony, or a priest who listens confession, or a therapist who listens to a patient. The structure of listening actually bequeaths a kind of master position onto the listener, who then decides what to believe, what to do with this knowledge. We put too much trust in listening. We think the listener is a good person. It’s good to listen. We have an entire repertoire of neoliberal, therapeutic listening, active listening. “I hear what you are saying.” Blah, blah, blah.\n \n\n42:12\tClint Burnham:\tSo what am I proposing? So, I’m not proposing to get rid of listening, to stop listening, but I am proposing that listening is not, not great. Lacanian psychoanalysis proposes a different kind of listening. So it’s still based on the idea of the psychoanalyst, but it’s a different sort of modality, Lacan famously combined the words caritas, or love, and trash, or déchets in French, to characterize what the analyst does as decharite, or what was translated into English as “trashitas.” So not caritas, but trashitas, a kind of a sifting through, a listening to garbage. And part of this is because there’s a through line of Lacan talking about his work as garbage. He’ll pun on poubelle-lication – a publication and poubelle, meaning garbage. Or he’ll say his work is only fit for the wastebasket. So he is talking about his own writings as well as about what the analysand, the patient, is saying.\n \n\n43:12\tClint Burnham:\tBut trashitas comes from caritas, so it’s also the love of garbage. An example of listening as trashitas can be found in how I listened to the Radio Free Rainforest archive. So thinking about the archive, sifting through the archive, of looking for that nugget, that gold, the archival jolt, as I think actually Michael O’Driscoll first theorized it. So we’re looking for something in the archive and the rest is– the remainder, is dross, is garbage, is uninteresting to us. [Audio Recording: “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman] And so for me then finding the poem, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman…\n \n\n44:04\tAudio Recording, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman, courtesy of Radio Free Rainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books:\t[Drumming] [Singing] [Drumming] [Singing] [Repeats] [Voices overlapping]. A moment ago, once I was like, this is an interesting thing. Once I was interested in [inaudible] everything. I was talking a moment ago. Everyone’s talking to someone. Nobody’s talking to noone. [Breathing sounds]. [Singing].\n \n\n46:58\tClint Burnham:\t“Mayakovsky”, a sound poem by the sort of Canadian avant-garde sound poetry group, the Four Horsemen, active in the 70’s and the 80’s. This is actually a record that was from a record, their record, Live in the West from 1977, played on Jerry Gilbert’s radio show called Radio Free Rainforest in, I think November, 1990. And that was a show on community radio CFRO in Vancouver. That show ran for 15 or 20 years. And at a certain point after Jerry passed away, his fonds became – were collected by the contemporary literature collection at SFU. And the tapes –he taped all of his shows – I actually have cassettes of when I was on that show in the late 90’s. He would give a cassette to people when they were on the show. And he also kept tapes himself. Larry Bremner for a while was his technician as well, the Case W poet. And so all those tapes ended up at a SFU and through the SpokenWeb team of gremlins, [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] they were digitized and archived and now it’s all up on the SFU library website, which is quite amazing.\n \n\n48:20\tClint Burnham:\tAnd even then, as we just listened to the poem, sound poetry itself as a genre takes these, these kinds of – in this case, mostly with the body, but not necessarily, there’s a drum in there as well –these guttural or breathing or throat singing. There’s a bit of that Tuvan sort of thing going on there. The versions of sound that don’t quite seem to be language, that seemed to be something else that we might think of as being experimental or trashy or garbage, like in a certain kind of way. And of course, even listening for that extraneous stuff, the chatter, the car noises, the needle on the – in the grooves of the vinyl and the dust and the scratches and the vinyl that make for that kind of noise. And finally thinking about the mediation of that sound. We’re listening through a computer – it was a tape that had been digitized from a radio show. There was a record being played – what has to do with the affordances of how we listen, the ear buds, and so on. All of the ways I’ve been thinking about listening to “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen via Radio Free Rainforest, for me, is a form of listening that embodies that kind of trashitas ethics.\n \n\n49:40\tDeanna Fong:\tThat’s great. And you know what immediately comes to mind is, I remember Tony Power, who’s the contemporary literature collections librarian at SFU. When that collection came in, Gerry Gilbert’s fond , it was full of literal trash. It was full of cigarette butts and old birth control packages from the 1970s and paperclips and all sorts of things. So I think actually what you’re proposing here is a different reading of the archive itself too. Not as this elevated site of the arc-on, as we imagine it in other various theoretical texts, but literally the trash heap [Laughs] in many cases. And that’s a way to sort of unravel that archontic kind of power.\n \n\n50:32\tClint Burnham:\tYeah. I mean, both – so, I mean, it’s that trash heap, and something that Lacan rifts off from Joyce as well – a letter, a litter from Finnegan’s Wake probably –that materiality of it is trash, is the sublime is unsorted. But then also that the listening, I think, to talk about listening in terms of the trashitas means – and it’s not to, it’s not to say that what I mean, whether it’s a work of literature or a testimony or something else is trash in the sense that it doesn’t matter, it’s just that– because on the one hand, there’s this love for it, there’s this real desire to hear it– but it’s not treating it as this kind of, that that makes me a better person for having been the person who listens. That ethical call to listen is what I think really has to be, thought about because it puts the listener into this position of the master, of the beautiful soul.\n \n\n51:33\tClint Burnham:\tAnd I’m using master very conscious of the ways in which, with Black Lives Matter over the past six months since the George Floyd uprisings, has really asked us to think about what the signifiers are. And that mastery itself – we can sanitize or cancel language in terms of when – you know, master bedroom or master files and so on. And some of that obviously is very important, but I think I want to retain that idea, that one is put into a master position by the ethics of listening for precisely, for the problem of being a master. That perhaps when we call on others to listen to us, we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we’re putting them into that powerful position [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] and we have to think about that.\n \n\n52:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tSo Clint, I’d like to ask you about modalities or methods of listening then in terms of recognizing that the listener assumes a master position, even while purporting to conduct a kind of ethics of listening. So how can that position of mastery be subject to disruption or to intervention? Is – are there ways that one might imagine listening or not listening, or not assuming that position of mastery that you might imagine?\n \n\n53:06\tClint Burnham:\tThat’s the hard part. I was saying to Deanna earlier, I hadn’t got to the the conclusion. I hadn’t got to the, “what do we do now?” part of the evening. And I think it’s in part what I’m calling for. First of all – what I’m saying and what I’m asking, but also what I’m saying is that we have to think about that power position itself. And being aware of it – of that problem is the first thing. And being aware that when I’m listening to somebody tell me of – give this testimony or talking about their trauma. Let’s just say, let’s just put it in that kind of way, right. That I can’t make the mistake of thinking, or I should be really critical of thinking that this makes me a better person because I’m the one who’s listening. And in a certain kind of way, the problem with the ethics of listening is that it depends on the speaker having this trauma to bring to me. You know, I can only be a good listener if you’re going to tell me about the horrible day you had you know, at the level of an analyst or, you know, about your sin, if I’m a priest or about your crime, if I’m a judge. I can only do those – all those positions depend on that person, bringing that trash to them, bringing those horrible things to them. So my beautiful soul, as Hegel put it, as a listener, depends on the trash in the other person’s soul. And so it’s a very disavowed relation, I think, it’s something that –or a repressed relation perhaps to put it more strongly, that the listener has with what is being brought to them. That what is being brought to them, makes them into a good person. [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]And just to flip it around as well, when we are saying, “listen to me”, we are elevating that person into a position of power, and do we want to do that? [End Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n55:19\tDeanna Fong:\tLike the great variety of sounds that move us in our practices as makers and researchers, so too, are there many modalities of listening each with their own ethical demands. Sometimes listening demands an embodied response where we offer our voices as gifts freely given to a community-based and reciprocal trust. Other times, listening is about generating space. For thoughts, for reflections, for emotions, as they play out in the improvised performance between an interviewer and an interviewee. Sometimes voices ask us to listen otherwise, without the impulse to place demands upon that which we are hearing or to extract what we want to hear toward our own ends. And sometimes, listening asks that we turn the acoustic mirror back on ourselves as listeners to examine our own implications in a social and political forces that structure our listening.\n \n\n56:10\tMike O’Driscoll:\tFor us, the creation of this podcast has been an extended exercise in listening. One that in many ways has placed our own definition of ethics in tension with demands of the podcast genre. That is, what you have heard today represents only a small portion of the conversations we’ve had with friends, colleagues, and interviewees recorded and unrecorded, that themselves comprise a larger scope of listening activities around this final product.\n \n\n56:44\tDeanna Fong:\tIn the spirit of imagining an ethics of listening that is multiple, nuanced, and context-specific, we invite you to listen to the full recordings of these interviews, which have been made available for streaming on the Archive of the Present, ArchiveOfThePresent.SpokenWeb.ca. We also invite questions, comments, and further dialogue by email to Deanna.Fong@Mail.Concordia.ca and MO@ualberta.ca.\n \n\n57:11\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThank you for listening.\n \n\n57:19\tMusic:\tTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n57:28\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Deanna Fong of Concordia University, and Michael O’Driscoll from the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland, and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. Thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L Cohen for their generous contributions to this episode. Special thanks also to Deanna Reader and Alex Shield of the People and the Text project, and to Hartmut Lutz and Maria Campbell for giving their permission to share the audio from their interview here on the show. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there, and we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals]\n"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9288","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E8, Talking about Talking, 3 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3ce8b0fe-6175-403e-8a62-87afba9aed34/audio/8aae097f-18b7-4b66-8223-57c76570c48e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:00\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,780,700 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music used in episode:\\n\\nOriginal SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot\\n\\nNight Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642\\n\\nLinks to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:\\n\\nLillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/\\n\\nOctavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred\\n\\nMichelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome): https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/\\n\\nNikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world\\n\\nAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals: https://www.alexispauline.com/\\n\\nJessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel\\n\\n“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE\\n\\nShani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts\\n\\nSoledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/\\n\\nRashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/\\n\\nJeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/\\n\\nRucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549504393216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.\n\njamilah and Jessica sit down – over Zoom – with producer Katherine McLeod to share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”\n\n\n00:08\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voices]\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music Continues: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. An archive is a space of collective memory, a place where materials deemed to have historical or social significance are stored and ordered. But who controls what is collected – what gets remembered? Archives are inherently political. And we can rethink the archive as a space for celebrating marginalized voices, for contending with historical exclusion violence, and under-representation through addressing the politics of the archive, what futures might we imagine? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, artists and SpokenWeb fellows jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence award.\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tWe also hear from SpokenWeb RA poet and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run through these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking”. As the producer of the ShortCut series on the SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. Here are jamilah malika, Jessica Karuhanga, Faith Paré, and Katherine McLeod [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] with “Talking about Talking”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n02:46\tjamilah malika:\t[Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot] I’m reading Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And she has this quote here – chapter one is called “Listen”, and she says, “listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.”\n03:08\t Katherine McLeod:\tThat was jamilah malika. jamilah holds the position of Artist in Residence with SpokenWeb this year.\n03:15\tjamilah malika:\tHey everyone, I’m jamilah malika and I’m so happy to chat with you today, Katherine, about sound and my upcoming project with SpokenWeb. [End Music] I am a sound artist. I also work with tech stuff – page, but also thinking about video and installation. Mostly my practice is thinking about Black women and care. So whatever I make, no matter what it looks like, or what it reads like, or sounds like, Black women are always at the center.  [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n03:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tFor this episode of the SpokenWed Podcast, I sat down over Zoom with the two recipients of this residency, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga. In these conversations, we’ll start with an audio piece and we’ll learn how the piece began, the voices that inform it and how it’s influenced the current residency projects.\n04:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview\tWhy don’t we jump right into talking about the audio that you sent over and use that as our ground –\n04:17\tAudio Recording,  jamilah malika, Zoom interview.\tOkay! Cool.\n04:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe way that I approached these conversations was like sitting down to talk and listen together like we do on shortcuts. Yes, I’m Katherine MacLeod and you may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, a monthly feature on the spoken web podcast feed on shortcuts. I play a shortcut from spoken web audio collections as a starting point for reflecting upon what it means to listen to archival sound for my interviews with jamilah and Jessica, I thought I’d try using the ShortCuts approach in which an audio clip would be the starting point for our conversations. Listening to this piece was how jamilah and I started our conversation and that’s what we will listen to now. This is “Listen to Black Womxn” by jamilah malika.\n05:51\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Layered background sounds] This is / As a Black woman / which is / Black, Blackness/ calling myself / constantly being called out for/ my people/ my people/ I even subjugated myself and tried to hide / thinking about/ as a Black woman/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ my people/ my white boyfriend/ I said “hi, thank you!”/ [inaudible] talking in a way that makes white people comfortable has become a second skin/ I worked for 24 years in a telecommunications company without using my Trinidad dialect /super comfortable/ super comfortable/ dialect/ [Repeated breaths] Yeah/ Um, um /Yeah, um/ I’ve been moving and loving / My spirit in a way, I feel it/ As a Black woman/ in my spirit I can feel it /moving, trusting/ [Repeated breaths]/ in spirit I can feel it/ navigating /it’s so powerful /yeah / power/ like I said/ brown girl that was Black/ authority/like I said/ in relation to others/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ finding space for yourself/ finding space for yourself/ less small /with and in my body in totality/ [Repeated breaths] Um, ah, um, and, um, um, uh, / Yes, what do you feel it is in order to get your needs met?/ Which seems like a lot, but all of those things are happening/ Ugh! I don’t know [Laughs]\n10:31\tjamilah malika:\tYeah, “Listen to Black Womxn” is such a community – and lonely – it was such a weird evolution of a project. I was out in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute having a really hard time. And I was in this cool class – it was called psychoacoustics and it was led by this great artist named Kamala Patterson. And he had asked us to think really broadly about a sound project, and thinking about how sound occupies space. And I started thinking a lot about code switching and how in the space of the school, I was doing something with my voice in certain exchanges, notably with white women, where I was trying to mimic pitch and tone and like register as a way to navigate a lot of this terrible tension around being a Black girl who was making a lot of trouble.\n11:38\tjamilah malika:\tSo in my first month and a half at that school, I was in about five meetings with admin about things that we talked about in Canada, like cultural competency and decolonizing your curriculum, and what’s going on with your cannon, and how can you transform that and make it more accessible for different kinds of people. I was trying to figure out how to be a part of shifting that, and hearing myself bend and contort vocally. And so I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to do a project where I record myself doing these shifts.” And I just, I felt so lonely [Laughs]. I was just really intensely lonely. And I just put a call out to my friends, like “can you send me audio of yourselves just talking about what it’s like to talk as Black women?” Just talking about talking –\n12:37\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\n \n\nLess small/ how I’m actually always in my body / in totality/ in relation to my body/ in relation to/ trusting [Breathing]\n12:48\tjamilah malika:\t[Audio Recording of “Listen to Black Womxn” continues and fades] I made it for the class and then I took it to a sound symposium at school, and I felt really weird.\n13:54\tjamilah malika:\tAnd other times I’ve had it playing in conjunction with a video work. Other times through headphones, and I ask people to look in a mirror and watch themselves listen. And then there’s a notebook where I ask them to leave me a reflection. What does it feel like to listen to Black women? And the idea of: pay attention. So once it was at Prefixed Gallery and they have an audio art gallery, so that’s like this just very nice enclosed space. And a curator who saw it there reached out to me and asked me if I would design an enclosure. So now, I got to think about what’s the interiority of that sound as an experience of what I could wheat paste in terms of a collage, or what the smells might be in that space or what the lighting would be like that space. So it’s really been this exciting evolution at work.\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s fantastic to hear about all the different iterations of it –\n15:00\tjamilah malika:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n15:00\tKatherine McLeod:\t– and there’s so many things from what you just – because the piece is about the speaker and the speaker’s voice, but really – especially as I made a note of the word relation that starts to emerge through. And so thinking that even in the presentation of it, if there’s a sense that there’s a connection between the sound and the listener and that you could be part of developing a sound booth to design that experience, or really to be thinking about “how is this sound reaching the listener, and what is that experience like?” And so then the piece becomes about that listening experience too, which is really, really fascinating.\n15:36\tjamilah malika:\tI’m always really curious – what is it like to listen to Black women? When’s the last time? – so some of the prompts in the notebook were like, “when’s the last time you listened to Black women?” And what are those circumstances? And I think one of the showings was around the moment of Trump’s election and there was so much social commentary around –we should have listened to Black women and this idea of the Black women in your office or the Black women in your private personal spaces – how do you listen? When do you listen? Do you listen? I’m really interested in that as a bigger question.\n16:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tCircling back to that very first – the very first sound that we hear in the piece. Could you speak about that?\n16:25\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. Like the non-verbal. And I think there – in the first iterations I made, they were very legible and I think – somewhere conversations with friends, with advisors, what is a move more towards like fugitivity, and mystery and not explaining everything? And so a lot of those [makes sounds] – those sounds, they do a lot more. They do the thing they’re talking about – and how we can’t explain everything, but it can be something the body does – just a letting go of something or a sucking in of something and how that just comes out really organically.\n17:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd even the sound of it – I felt like it caught attention. You almost do take a breath yourself or just kind of really pause – the breath is so integral, but also it really says it says everything. So it’s –.\n17:39\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. You know, and there’s ways – I’m Nigerian and Trinidadian and in both of those cultures, we suck teeth and Michèle Pearson Clark has this beautiful sound work that’s also a visual, it’s an audiovisual work that’s just acquired by the National Gallery. It’s exciting when sound work is becoming a part of that echelon of art to me, because that work, you know, it’s “Suck Teeth Composition”. And it’s really just about that sound and everybody making that sound and how that sound relates to grief and to emotion and to all kinds of responsiveness and and it has meaning. And Michèle names that work “Suck Teeth Composition” after Rashaad Newsome. And he’s an African-American sound artist and that – his work is called “The Shade Composition” and it’s all these Black women making all these nonverbal sounds. And I learned about it only after making “Listen to Black Womxn”. I was like, “Wow!” It’s this really beautiful performance where he has all these Black women on stage.\n19:00\tjamilah malika:\tAnd it’s really orchestral and like a symphony of these nonverbal sounds. It’s really– it’s very special about these – [Laughs] like I just did it. These sounds that are just a part of knowing Black women. If you’re –in knowing this kind of little responses. But it’s very personal, it’s very intimate.\n19:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. And it also – thinking too about something becoming something that is so personal and intimate becoming, say a composition or becoming compositional. And I did think of the way that the voices – like I wrote down the word polyphonic at one point of thinking about what it creates. And it really – it’s this overwhelming sort of polyphony of voices, but they’re, and they, they become very musical. It felt like a very polyphonic experience in listening to it –.\n19:57\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. There’s definitely rhythm. And I think there are places when I really played that up. And it just –it felt good.\n20:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, exactly. Exactly. And it feels good to listen to as well.\n20:11\tjamilah malika:\tYeah! That’s great to hear.\n20:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I love the idea too of it being sort of – coming out of also thinking about talking about talking too –\n20:20\tjamilah malika:\tYeah.\n20:20\tKatherine McLeod:\t– because that’s something that – just thinking of it’s a way too, to think of how we connect as bodies together too. So…\n20:32\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Words with echoes and layered sounds] Just as I am/ As a Black woman/ Power in her voice/ That’s her bass/ that’s her bass / that’s her bass / that’s her bass\n20:40\tjamilah malika:\tWhen it comes to the SpokenWeb project, this is really an opportunity to build an archive that shows that Black Indigenous and People of Colour artists who make sound works, who are women, femmes, gender nonconforming, are really contributing to what sound art looks like, and it doesn’t have to be verbal. So Nikita Gale is a sound artist who I really love who makes works that – there’s an installation she has where it’s water rolling off of drum kits. And there’s an artist named Ruth Seal, some Black woman who makes a solar informed sound work. Right. So has these panels and they are connected to different notes and they sat out in this field and they just produced sound. Right? There’s just so much sound art that is really about found sound, about evoking sound, and also all the way into the spectrum of recordings that include voice, and how do Canadian Black artists show up in this work?\n22:17\tjamilah malika:\tAnd in my work, I know who I’m in conversation with. I don’t know who else knows. So the project is really about giving –and I hate to use the word visibility because it’s not about visualuality right? Because it’s giving an audibility to these sound artists who I’m really certain that when it comes to people who face the burden of representation and just the way the art as the market drives certain trends in reproducing Black pain and trauma. And I think what sound does is it undoes what visualuality does. And I think it does what visualuality cannot. It makes the listener almost interrogate themselves in a different way than looking. When I think about art and its limitations or its libertory capacity, I really think that sound art is this really exciting opportunity to free yourself of visualuality and to give whole new possibilities in terms of relating to the audience.\n23:42\tjamilah malika:\tI hope the website as an archive serves to highlight these Canadian contributions. I think there might be some works like across Turtle Island, but largely Canadian contributions to sound art – and in my greatest hopes will inspire a lot of young people who are Black Indigenous and of colour to try their hand at some sound art. There’s some great stuff in the archives like Lillian Allen, so sound poems, and Faith Paré as being really super helpful, helping me navigate the archives. So I think if I had to kind of go into the SpokenWeb archive and dig around myself, I would probably be having a way harder time. So it’s really helpful that Faith, as someone who’s at SpokenWeb is really collaborating with me and I owe her a great deal for helping me figure out –she’s like, “okay, kind of what are you, who are you looking for?”\n24:51\tjamilah malika:\tAnd I’m like, “Okay, these people, these people, these people.” And she’s like, “Got it”. And so there’s some great recordings of Shani Mootoo that she’s found. And so it’s – Shani is a writer and a novelist and also a painter it’s this quite large range, so Shani talking is going to be included. And I think it does – this idea of drawing a circle is kind of where I’m at in this moment of like, what is in, what is out, how do I make something that feels not comprehensive, but as generative as possible so that people are like, “Oh, there’s all kinds of possibilities”. And yeah, I think kind of hard definitions isn’t really what I’m going for, but more so this feeling of range. [Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n25:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with jamilah, I was interested in the kinds of resources in the SpokenWeb audio collections that she might be tapping into. And what could these recordings tell us about the sound of Black women’s voices in the archives? She mentioned SpokenWeb RA Faith Paré and I asked Faith about what she had found so far and also about the process. [End Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n26:17\tFaith Paré:\tYeah. I think what was really interesting and starting off with Cumulus project reading through it for the first time after she was selected by the jurors and starting to get acquainted with it and our first Zoom meetings, was how much I felt immediately that her project, as well as Jessica’s, was going to impact my own research as a Black woman poet with a huge research interest in Black cultural production in Canada. I’m really invested in taking a look at Black created artifacts and my own experience at SpokenWeb for the last year or so – almost a year – has been digging through and seeing what is also in the archives that is waiting to be discovered or waiting to be animated in a particular way. Last summer, I had worked with the Words and Music shows metadata and community collection which contains a lot of spoken word.\n27:16\tFaith Paré:\tThat’s a tradition that’s full of Black innovators, and it’s a tradition that I’ve come out of and I’m very familiar with. From the get-go I revisited this collection because I’d grown to know it so closely and known grown to know the curation and the collaborators on that project. I started off by essentially listening to pieces that I had already listened to a few times – sets by Lillian Allen, for example, or Takita Tanya Evanson. And then from there, it was a matter of consulting Swallow, which has SpokenWeb’s open source metadata ingestion system, as many will know, and using keywords around Black poetry and poetics in an attempt to find recordings from other institutions. Because we have lots of community collections, there were also really exciting pieces by young Black spoken word artists, who may be recording technically for the first time, as well as there were more formal readings coming out of SFU, for example, of Esi Edugyan and Juliane Okot Bitek And there was also some materials too that probably will make it into the final, just because of the particular interests that jamilah has run her project, which is really about honouring the sonic artistry of Black artists. But there were some interviews as well with Gwendolyn Brooks and the Amiri Baraka, and some more materials of Amiri Baraka’s that I wouldn’t have expected to find not only in SpokenWeb’s archives, but just to Canadian archives, per se, as well.\n28:50\tKatherine McLeod::\tIn terms of recordings that really sort of caught your attention, what would they be?\n28:55\tFaith Paré:\tWell, I’m a huge, huge, huge Lillian Allen fan. And particularly when we think about Lillian’s career and her huge influence in dub poetry, not only in Canada but in the Caribbean and around the world, that dub poetry is the perfect example of a form that integrates a literary form, and what’s going on in a studio, and also the oral performance tradition and also rejects all of those labels at once.\n29:38\tAudio Recording, “Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen\t[Caribbean Beat] Riddim and hardtimes [Singing] [Speaking] [Repeated]\n29:38\tFaith Paré:\tTo hear some of her work again in the archives was very exciting. And because I also have a huge interest in what a Black aesthetic is and what tradition of Black criticism around poetics is finding some of those Amiri Baraka interviews was very, very exciting too. And I’m very excited to revisit them. And we also –me and jamilah had another gushing moment when we got sent some Shani Mootoo  recordings and Shani Mootoo  is an Indo-Caribbean, particularly Indo-Trinidadian writer. She’s not Black, but because jamilah is Trinidadian and has a relationship and all of Shani’’s work, we had this, “Oh, wow!” moment of, I can’t believe this is like sitting in an institution. We haven’t been able to listen to it! So, it’s one of those things where I think when you’re researching, everything is never going to make it into the final cut, but still finding those recordings and knowing that they can enrich your own listening experience, or also you can pass them along to someone else who might benefit from it.\n30:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt makes me think too, that it really – in finding these recordings, it’s also changing the sound of SpokenWeb as a project and sort of it not only changes the sound of what one thinks of in terms of the sound of it [Music Begins: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions], but also the what kind of sound-based research can be done through its archival collections.\n31:13\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI really think storytelling is about self articulating. It’s also about witnessing. It’s also about every assertion or an affirmation of presence that I am here. [Music Ends: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I am Jessica Karuhanga – I also go by Kichoncho. I am a multi-disciplinary artist.\n31:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tI spoke with Jessica on Zoom. We started with an audio clip of where it all began. It is a piece called “ALL OF ME”. You can find a link to the entire piece in the show notes for this episode. We started our conversation by listening together to the opening section.\n32:05\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by  Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing] Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed. Big. And never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. [Choral Singing] Because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. [Choral Singing] [Drumming and singing begins, underlaid] I don’t want to think about the past so, like, I don’t really, like, I don’t really like to think about nostalgia because it just makes it sad because we don’t really have a family anymore. I don’t know sometimes like, cause like, just when you think about happy memories with your family, but, and you remember when your family was happy, your family is just so not even existed anymore. So thinking about those happy times, or we had like a childhood and, and we would get in the van and go camping every weekend. And our, like our summers used to be us as a family, swimming in the pool and how happy we were and I guess sometimes you gotta think about that stuff because you remember when you were just like purely happy and just didn’t have to stress out about, about the dynamic that your family was in, because you thought – felt safe and you felt secure. So I feel like I feel nostalgia. I feel nostalgic for the feeling of when I was a child and I felt secure and safe and happy, and I didn’t have any care in the world. I’m really – I was nostalgic about not necessarily even nostalgia – I just yearn for that feeling. And I wish I knew at that time that I should enjoy that feeling because I have – because of all the stuff that was going to happen. And like, I guess it makes you look forward to when I have children of my own, I want them to have those memories and then never let those memories get ruined, like the way that those memories have kind of been ruined for me. Yeah. Is that good? Sure. [Vocalizing music]. [Piano chords] There is no time in the past that I want to return to in my life because I have trouble relating to who I was in the past. I can never quite return to that headspace. I experience regret and time travel for me would be an opportunity to correct those mistakes, rather than stay within the same history as it played itself out.\n35:35\tJessica Karuhanga:\t“ALL OF ME” is the name of the piece. It’s an assemblage of voices, Black women, femmes, nonbinary, gender non-conforming folk, and I basically ask people who are close to me – so there’s that innate trust there, which felt very pertinent – to just address how they were feeling. The original voice that we listened to, the initial voice is an acceptance speech that Viola Davis made for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. I remember being really blown away by this because she was articulating something for me that transcended – kind of affirmed or reminded me that there’s a lot that you’re still injuring in doing the work or the work that she may be doing, a person that I do not know, but I felt there was analogies I could draw to my experience. So I was very moved to that notion of exhuming and withstanding these kinds of thresholds. So yeah, that just felt like the initial impulse.\n36:42\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd then I was – from that I wanted to just hear from people that I know intimately to speak to these kinds of alterities, these self-forming self articulations – the imagination, like how we imagine ourselves. So, I find that in moments of despair, there are two-fold responses: one that is kind of this nostalgic past tense, looking to the past, romanticizing it. And then it’s like, for what? For whom? Often the greater your proximity to whiteness or able-bodied cis-hetero embodiments, maybe the more likely you are to have this kind of nostalgia, or it’s about these alterities, they’re trying to imagine, a kind of Afro-future, or maybe it’s just an entirely different dimension. And there is one of the speakers who speaks to – later on to dimensionality and time travel and all these beautiful, strange things. So, it’s in a constellation with Octavia Butler’s thinking and is – actually, the project was heavily inspired by texts of her as like Kindred and Black science fiction as well. So that’s –it’s really through the voice I feel like there’s something there that maybe is tied to storytelling, mythmaking, and like oral rituals.\n38:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. I’m thinking the opening line of like, “they ask me all the time, what stories do you want to tell?”\n38:17\tJessica Karuhanga:\tYeah. I really wanted to take you kind of on a journey –a journey like where you begin being hyper aware and attentive to every word that’s being said, but that the music can be a kind of compliment or buttress or support to that voice. So, I listened over and over and over again to the recordings I recorded on voice memos, on recorders that I have – so they’re a mix of low and very high fi, depending on if I can meet in person for person or if we are geographically dislocated. But I basically listened – spent time with these recordings after getting their consent and okay to use the material, and just spot about what sounds could compliment it. Already in having these voices, it speaks to a history of assemblage and sampling, and these kind of markers of hip hop, R&B, pop music, all music at this point involves a lot of sampling and remixing.\n39:24\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThere’s all these different stylistic things that happened that were really just me kind of reflecting back –back and forth between us. So I really wanted to reinforce that kind of call and response. So I asked a question, they responded to it and I– and when they’re comfortable a few seconds into speaking, it becomes kind of free form. You kind of lose yourself in the storytelling. And then the same –then I respond again with the sound. So it’s this kind of call and response in the actual making and coalescing of the project. And also it’s a project that’s about, it’s almost 30 minutes long, the entire piece, so it’s something – I mean the experience, or witnesser always has a choice to stay or go. And also I usually have it playing on a loop on headphones, kind of evoking what might be a listening booth at music stores, just as an experience.\n40:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tTo step outside the conversation for a moment on Jessica Karuhanga’s website, there’s some documentation from a piece called through a brass channel from 2017. I wanted to ask her about a woman moving while listening to headphones. I asked her if she was listening to “ALL OF ME”.\n40:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t– the visual of the listening… so I had to ask you that.\n40:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAbsolutely. And what are you privy to? So, you’re close. Yep. Yes and no. So, in that installation, it’s – I call it like a multi-vaillant, multi-channel installation. So I had about six different works that were either sculptures, video installations, and whatnot. So, in that documentation of the performance and exhibition making, you are really saying, seeing exhibition making happening in real time and temporality, which is also like an element of music making it space making, but it’s like oral, you know? And so that person, they’re listening on headphones to the sound of a video that’s looping, but you’re not privy to the screen. And that was also a structure – a structural or a devisive choice I made – that when you entered the space, through the doorways, that the back of the screen would be towards you.\n41:50\tJessica Karuhanga:\tSo you as a spectator have to acknowledge that being a viewer, observer is a verb, is an action, that you are complicit in the space making. So someone else can go to the listening booth, listen to “ALL OF ME”on their headphones and then be watching what it is you’re looking at. So that’s why I was saying yes and no. It’s both, the two co-exist – is because someone actually had that experience where they were – they’re explaining to me that they had the headphones on and they were listening to “ALL OF ME”. And then they saw the performer in the corner, swaying back and forth with their headphones on kind of in their own world and felt like there was a moment of synchronicity, a moment that they shared that was temporal that no one else could embody and experience. So I really was wanting to cultivate that.\n42:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter hearing that response, I knew that I had to ask Jessica one more question about through a brass channel. I saw that the performance had featured a guest M. NourbeSe Philip, and I had to ask her about what that performance was like.\n43:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tthrough a brass channel was the installation, and “ALL OF ME” was one of the art-i-facts in that constellation of words. So there – there is that another project was called Kiss the Sky, another object, and they all had different names. The video that the person’s witnessing with the headphones on is called Moon and the 12th House. And there were four constant performers that are circulating the space. And I just basically told them come and go, as you please. And the roommate, the initial kind of precursors or determinants were, “I want you to come to the space with an object or a gesture. That’s something that only we share.” So someone brought in an urn, someone else brought in turmeric, someone brought in salt, someone brought in cloths. And at first you were using them the way that the general public might think to use them. Like salt, I’m pouring it out, picking it up.\n43:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI’m like –a scarf. I’m folding it, unfolding it. But over time, it went from not just using these objects to like the wall becomes material. The headphones that have a utilitarian function for visitors becomes an art material as well. So that’s where those boundaries started to blur. It’s like giving that – in the spirit of liberatory politics, giving that freedom to the people I invited in to activate the thing. And then with NourbeSe Philip we met through a childhood friend of mine who has worked with her for years. So through this connection of a mutual close person in our lives, we kind of built this friendship, or this like – from my side, it’s deep affinity and respect and reverence. And also from someone who’s very kind and generous and you feel like they’re approachable.\n45:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd so just based out of that kind of respect or affinity– I shot my shot, so to speak and asked if she would be willing to be a guest in my piece. And I think she found it really interesting because I don’t think she considers herself a performance artist, even though she does these – every year, this kind of elergy. And to be clear, I think the enactment raison is not at all a performance. It is like a reading. It is a response. It is elergic. So it isn’t – it isn’t an enactment that happens annually or sometimes multiple times a year. It’s different from performance art capital. But even with my performance art, I’m not – precisely because I am a Black queer person, it’s very different for me because of the gaze that I’m there, that we have to deal with but have no power over. It also doesn’t feel like performance art for me.\n46:00\tJessica Karuhanga:\tIt’s not – I’m not ever playing a character. It’s never play time for me. In fact, it’s exhausting. And that is why I told the performers, show up however you are, if you need to take a break, if it’s only for 15 minutes today, if it’s for four hours, what is it that you can do? So in asking Nourbese I –yeah, we didn’t, I just invited her. We’d decided on a date. We opened it to the public for people who wanted to witness. So we had seating there. And we kind of just improvised and intuited what we did. So she brought in leafs from [inaudible] – photocopied leafs and some libations and other ritual objects, because that was also –it was already happening in this space. And we just did this call and response.\n46:52\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI couldn’t tell you if it lasted an hour or two hours, there’s no documentation of it at all. Maybe some poor quality cell phone photos that were very discreetly taken so as not to disrupt the energy exchange that was happening. And the few people that shared with me, their experiences of watching us said, they thought we rehearsed it. Like there are moments of profound synchronicity or just sharing. Like there was a moment where she was making these sorts of sounds or gestures, and I kind of received it, but my eyes were closed. Just these beautiful moments that happen over and over and over again. And I think it involves trust and risk and an openness to allow for something like that to happen, to not want to control the thing, to understand that it isn’t, that it is art, but it also transcends art.\n47:45\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing].\n47:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI guess I’ll start with how my relationship to SpokenWeb took shape or came into vision. The feel of the vision. There was an open call and I responded. And then was at a moment where, we are reeling around more unmoored from not simply the deaths of George Floyd and others – just the kind of response to that. Like suddenly, because we are all forced to be silent and home and obedient kind of proletariats to care – suddenly people were like, “Oh, I have proof I’m witnessing anti-Blackness differently”. And so there’s this retraumatization that was also going on. So I had a lot of feelings thatI was going through, a lot of grief, a lot of rage, a lot of this. So that there’s that bit and then all the opportunities predicated – are riffing off of people’s guilt. Do the Instagram takeovers, to do, to make art, not even people naming that it’s directly a result of this, but we know that it is no coincidence you have all these positions popping up in institutions of Black people doing Black things and the IG takeovers, whatever it is, like all of these positions being formed in the wake. There that’s the second bit. The third bit is in my way of dealing that was plugging out and ignoring that thing. And in resistance to the pervasive circulation of images, violent images being like, I want to return to this other space. I want to be with the music I’m doing. I want to – I want to feed my senses, nourish my senses, and I want to start to heal. So I actually was remembering this piece in that project and as a whole and how nourishing it was for a different point in my life where I was also dealing with a lot of grief and illness.\n49:54\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd some friends of mine had brought up the project. So I was like, okay, there seems to be this need for this. I found myself sharing a lot of voice notes with close friends. And I was like, Oh, there’s something here with the voice note, even musically, how something like an interlude functions as this kind of interstitial thing. So I kind of put all those things together and vomited up a proposal very last minute, kind of undulating –should I, shouldn’t I? And then I was like, no, I’m gonna, this feels important. I’m going to just do this. It’d be nice to have support and resources to help make this happen because I’m one person and I don’t know how much I could actually facilitate different people being vulnerable. You know, I’m not a therapist. I don’t have a practice like that and all of these things. So that’s kind of what happened.\n50:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI responded to this open call. I got selected. And now what – how that has to do “ALL OF ME” is “ALL OF ME”  was started within my own circle. These are people that I cared deeply about. These are close friends. But I wanted to bring it expanded outward to people who are not my family, but are kin, are fam. So I was like, Oh, maybe it has to be an open call. I want to facilitate something that is bigger than me, larger than me. That can become a self-sustaining thing. So that’s how I arrived at my current project, which is basically a digital artwork, website repository for people to unleash their stories.\n51:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ve covered a lot. But I was wanting to ask you about whether you see this as an archive…?\n51:31\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI think it is. I think– I have this project that is also involved sound and performance called a #carefree. And with that, I made a video collage out of all the images and videos and Vines – when Vine was still a thing – and Twitter. With that is all archived cause hashtags are a form of archiving or classification we can say, classified through carefree Black girls. And I was like, Oh, it’s interesting –or carefree Black boy– and I was like, Oh, what if all of these things – I assembled all of these things into this visual assemblage and I responded to them. So again, that call and response thing is there. What if it’s cues for choreography? So I think of it in a similar way because these people are still living people, they’re present. They were in the moment and present when they made these videos. It’s all about self defining. Like I am deciding the terms of how I reveal and conceal and what I share, what I don’t share.\n52:38\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThat’s where the social media bit is distinct, but interesting. So I do see this as in proximity to that or in a constellation of that. So it is an archive, but I just don’t feel like oftentimes when we speak about archive particularly in relation to Indigenous subjectivities, I mean that globally. So let’s get even more specific about African peoples. There’s primitivism, it’s always about this past and this thing of like, rareify our subjectivities to the past as objects, so a larger thing, like these museological conversations, cabinet of curiosities, these kind of colonial capturing of artifacts and living beings, whether they be plant life or humans that are captured. So yeah, archive is loaded. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] Artifact is loaded, but I don’t know what other words to use. It is situated in not saying, but in a space of reclamation or something\n53:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tAt one point, Jessica refers to the recordings as “cues for choreography”, a phrase that not only suggests that the recordings invite a response, a doing, a making, but also that this doing and making might happen in another medium or art form altogether. I think back to speaking with jamilah and how throughout our conversation, she was sitting beneath a vivid painting, and only when our conversation veered into the archives towards the end and about the writers whose voices are recorded there, she mentioned Shani Mootoo  and that the painting behind her was in fact, a Shani Mootoo painting. [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I tell that story here, because it feels as though it brings it all together, the painting, the recording, the speaking body in front of the painting, the listening, the conversation.\n54:32\tjamilah malika:\tShani is a writer, and a novelist and also a painter. I’m actually sitting under one of her paintings.\n54:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tI wanted to ask you but I was like, Oh, maybe I’ll wait til the end [Laughs].\n54:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were all invitations or responses to “cues for choreography”. And thinking back to that, painting reminds one that talking about sound art is not only talking about sound. Talking about talking is not only about talking. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]What kinds of cues for choreography do the sounds of this podcast activate? In which practices of everyday life might this activation bring a kind of freedom? What might you make in response?  [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]\n \n\n55:21\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n55:36\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb team member Katherine McLeod of Concordia University. Thank you to Jessica Karuhanga, jamilah malika, and Faith Paré for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. And our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Dr. Kristin Moria of Queens University and to Tawhida Tanya Evanson of Mother Tongue Media for their role in adjudicating the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWord Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9289","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E9, Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 7 June 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/701010c0-9bb5-412c-acb0-2e48a249ca09/audio/792ab3ed-977c-43e3-9e55-a10c09f5495d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:10\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,362,594 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\\n\\n“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295.\\n\\n“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549506490368,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the March 2021 episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented the first episode of a two-part series: “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU,” which included a full-length recording of Mavis Gallant’s reading of her New Yorker short story at Simon Fraser University in 1984. In the second episode of this series, we dive into what we are calling the “paratexts” of the reading: the material and contextual circumstances that informed Gallant’s performance, including an unrecorded and unarchived event that took place the day before; the audience; the theatre; and the physical tape itself.\n\nThis episode features our efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also our own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and our interactions with the surviving archival materials. This investigation led Kate, Kandice, and Michelle to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events, and talk to Grazia Merler, a professor in the Department of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the time of the reading. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.\n\nWith additional archival materials available in a supplementary gallery, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the spoken web podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. There’s a kind of magic to finding an old recording and listening to the sounds of the past. When researchers listes to archival recordings, each sonic literary record comes with silent questions: who is speaking and who is recording? Where was this recording made? And, what are those background sounds? How are we listening to and interpreting the recording in the present and how might people have listened differently at the time the recording was made? How can we preserve this physical tape so it’s protected for future listeners? In March of this year, SpokenWeb researchers, Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy brought us a full audio edition of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story ‘Grippes and Poche’ at Simon Fraser University in 1984.\n \n\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tNow we bring you part two of the series, an exploration of the questions that surround this recording of Mavis Gallant. Kate, Kandice, and Michelle refer to these as the ‘paratexts’ of the recording. And their illuminating investigation takes us back to the year 1984 and the days surrounding Galant’s presence at the SFU podium. The stories that they uncovered are surprising and often delightful, and they help us listen to Gallant’s reading with fuller awareness of the realities that surrounded the event. Here are Kate, Kandice and Michelle with episode nine of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Mavis Gallant Part Two [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n02:34\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown, so we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10!” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office.” So anyway, [Accordian/French interlude music] it was one of those ones…\n \n\n02:58\tKate Moffat:\tOn March, 2021. We – Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented Mavis Gallant reading of her New Yorker short story ‘Grippes and Poches; as an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast – [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tI’m a fetishist. That’s why the watch has to be there and not there. And you see that’s …\n \n\n03:15\tMichelle Levy:\t[Clips of audio layered] …at the time of this SFU reading Gallant….\n \n\n03:17\tKate Moffat:\t…the recording provides us with an offering…\n \n\n03:19\tKandice Sharren:\t… the audio cassette containing this recording is housed in…\n \n\n03:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tCan you all hear me? [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:24\tKate Moffat:\tWhile we were preparing our last episode, we used our grounding in book history methodologies to think about the recording as an unofficial audio edition of “Grippes and Poche”, in which Gallant’s explanatory asides take on a role similar to that of footnotes or endnotes. In our last episode, we noted, however, that unlike footnotes or endnotes, listening to Gallant’s asides were not optional, but integrated into the text. Something paratextual became textual, so to speak [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n03:51\tKandice Sharren:\tWhile putting together the second episode, we were curious about exploring the relationship between the text and the paratexts of the reading further. Paratext was coined by Gérard Genette to describe everything that surrounds a text, including the material form the text takes, contextual information about the author, and even book reviews and interviews. Genette talks about paratexts as “thresholds of interpretation”, that is to say that they fundamentally shape how we approach, encounter and engage with the text. For the original print version of “Grippes and Poche” in the New Yorker, it’s paratextual material would include the cartoons interspersed throughout the text, other articles that appeared alongside it, and even the magazine’s signature font. These paratexts established Gallant’s story as a self-consciously literary work, one that carries with it a certain amount of prestige. In dealing with an audio recording of a text, we had to expand our idea of what a paratext might be. In the case of Gallant’s reading, the paratexts include the audible and inaudible contexts that surround the event and inflect how we interpret the story. The circumstances that surrounded Gallant’s visit, the planning that went into the reading, Gallant’s delivery, the audience, and even the tape that holds the recording.\n \n\n05:12\tMichelle Levy:\tInterested in supplementing the archival materials we found with human memory to reconstruct the event and its paratexts, we sought to make these paratexts visible by talking to Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who worked in the liberal studies department at SFU and were involved in organizing the Mavis Gallant events during her visit. I also spoke at length with Grazia Merler, a friend of Gallant’s who worked in SFU’s Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at the time of the event. [Start Music: Piano] From these investigations, we have assembled a series of conversations and artifacts to contextualize the audio recording of the reading you heard in the first part of this two-part series. To establish the paratext of this reading, we asked the following questions, which structure this episode.\n \n\n06:03\tKandice Sharren:\tFirst, what were the circumstances of Gallant’s visit to SFU in 1984? Second?\n \n\n06:10\tKate Moffat:\tWhat do we know of the reading the day before otherwise known as the fiasco?\n \n\n06:16\tMichelle Levy:\tThird, how do we place Gallant’s accent and understand her pronunciation choices?\n \n\n06:21\tKate Moffat:\tFourth, who are the unseen, but audible audience members for the reading?\n \n\n06:27\tMichelle Levy:\tFifth, why did she select ‘Grippes and Poche’ to read to this academic audience?\n \n\n06:32\tKandice Sharren:\tAnd finally sixth, what physical artifacts of the events survive and what do they tell us about the event?\n \n\n06:39\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter One: The Visit, in which Michelle talks to Grazia Merler and Gallant’s reason for visiting Vancouver becomes clear.\n \n\n06:54\tKate Moffat:\tFollowing our close listening to the recording of Gallant’s reading for our last episode, we were curious about the circumstances that brought Gallant to Vancouver in 1984, given that she lived in France for most of her life. In addition to chatting with Ann and Carolyn, Michelle was able to connect with one of Gallant’s old friends,\n \n\n07:10\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant was invited to SFU by Grazia Merler, then an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics on the recommendation of her supervisor, Merler had met Gallant while researching her PhD on Stendhal In Paris in the early 1960s. Merle told me about how she was invited to Gallant’s apartment at [French addresss] in Paris for tea. Upon arriving on a frigid day in the middle of winter, Gallant asked Merler if she wished for tea or something stronger. Merler agreed that something stronger would be welcomed. They hit it off immediately and remained friends until Gallant’s death in 2014,. Gallant lived in the same apartment in the sixth arrondissement for over four decades, from 1961 or 62 until her death. Merler told me that Golan came to visit her when SFU was first being built, and she references this first visit in her introduction for Gallant at the Burnaby event.\n \n\n08:07\tAudio Recording, Gratzia Merla:\n \n\nI talk a little bit louder. Can you hear me now?\n \n\n08:09\tAudio Recording, Audience Member:\tThat’s fine. Thank you.\n \n\n08:11\tGratzia Merla:\tIn 1965, before Simon Fraser University opened, I took a friend to the top of this mountain to show her a striking piece of architecture and the awesome site or this architecture. At that time, we both decided that we should come back to see the development of what seemed at that time a master temple. I kept my promise about 15 years ago. Mavis Gallant was the other part in the promise, and she’s keeping her part of the bargain today.\n \n\n08:56\tKate Moffat:\tAs we know from the recording of ‘Grippes and Poche’, Gallant visited SFU again in 1984, to give her reading on February 14th. The poster for the reading tells us that Gallant was, at the time of the event, writer in residence at the University of Toronto. She likely took advantage of her relative proximity to Vancouver to make good on her promise to return.\n \n\n09:15\tMichelle Levy:\tMerler told me that during this period Gallant came regularly to North America. She was being paid well for her New Yorker stories and could afford to visit friends in Montreal, as well as her editor, William Maxwell, in New York. From what we’ve been able to gather, it seems Gallant gave a number of readings at universities in Canada during this time. In addition to the SFU reading of Grippes and Poche in 1984, she also gave a reading of the same story in June of that same year at the University of Toronto, a reading of her story ‘Virus X’ at the University of Alberta in 1975, and reading at the University of Victoria, although we haven’t been able to track down a date or the story she read for that event. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano][Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages]\n \n\n10:00\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Two: The Fiasco. In which attendees and organizers Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate meet Mavis Gallant, and an event goes terribly wrong.\n \n\n10:13\tMichelle Levy:\tI was hoping that you could each just introduce yourself briefly and maybe tell us a little bit about where you are now and where you were in 1984. Carolyn, do you want to start?\n \n\n10:24\tCarolyn Tate:\tSure. Well, right now, I’m in my dining room in Toronto, Ontario in the Bloor West Village. I’ve lived in this house for about 20 years. At the time Mavis was in Vancouver I was the director of Liberal Studies – the Liberal Studies program for Continuing Studies, and I was the person who was responsible for organizing the downtown part of her visit. And as we’ll discover, it was complete fiasco. But really my main reason I’m here is I’ve been a tremendous fan of Mavis Gallant for many years. And maybe I should add that since Continuing Studies, I went to law school and I practiced intellectual property law for 20 years.\n \n\n11:10\tMichelle Levy:\tWonderful! Well, thank you so much. Ann, do you want to tell us a little bit about you now and where you were?\n \n\n11:17\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, now I’m sitting in my study in Vancouver. I live in the West End near Stanley Park and I’ve lived here for a while. But in 1984, I was in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser and Carolyn came to join us. I think she came a couple of years after I did, and we became great friends. And we had babies together. I had one, she had one, I had one, she had one. So we – the same maternity clothes were floating around the office for almost five years, which drove everybody nuts. But anyway, so we’d been friends all these years. I did my BA at U of T in English – English Language and Literature it was called then. And then I did a Master’s degree in Carlton because I was married to – at that time a physiology professor who had a job at the University of Ottawa. But then I fell in love with Peter Buitenhuis and moved to Vancouver and started working at SFU about a year after that. So – and Peter was the chair of the English department at the time that this recording was made…\n \n\n12:35\tKandice Sharren:\tIt was through our conversation with ann and Carolyn that we learned that Mavis Gallant’s visit to SFU actually included two events: the reading of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU Burnaby at Images Theater at 11:30 in the morning of February 14th, which we have a recording of, and a mid day reading downtown the day before for which we have no archival material whatsoever. In fact, we were unaware of the event on February 13th until we had the opportunity to chat with Ann and Carolyn about their experiences organizing and attending these events.\n \n\n13:09\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, first of all, you’re quite right. There was an event downtown. It was the day before the event on campus. And it was in quite a small room because we were at 549 Howe in those days and we didn’t have any large rooms. So we did – as Carolyn said, she organized the downtown talk and neither of us can remember what story she read downtown. It was not the same one as she read on campus. But I think Carolyn should tell you a little bit about that event because some of the behaviour of Mavis in the recording of the second event, I think stems from her experiences downtown. So maybe Carolyn would talk a little bit more, because you were really in charge of that event. And I certainly remember the room being full of very enthusiastic people.\n \n\n14:00\tCarolyn Tate:\tI’m happy to talk about the downtown event and Mavis. It was a fiasco, frankly. I didn’t think that there would be very many people and we had this little free room down there and somebody set up the mic and I thought, well fine. You know, 20 people will come or something like that. Well, more like 50 or so people came and the room was very crowded and we didn’t have the technician – he had set it up, but then it didn’t work. So it was really quite miserable for everybody, but especially for Mavis. She was very, very put out by it. And in truth, I was a little bit put out by how put out she was. I expected her to be this kind of, I don’t know, nothing would phase me sort of person. And really, she wasn’t that at all.\n \n\n14:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tShe was very proper. She was very neatly dressed in a very good French suit. She’d come on the airplane and she told us that she had a terrible time because she didn’t want to ask somebody to help her get her suitcase down from the bin. And you know, you couldn’t just ask somebody to help you – didn’t you know? And frankly, I didn’t know that [Laughs]. I thought – I really thought she was a bit precious. I have to say. [Laughs] But, notwithstanding that, she came along and we were going to do the talk and there was no mic. So she had to shout the whole time, and she did. And she finished, she gave her reading and people heard her. I have to say – I was so fritzed by that time that I didn’t, I didn’t know – I have no idea what story she read. I have no memory of her actual talking, which was why I was so thrilled with the recording that you have because I think she is a brilliant speaker.\n \n\n16:04\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell she was a little grumpy, I have to say. And she – not only was she grumpy, she told everybody to ask Carolyn for their money back, which was $10. The event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown. So we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10.” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office”. So anyway, it was one of those moments. But the reason I mentioned that is that the next day, you’ll notice, she says several times on the recording, “can everyone hear me? Can everyone hear me?” And the thing is that she wasn’t a very large person and she had a not particularly strong voice. So I think that having exercised her voice to the max the day before she was a little bit overly nervous on that recording about how well she was being heard and so on. And she was fussing if you remember, at the beginning, she was fussing about the microphone and so on. And I I think she was nervous about technology in the same way that both Carolyn and I are. So, we have to forgive her that. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano]\n \n\n17:24\tKandice Sharren:\t[Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Three: Mavis Speaks, in which we try to pin down Gallant’s accent.\n \n\n17:31\tKate Moffat:\tDespite Ann’s memories of Mavis being somewhat grumpy and nervous about her delivery, we all agreed upon listening to the recording that it was rather brilliantly done. She’s an engaging and dynamic speaker and one who is perhaps more self-conscious or aware of the unique elements of her delivery than her audience. In the short question period following the reading, someone in the audience asks a question, barely audible on the recording. Gallant’s response indicates she heard him mention a mistake, and contextualizes her various pronunciations of Grippes and Poches throughout the reading, which she clearly considers as slips of the tongue.\n \n\n18:02\t   Audio Recording,   Audience Member:\tBut in this context, you committed the best kind of blunder, which revealed a bit of your personality to us.\n \n\n18:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tWhat kind of blunder?\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording,   Audience Member:\n \n\nRevealing your personality.\n \n\n18:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tOh! I thought you were talking about pronunciation because when I’m reading in English in English, it’s almost impossible for me to pronounce French names in French because you have to change the pitch of your voice, you know, and it’s a different pitch, the two languages, and it interrupts the reading. And that’s why I say Grippes, Grip, Grips, just as it comes most easily, I thought you meant that [Laughs].\n \n\n18:35\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant’s remarks on her uneven pronunciation of characters’ names reveals her position between English and French and between Canada and France, not just in her adult life. All of us had strong responses to Gallant’s accent, which we struggled to place until Ann and Carolyn compared it to that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who also grew up bilingual in Canada during the 1920s and thirties. Like the New Yorker’s font, Gallant’s accent conveys particular contextual information about her and her place in history.\n \n\n19:08\tCarolyn Tate:\tI wanted to ask you what you thought of Mavis’ accent, if you had any, do you have any reaction to that? Because I found her accent quite amazing, sort of mid Atlantic. It didn’t sound totally Canadian. It didn’t sound British. It’s kind of, she kind of reminded me a bit of the way Pierre Trudeau talked, it was just its own thing. And I don’t know whether you had a reaction to that or not.\n \n\n19:42\tMichelle Levy:\tI think we had trouble –I had trouble placing it. And I remember discussing that with Kandice and Kate. I asked my husband about it [Laughs], I was like, “where is this voice coming from?” It did seem really unusual. Lovely. One of my favourite stories of hers called ‘Specs Idea’, which is from around the same time, it was in that same volume, and it’s about an art dealer. There’s this woman that owns the art that her husband has left her, and her voice is described as like trilling bells. And I always feel like that to me, that’s almost like Mavis’ voice. It’s – I thought it was beautiful. But the accent, I just, I had no idea.\n \n\n20:25\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, it’s –I think that you mentioned that she was educated in French, but her English became the language of literature for her. So I’m wondering if, as Carolyn said, Pierre Trudeau had a bilingual early childhood as well. And I’m wondering if that’s a West Mount Montreal or [French word] accent or something like that.\n \n\n20:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tI think so. I mean, that’s what I thought. I mean, his mother was –Trudeau’s mother was an Anglophone and of course, Mavis’ parents were Anglophones too, but she had this French education. [Start Music: Piano]\n21:04\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Four, The Unseen Audience. In which we learn about bums in seats, how many there were, where they sat, how they laughed. [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Our listening to the recording and our reactions to what we could hear of the event, the story, and her voice, and accent were necessarily mediated by the recording and our own personal circumstances listening to it, which differ greatly from the live experience that the audience of the reading had. Ann realized while listening to our last episode, that she could hear her husband in the audience during the reading.\n \n\n21:37\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd it was really kind of spooky for me because when I listened to the recording, I could hear Peter laughing. And I haven’t heard it for so long.\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tNo action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. [Audience member laughs] The professor, one.\n \n\n21:57\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tOne of the wonderful things about Peter was that he always laughed very loudly and the kids would always say their school plays went better on the days when he was there, cause he would laugh at all the jokes.\n \n\n22:08\tKate Moffat:\tListening to the recording, we have no information about the audience except what we can hear. With Ann’s input, We know Peter Buitenhuis, chair of the English department at the time, was in attendance, and also the longer personal history of his laugh. And this prompted a general curiosity about the audience, including how many people attended, and thus how full the very large Images Theater might have been, which isn’t something recorded in the archives.\n22:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah, I think that the Burnaby audience was not bad. I think we probably– that theater is good. I think we persuaded people to sit near the front and to kind of group, but I think that the theater would have been three quarters full. And I think that theater holds over 200 people.\n \n\n22:51\tKate Moffat:\tIn asking about and considering both our own reactions to the reading and the audience, we wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed or not from that of the individuals attending the event, who we hear occasional rumbles of laughter from\n \n\n23:04\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t…Anglo-Saxon commercial English [Audience Laughter] shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents [Audience Laughter] He showed…\n \n\n23:16\tMichelle Levy:\tNow from the talk itself you mentioned, Ann, that there were, that Mavis was asking questions at lunch about how you felt it went, and I’m wondering how you felt it went during the talk itself. I mean, it sounded again from the recording, which we’ve all heard, like it was crystal clear. So it sounds like the –some of the issues that happened the day before didn’t happen, but did you get a sense people were laughing, people were getting the jokes, people were enjoying it?\n \n\n23:49\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tYes, I certainly did. And, I was listening to the responses as the talk went on. I think the story was a bit long, quite frankly. I think –there’s a point where she tells you she’s reading from proofs and that her editor had a query. I mean, is he thinking, is this in his head or is that actually happening? So – and I had had the same thought myself, like, wait a minute, is this in this guy’s head? Or is he actually having this conversation? Or what have you. And I realized that I had drifted off, listening to the recording, and my recollection in the talk itself was that it was quite a long story. I felt at the time. And I think – but I do think people got it and there was still enthusiasm. But my recollection also is that the university classes were programmed in such a way in those days. The scheduling was done in such a way that there was a certain period of time in the middle of the day that you could fill with an event and people would have to go to class if it went too long. So I remember having a little bit of anxiety because I figured having observed her behavior the day before, if people stood up and started leaving, she was not going to be happy. So, I think I had a certain amount of nervousness about how long it was and – no concern about people’s lack of interest – but just a little bit of event planner angst I guess.\n \n\n25:21\tMichelle Levy:\tThat people would have to leave. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n25:23\tKandice Sharren:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Piano] [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Five: Choosing ‘Grippes and Poche’, in which we reconsider Gallant’s story in light of the audience she performed to and are deeply unimpressed with Henri Grippes.\n \n\n25:45\tMichelle Levy:\tOne of the things that I find most fascinating about paratexts is that they don’t just work one way. Artistic choices are made anticipating a certain format of publication. When we’re talking about print, it can be hard to pin down how involved an author was in the design of, say their book. Although we do know that Gallant wrote many of her stories specifically for the New Yorker, meaning that she would have been aware of the format her stories would be published in. Again, down to the font, although probably not the cartoons.\n \n\n26:15\tKandice Sharren:\tIn the case of a reading though, it’s a lot easier to see how a writer might be responding to their immediate context, which led us to ask: why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984? As you may recall, in her introduction to the reading, Gallant describes her story as a “gentle send-up” or satiric commentary.\n \n\n26:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHenri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It was just a very gentle send-up.\n \n\n26:59\tKandice Sharren:\tShe may have chosen the story for its delicate comedy, as she sends up French bureaucracy, as we meet the hapless and misinformed tax agent, O. Poche and Henri Grippes with his secret apartments and tax evasion. The main object of her send-up seems to us to be Grippes as writer. As Jonathan Coe noted in the London Review of Books in 1997, “Grippes is one of her most memorable characters, a shallow opportunistic writer who nevertheless, somehow manages to elicit the reader sympathy by virtue of his rotten luck and his chronic unpopularity with the book buying public. There’s a mordant redeeming humor here, which has given free rein then in Gallant’s weightier stories.”\n \n\n27:41\tMichelle Levy:\tDoes he elicit the reader’s sympathy though? I have to say, as someone who rents in Vancouver, I am hard pressed to want to spend time looking for a slumlord’s redeeming qualities, especially when it’s paired with literary opportunism. I really found myself hoping that Poche would catch him out by the end. So hearing Ann and Carolyn discuss the reading really struck a chord with me in part, because I kind of agreed with Carolyn’s assessment of the story.\n \n\n28:09\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah. I’m kind of surprised, ann, that you say that people received the story well, and that they laughed and whatnot because I found the story of a bit dismal. I think of it, she mentions Flaubert, as I was saying to Kate at some point during the story, and I feel that this was her kind of her Flaubertian moment or something. And it kind of reminded me of that novel the [French book title] by Flaubert where he has the ex-bureaucrat and somebody else doing all of this extremely grotesque kind of pseudo literary stuff. And I found that when I read the story, it dragged quite a lot and I didn’t find it all that amusing. And I think of it also as sort of the beginning of the end of her North American kind of– well, maybe I’m wrong about this because I think that North American readers were fascinated and gripped by these expats that she wrote about. I don’t think they were so interested in French bureaucrats and you know, French literary life and who is this English writer anyway, you know? Anyway, as I say, I don’t think it’s her best moment. Although because of this literary aspect of things, I’m going to read the other Henri Grippes stories and see whether, you know, they kind of interest me more now that I thought a little more of a take on this kind of this world.\n \n\n29:38\tMichelle Levy:\tCarolyn, if you read the rest of the Grippes story, you will indeed find much more on this kind of the French literary scene – corruption may be a bit strong, but there’s a really hilarious whole story about this attempt to write an encyclopedia of French authors that drags on for decades because they’re constantly changing who they think is important and who should be included, and the editors keep fighting with each other.[Laughs] It’s really funny. So there’s definitely more of that in that series of stories about the writer.\n \n\n30:13\tCarolyn Tate:\tI did read them sometime, but that’s very Flaubertian too. That’s what this –I don’t know whether you’ve ever read this, [French book title], it’s a terrible thing actually, but this is their whole thing too. They’re trying to be more and more kind of literary and correct, and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete balls up, frankly. [Laughs] I think Henri, he’s sort of in that frame somewhere.\n \n\n30:44\tMichelle Levy:\tThat said, and in Carolyn’s discussion of the literary trends of the 1970s and 80s,, a period that I didn’t live through and haven’t paid much attention to either academically or in terms of its literary culture, but one that ‘Grippes and Poche’ engages with did help me appreciate what exactly this story was doing.\n \n\n31:04\tKandice Sharren:\tI was struck by the sexual politics of the story, and particularly Gallant’s deadpan, imagining of a very capital P problematic male writer. Grippes regrets that in his American novel, he resorted to the stale male teacher, female student pattern. Could this failed attempt to write a novel about an academic romance be the reason for her choice?\n \n\n31:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t… female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Flaubert with his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. [Audience Laughs]\n \n\n31:48\tKandice Sharren:\tThis line elicits a knowing laugh from the audience. In fact, Gallant had been one of the first to write about a real life female teacher, male student affair between a 32 year old Gabriel Roussier and her 16 year old pupil for the New Yorker in 1971. It was a story that scandalized France, when it broke in 1967, as the parents of the boy brought legal proceedings against Roussier, that resulted her in her imprisonment, and that brought about her suicide in 1969. As Gallant dryly points out in her article about the affair, the story was an old one rife with the double standard, reflecting what Gallant calls “a prevailing belief that Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis.” ‘Grippes and Poche’ ends on a note of implicit violence as Gallant relates Grippes storytelling as a process of stocking and confining one of his female characters. In her reading, she slows down to relate his menacing attempt to invent a female character.\n \n\n32:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe had got the woman from church to dining room and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, and watched until she yielded to Grippe and told her name.\n \n\n33:08\tKandice Sharren:\tThus ending the story on a more ominous note than the gentle send-up with which it begins.\n \n\n33:14\tMichelle Levy:\tThe story is commentary on sexual politics in a campus environment, complimented her location and audience. In our conversation with Carolyn and ann, they speculated that the academic satire within Grippes and Poche, maybe one of the reasons why Gallant selected this story for her on-campus reading.\n \n\n33:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tDon’t you think she was a brilliant reader on campus?\n \n\n33:36\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI do. And I was thinking about the context of that story: 1984. And I kind of – I was thinking, what else was being published at the time? And it was interesting that she was sending up the campus drama, the campus romance, the professor who falls in love with the student – and remember he had written a failed novel. It wasn’t quite good enough in that genre. And so I was thinking who was writing in that genre that time? And I remember David Lodge’s trilogy – do you remember? And they were so good. They were so good. And so I think, she was sort of sending up professors and sort of commenting a little bit on David Lodge’s three books, which were Changing Places in 1975, Small World – an academic romance in 1984 – and Nice Work in 1988.\n34:33\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd the other thing too I found was – as Carolyn said earlier –just the vagaries of literary tastes. People going in and out of fashion and suddenly being reinvented as somebody who’s okay with women, at a time when, when suddenly we’re worrying about whether or not somebody has the right feminist credentials to be read by the students in women’s studies, et cetera. So I think that there was certainly a memory for me of literary tastes and fashions and so on that I found quite interesting hearing the story again. None of this occurred to me particularly at the time.\n \n\n35:19\tKandice Sharren:\tIt’s something that testament to these vagaries of literary trends that I had actually never heard of David Lodge before. Apparently this shocked Michelle who asked me if I was sure I wanted to admit to this publicly. When I think of campus novels, I think of on the one hand, Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night published before the outbreak of the Second World War, or on the other hand, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. But I haven’t really read any written between the Second World War and the early 2000s, perhaps because the sexual politics of novels written in that period speak to a very different historical moment, and one that isn’t the subject of nostalgia, the way something like Sayers book is.\n \n\n36:05\tMichelle Levy:\tThe literary context of this story are only part of it’s satire though. Grippes refashions the dull civil servant in an attempt to keep up with literary fashion, but also with the winds of political change. The beginning of the story is set in 1964 and ends in the early 1980s, thus tracking both the progress of Grippes writing career and that of the fifth Republic itself.\n \n\n36:29\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe other thing though, I thought that was interesting about the story was how she talked about the change in government and this story spans 20 years or something. And so you have those [French phrase] coloured folders and you have the Charles DeGaulle coloured folders and so on. And the poor old tax guy gets his baby face gets sterner, and he got some little bald spot in his curls and so on. And so there’s a sense of a time passing. To me that sort of Proustian, and maybe that was a kind of melange of that as well. I really haven’t thought too much about what she might’ve been trying to accomplish in terms of her own oeuvre, but she had published that some years before she read that story. So it certainly wasn’t new work she was reading. But I have a feeling she kind of hauled out something that she thought might appeal to an academic audience. And the question that you asked…\n \n\n37:34\tMichelle Levy:\tDespite the literary and political moments that Gallant’sstory is in conversation with, her language has a strikingly timeless quality, precisely descriptive, but with a wry restraint that ironically captures the rhythms of Grippes thoughts.\n \n\n37:47\tKandice Sharren:\tIn writing about a writer, Henri Grippes, Gallant celebrates his flights of imagination, but also wryly observes his limitations. The meta-fictional elements of the story are both profound and comic as we are treated to a description of Grippes entire oeuvre, and also to his inability to recognize himself in his characters. On contemplating the protagonists of his books, Gallant dryly explains that…\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe was like a father gazing around the breakfast table, suddenly realizing none of the children are his.\n \n\n38:18\tKandice Sharren:\tThis was something that Ann commented on too.\n \n\n38:21\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI thought she had some wonderful metaphors and some wonderful sentences. I mean she talks about the shoreline of the 80s at one point –and talking about the rise to acclaim as this man’s career is a little bit rejuvenated at the end of the 80s. And she had just lovely, lovely metaphors from time to time and quite extended – she’d spin it out in kind of interesting and droll ways. And so I really admired her as a wordsmith in this story. And– as I said earlier, I did feel it was a rather long story, but I felt that her language – I had forgotten what a fine craftsman she was. [Start Music: Piano] She really, she really does write in a very original and refreshing way\n \n\n39:26\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter six: Grippes and Poche in the archive, in which Ann remembers the reel-to-reel machine at the reading and a hunch is confirmed. [End Music: Piano] Listening to Gallant’s original and refreshing language in her own voice is only possible through the archival remains of the event, especially their high-quality. In the March 2021 episode we talked about how these archival materials –in this case, the tape that holds Gallants reading – reveals the hands that manipulated it. The clean break between sides one and two had us convinced that despite the fact that the tape said “master” on it, it was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n40:11\tKate Moffat:\tWe were delighted to hear Ann confirm some of what we questioned and hypothesized in the first episode surrounding Curtis Vanel’s involvement. In a subsequent email, she shared with us that “the sound technician was set up on the right side, facing the stage and had a desk with reel-to-reel recorder. I always paid to have the technician there. Otherwise someone else had to make sure the record button was pushed and that the thing was at the right level. The technician also made sure the audio levels were good. I have a vision of Curtis walking up to the mic, turning it on and checking, and then adjusting the height for Mavis, and then sitting down. He would have done the same for Grazia.” She even recalled that Vanel was particularly interested in generations of recordings. His master tape was the one that other generations were created from.\n \n\n40:55\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI remember having many conversations with Doug about first and second generations. I mean, this is before things were digitized. So, he used to make a master cassette that would come from the reel-to-reel stuff that he did. And it would be very clean, whereas the reels would not be – I mean, he was a master at fixing things, getting rid of all the ums and ahs and whatever. And so he probably then had a master cassette from which copies would be made, but he would always hold onto the master because every copy was another generation. So that was the way he thought about it.\n \n\n41:40\tKate Moffat:\tAs far as we, and the folks in the SFU archives have been able to determine, we no longer have the original reel to reel for this reading evidence of its existence lies only in evidence of editing hands on the cassette tape, recording. [Start Music: Accordion]\n \n\n42:01\tKandice Sharren:\tOur interview with Ann and Carolyn, and Michelle’s conversation with Grazia Merla was a reminder that while the archives can provide records and a certain amount of contextual information, particularly when you pay sustained attention to your materials, they cannot capture everything. Ann’s recollection that Images Theater was three quarters full for the reading is information we would never have been able to track down otherwise, as it wasn’t recorded anywhere. Gallant’s fussing over the microphone at her reading in Images Theater is informed by the technical difficulties the day before. And that day before the event downtown uncaptured on audio doesn’t seem to exist in the archive at all, only in fickle human memory.\n \n\n42:56\tMichelle Levy:\tWe want to end by connecting our conversations about the reading with the larger paratextual paper record, including the label on the cassette, the poster used to advertise the event, and the proofs Gallant was reading from. In addition to these materials, we were also fortunate to obtain a copy of proofs of photos, taken of Gallant by Bruno Schlumberger on November 1st, 1990, during another visit to Canada. These photos taken near the Rideau canal in Ottawa offer a wonderful glimpse of Gallant, charming, exuberant, but still well-dressed and put together. Kate, Kandice and I were not fortunate enough to have met Gallant or heard her read in person, but with these photos and the recording and our interviews with Ann, Carolyn, and Grazia, yet we are able to conjure a distinct portrait of this most entrancing and provocative writer. [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n44:06\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada., Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini-stories about how literature sounds."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9290","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E10, Robert Hogg & The Widening Circle of Return, 5 July 2021, Carpenter"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Craig Carpenter"],"creator_names_search":["Craig Carpenter"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/13172193219706490344\",\"name\":\"Craig Carpenter\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7dd301e3-2ea3-4ad4-928a-50c123f42cfd/audio/85084a62-41f6-40e0-bfaf-b9835fe7c239/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e10-roberthogg.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,818,467 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e10-roberthogg\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-07-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Sound Recordings Featured:\\n\\nArchival Audio from PennSound.com\\n\\nShort intro clips of: Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering: all from PennSound digital archives.\\n\\nRecording of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC/the_red_wheelbarrow_multiple.php\\n\\nRecording of “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Duncan/Berk-Conf-1965/Duncan-Robert_01_Often-I-am-Permitted_Berkeley-CA_1965.mp3\\n\\nRecording of “I Know a Man” by Robert Creely: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley/i_know_a_man.php\\n\\nRecording of “Maximus From Dogtown I” by Charles Olson: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Olson/Boston-62/Olson-Charles_14_Maximus-Dogtown-2_Boston_06-62.mp3\\n\\nArchival Audio from AMP Lab’s Soundbox Collection\\n\\nRobert Hogg reads at Black Sheep Books, Vancouver, 1995: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\\n\\nArchival Audio from KPFA \\n\\nRobert Hogg reads at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965: http://www.kpfahistory.info/bpc/readings/Young%20poets.mp3\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549511733248,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of poets at UBC Vancouver began a little magazine: the TISH poetry newsletter. The TISH poets would later be called one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. In the summer of 2019, Craig Carpenter visited one of the former editors of TISH magazine —who is also his former professor of modern Canadian poetry. Based on interviews conducted during this visit and a subsequent visit in the winter of 2019, Craig has created an episode that explores his evolving relationship with his former professor and scenes from more than 50 years of literary history. Craig takes us through the relationships and the stories that formed a part of the TISH movement and the poet that Robert Hogg has become.\n\nCraig gives a heartfelt thank you to all those who took the time to offer feedback on early script drafts: Deanna Fong, Judith Burr, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell. Special thanks to Dr. Karis Shearer, all of his  colleagues at the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, and, of course, to Robert Hogg.\n\n0:00\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Theme Music]\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history began at UBC Vancouver—the TISH poetry movement. The voices of many TISH community members have been archived and cared for within the SoundBox collection at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab as part of the SpokenWeb Project. Today, UBCO Masters student Craig Carpenter brings us on an immersive and personal sonic journey into the life and poetry of one TISH: poet Robert Hogg. Craig was a student of Dr. Hogg’s, and in this episode, he weaves archival recordings together with original interviews with Bob, taking listeners on a poetic journey. The episode takes us back and forth in time—into the sonic spaces of poetry readings, the laughter of present day conversations, and worlds of memory and reflection. This is an audio story about Robert Hogg the professor, Bobby the poet, the TISH community, the power of Canadian poetry, and the moving emotion of mentorship and connection across decades of shared inspiration. Here is Craig Carpenter with Episode 10 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return.\n \n\n \n\n02:11\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\t[Begin Music Gentle Instrumental] [Faint voice and car sounds in background] Mountain Path Farms…Hogg.\n \n\n02:31\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s August of 2019. I’m on my way to visit my old professor at his farm on the outskirts of Ottawa. As I approach, I notice one of the “Gs” of his last name has fallen off the sign at the foot of the long drive towards Mountain Path Farm. This is where Robert Hogg raised his family, ran his flour mill, and studied and crafted his poetry since the 1970s. It’s been a quarter of a century since I knew Bob as my professor of modern Canadian poetry at Carleton University.\n \n\n03:10\tSound Effects Mixed with Original Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Sound of car key turning off the ignition and car door opening]\n03:24\tCraig Carpenter:\tWhen Bob greets me at the door, I reflexively call him Professor Hogg. He is just as I remember, except a little more rounded and perhaps a bit more jovial in nature. As Bob offers a quick tour of the old farmhouse, our feet creek the fat wooden plank flooring, and I wonder—who else has trod these floors? What stories could they tell? [End Gentle Instrumental Music] [Sound Effect: Whirring sounds of tape rise] [Faster Instrumental Music Begins]\n \n\n04:01\tCraig Carpenter:\tI have decided to return to school to work with Dr. Karis Shearer on the SpokenWeb Project. A box of tapes donated by my former professor awaits digitization. [Sound Effect: Whirring sounds of tape end] The box contains recordings of his own poetry community from the 1960s at UBC’s Vancouver campus.\n \n\n04:24\tAudio Recording, Short clips of Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, and George Bowering from PennSound Archives:\n \n\n[Instrumental Music Continues] The microphone may seem like a lot of rigmarole, but actually…it’s necessary. [Faint voice] This isn’t working? [echoing inaudible voices] Poem. Poem. [Stammering voice] Did that introduction – does that come off my twenty minutes?\n04:46\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] The voices of his former professor Warren Tallman and his peers, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt, Gladys Hindmarch, Fred Wah, and George Bowering are not only being preserved through digitization, but remediated and re-presented through new forms, such as podcasts like this one.\n \n\n05:10\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Audio recording, Sounds of door latch opening]\n05:17\tCraig Carpenter:\tAfter the tour of the farm house, Bob asked me to give him a hand moving a few things in the barn. The barn is oddly clean for a barn, I think. In fact, there is an astonishing order to everything at Hogg farm. Even the out-of-order tractors appear to be meticulously cared for. Bob shows me the remnants of his old grain mill. He somewhat softly recounts its last days of operation. And then his demeanor shifts. There’s a sudden bounce in his step as I follow him up a set of stairs to what used to be a hayloft. We take a bin filled with periodicals down to an old office. [Recording of voices rises in the background] The former office is jammed with books, magazines, and bins of papers. There’s scarcely room to step as we enter. This is what Bob refers to as the overflow of his poetry collection. [Gentle Instrumental Music Continues]\n \n\n06:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\n[Inaudible] …this says sun, S-U-N… [Sounds of rustling papers.] Georgia Straight…one of my poems was in there too. Anyways, somebody somewhere along the line will want to go through all this stuff, I knew most of the Beat poets…\n06:31\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nYou did.\n06:33\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\n…The only really important Beat poet I never met with Jack Kerouac…[Recording continues and fades. Gentle Instrumental Music Continues]\n06:34\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt would be easy to spend hours sifting through the old journals. But finally, we head back to the house and up the narrow wooden stairs to Bob’s writing room. [Instrumental Music Tempo Increases] The slanted ceiling meets an entire wall of books stacked with first edition Ginsbergs and Kerouacs. Knowing this is where Bob crafts his poems, the attic feels like a cathedral of sorts. Bob positions himself behind his desk and turns on his computer. He is keen to record himself reciting his work.\n \n\n07:19\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nAlright.\n07:20\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nAnd let me just get this in a better position, and…[inaudible]…I’ll just monitor that while you read…Just do a test first.\n07:31\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nYeah…Okay, so I’m going to read a poem called “Amber Alert”, and I’ll just read the first few lines and we’ll test it out.  [Reading poem] It  was a day like any/ other you know / the kind the poet/ wrote about /people/ going about their business. [Ends Poem]\n 07:44\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nThat’s good. Yeah, I think we’ve got that good so… [We hear a click as Craig presses play on the recording and Bob’s voice appears again] “a day like any/other you know / the kind the poet/ wrote about /people/ going about their business.”\n07:56\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Bob reads a few newer poems. I’m reminded of William Carlos Williams by some of Bob’s poetry, and we begin to talk about the poetics of Williams and Ezra Pound who were both major influences on the TISH and the American Black Mountain poets. We discuss Williams’ statement: “No ideas but in things.”\n \n\n08:17\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tYou do need to remember that one of the problems with modern verse, when you drop all the trappings that were typical of  traditional writing in the form and structure—like a sonnet, for example, with its rhyme scheme and everything—you are left with a fairly naked body of words, right? And something in those words has to keep that poem cohering for people…it has to keep jumping at you in some way. And of course, between Pound’s insistence on the image and Williams’ more direct insistence on the Thing, which is also of course the image — you know, that helps to bring that idea of the vividness of experience into focus in the writing of poetry. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n09:02\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of William Carlos Williams reading “The Red Wheelbarrow”:\n \n\nThe red wheelbarrow // so much depends / upon// a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens\n09:11\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tThings trigger, right? They really do. They are they—I think that could be, that could be quite, quite exciting at times. And I guess, sometimes it leads to something quite profound and other times it just leads to something, you know, a little bit more expressive or it widens the perception or whatever it does, or deepens it maybe. Hand me those scissors. You can hand them to yourself. [Craig laughs] This poem is called “A Miller’s Tale.” [Reading poem] These tailors sheers / that long before I was born / cut yards of fabric my English grandfather sewed into clothes / for Finchley’s finest /  somehow passed onto my father / settled in Canada after the Great War / never used them for anything so far as I can tell / except to leave them to me who gave them a second life / when I opened the flour mill / mountain township 1983/found them rusting slightly / ideal for trimming paper flower bags / 25 to 10 kg / and after stitching cut the thread old job once again / as fate would have it/lying now on the carpet of my study floor /  tucked under the tredel of mom’s old Singer sewing machine/sent from Langley decades back / the plywood crate reworked to become the grain hopper of both my 30 inch stone mill / it must be 30 years before it all went still. [Poem ends] And that’s the sewing machine over there, and they typically lay underneath the treadle. I have been using them lately so that’s why they’re in my drawer. Yeah. Yeah. [Sound effect of shearers clipping echoing.] [Gentle Instrumental Music Begins]\n \n\n10:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s 1959 in the sleepy town of Abbotsford, British Columbia. Among the carousels of paperbacks at Bennion’s Pharmacy the teenage Bobby Hogg is stumbling across Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The only poetry Bobby has heard spoken aloud up to this point is the Victorian verse his father recited to him as a child. He loved listening to his Dad recite poems. But like so many of his generation, it’s On the Road that opens up a new way of hearing words and seeing the world. It isn’t long before his high school friend Frank Davey, who has skipped a couple of grades and gone off to UBC ahead of him, is bringing Bobby the City Lights Pocket Poets Series books. Bobby devours the little books filled with free verse. Among his favourites: Ginsberg’s Howl, Gasoline by Gregory Corso and the selected poems of Robert Duncan.\n \n\n11:47\tSound Effects Mixed with Original Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Low rumble of a car driving mixes with the music]\n11:56\tCraig Carpenter:\tAt the end of December 1959, Frank pulls into Bobby’s driveway in Langley where his family had just moved. He’s driving his ‘47 Ford coupe. He orders Bobby to get in. [Sound of car door shutting] Frank’s professor Warren Tallman and his wife Ellen have invited Robert Duncan to Vancouver to read. Duncan is here. In person. In the Tallmans’ basement. Tonight. Bobby didn’t have a choice.\n \n\n12:26\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tI said, “well, I’m busy,” he said that doesn’t matter how busy you are, you’ve gotta come. And it was like, I mean, if he put a shotgun to me as it were. And says, if you don’t come to this you’re blowing your whole life—which was, totally would have been true. So, I can’t remember now whether I jumped in his car with him. We both had—he had a ‘47 Ford coupe and I had a ‘48 Ford coupe. Real classic cars in our time. And so, I either went with him, which I think I did, and then he must have had to bring me back again the next day or something. In any case he did. We went in together and I heard Robert Duncan read his poetry in Warren’s basement. That was absolutely the quintessential moment in my entire life in terms of poetry, because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was really hearing poetry from a distinguished person that I had never been able to hear before. I mean I’d read famous poets but I’d never heard one read. So I went from being just sort of genuinely interested in poetry to being converted, I guess you could say, by this experience. And I think I felt from that moment on I would probably have to write poetry as a means to survive, right. In my spiritual side, right. And it’s been true for me ever since. And he read the poems that were then subsequently published in The Opening of the Field including that famous poem, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” which is the poem I think he started off the reading with. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n13:40\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Robert Duncan reading “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:\tOften I am permitted to return to a meadow // as if it were a scene made up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, // that is mine, it is so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought / so that there is a hall therein // that is a made place, created by light // wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. // Wherefrom fall all architectures I am / I say are likenesses of the First Beloved / whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. // She it is Queen Under The Hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded. // It is only a dream of the grass blowing / east against the source of the sun / in an hour before the sun’s going down // whose secret we see in a children’s game / of ring a round of roses told. // Often I am permitted to return to a meadow / as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos, // that is a place of first permission, / everlasting omen of what is.\n \n\n14:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nWhat was the effect of actually hearing him?\n14:48\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tWell, the effect was incredible, because we hadn’t—The Opening of the Field was not yet in print. It came out that year actually in 1960. But, well, the next year—it was ‘59 when I actually heard him. But still, it was almost 1960, it was like the end of December, 1959. And that book came out with Grove Press just a few months later. But he was reading from manuscripts still, right? So the poems that were in The Selected Poems were not like the poems in The Opening of the Field. He broke new ground there. It was a lot more accessible. It was a lot—to me it was a lot more poetry that somehow spoke about poetry. I mean that very poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”—that meadow immediately becomes a page, it becomes the subject of poetry itself. [recites part of the poem] as if it were a scene made up by the mind, / that is not mine, that is a made place // that is mine, it is so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought. [ends recitation] I mean, all those things are statements about writing, right? And then he says, “that is mine, it is so near to the heart.” Okay, [laughs] I’m hearing that, and I’d never heard anybody talk about the act of writing. I mean, I think I intuited right away that this was a poem about writing not about a meadow or some children playing a children’s game. It really was all about the process of writing. That’s what I think I heard — something new about writing, which is often about writing. It’s surprising how much of modern poetry [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] and maybe all poetry has been to some degree about writing.\n \n\n16:21\tCraig Carpenter:\tBob tells me this now mythic Duncan reading set off a chain of events that included the evolution of TISH. We now know, from the work on hidden labour that SpokenWeb researchers Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer have done, that it was Warren Tallman’s wife, Ellen, who knew Duncan personally, and not only arranged for him to come read, but also helped select which poems he would read. Bob explains to me what it was about this reading that changed his relationship to poetry.\n \n\n16:52\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tWhat that reading that he gave in Warren’s basement did for me, I think, that nobody else had done before [End Gentle Instrumental Music] and probably very few people have done since, was that it gave me a sense of the physicality of language as it was being spoken. Not only in the gestures that he was making. The body—the way he embodied, he seemed to embody poetry for god’s sake, he was like a walking poem. He was very much—he was a showman and he was very much involved in being like a shaman, shamanistically, you know demonstrating with his body what the poem was about. Robin Blaser was a bit like that too. I don’t mean to say in the cheapest sense of showmanship, there was a bit of showmanship in it too, let’s face it. But it really had to do with wanting to show physically what was going on in the physical nature of the poem. I had been taught about poetry that had things going on in it. Like you could scan a poem and you could say, yeah it’s got iambic pentameter, it’s got anapestic, whatever, four beats to a line, or whatever. But nobody made me hear a poem, nobody made me think of the poem as a physical gesture that was being spoken aloud. And that was the thing that I really got from Duncan’s reading. I heard poetry being read aloud as though this was what its real articulation was, not on the page but in the air. And in his body and my body because we’re both in the same room together and I’m hearing and feeling it, the way you do music. It’s like trying to stand still when some really incredible rock band is playing right in front of you. It’s pretty hard [laughs], sometimes you just gotta move with it. You just want to say, oh my god, I really feel, I just want to dance. The dance that was part and parcel of Duncan’s poetic sensibility and his gestures as a writer I think really hit home for me. [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n18:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tDeclared “the Wonder Merchants” by Warren Tallman in his essay of the same title, the group of poets who created TISH magazine were all students of Tallman’s at UBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They are known for having been heavily influenced by the American Black Mountain poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Critic C.H. Gervais calls TISH one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. My old professor, another Robert, was a “TISHITE” or a member of TISH himself and considered part of the second wave of the movement. After Bob hears Duncan read, the following fall, he follows Frank to UBC. Like his friends Frank and George Bowering who precede him, and other second-wave TISH editors like Daphne Marlatt and Gladys Hindmarch, Bob takes poetry classes with Warren Tallman.\n \n\n19:51\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] The most important thing, in some ways, besides Duncan’s reading in Vancouver at that time, was the emergence of the New American Poetry Anthology by Donald Allen, right. Not only did it have poetry by all these people in it—\n \n\n20:02\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nThat was the book I think we studied.\n20:04\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nYeah, yeah. In my class. Yeah, no doubt. I still have copies. I even have my original here. This is my old original copy. If this was on video it would be exciting. [Gentle Instrumental Music and Audio Recording continue under narration]\n20:14\tCraig Carpenter:\tAs his cat jumps onto his desk, Bob pulls a well-thumbed and  marked-up copy of the New American Poetry Anthology from his bookshelf.\n \n\n20:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Multiple Speakers:\n \n\nI’ll take a photo of it. This is a first edition probably. It is utterly falling apart. 1960, see that? Bob Hogg. What’s it say, Arts one at UBC. [Laughter]\n20:37\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Like the old books on Bob’s shelf, there are audio reels from the late 50s and early 60s that are also falling apart. These reels hold living memory in voice. They are the only means we have to hear how poets spoke their poems aloud. And unlike books, these literary analog audio objects are at risk of decaying and disappearing forever [Sound Effect: tape slowing down on reel] if they are not preserved through digitization. [Sound Effect: Sound of click and reels rewinding]\n \n\n21:04\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Faster-Paced Instrumental Music] It’s late Spring of 2019 and Professor Karis Shearer and I are in the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan. Karis shows me the box of analog reels given to her by her colleague Jody Castricano. Warren Tallman gave Jody the box and told her when the time was right she’d know what to do with them. It’s been over two decades since I’d threaded a reel-to-reel machine. Scrubbing my memory from second year radio journalism class, I manage to loop the brittle 50-plus year old magnetic tape across the playheads and onto the take up reel. [Sound effect: Threading tape and clicking play]\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Warren Tallman:\tFlood tide below me, I see you face to face. [Inaudible] of the west…[Recording continues under narration]\n \n\n21:57\tCraig Carpenter:\tTallman’s voice leaps out of the machine at us. As if magically fast forwarding through time, his rich harmonic tone captures us immediately. [Audio, from recording: …the tires and the usual costumes…] Its magnetic authority and ringing certainty must have been incredibly moving to hear in person as a student.\n \n\n22:19\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Warren Tallman:\n \n\n…Are more curious….\n22:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Recording Ends] [End Faster-Paced Instrumental Music] Well, he was a remarkably beautiful prof. How else to say it? I think he did more to make poetry available to me as a young writer and as a young reader. I think those two words are almost synonymous with each other. I try to tell people today, if you’re not a reader of poetry, you can’t be a writer  of poetry. And if you think that reading your friend’s poetry is being a reader of poetry, you’ve got another learning curve coming because there’s so much wonderful poetry that’s been written throughout the ages that we all have to become more immersed in in order to have some sense of what we are trying to do ourselves as writers. And  Warren was remarkably eclectic in his appreciation of poetry. Warren had a great capacity for reading poetry and letting every syllable of the poem have its own articulation. And I guess I might’ve said this before, and I’m not sure if it was in talking with you, but one poem he read was “Lapis Lazuli” by Yeates, which just absolutely blew me away. And I can still hear him reading that poem with his slow, deliberative unfolding as the poem progresses so I can’t recite in full, but…[Sound Effect: Click and whirring of tape on a reel] [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n23:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s the fall of 1995. Ottawa is overflowing with small poetry journals and regular poetry readings. I’m studying poetry with Bob at Carleton. We read Charles Olson and Canadian poet bpNichol. I take over editing the Carleton Arts Review from the infamous Ottawa poet, the lowercase rob mclennan. rob churns out zines, pamphlets, posters, littering the city with free verse. This same year, Bob flies back to Vancouver to revisit the stomping grounds of his old poetry community and give a reading. Among the box of tapes Bob has donated to the Lab, is the 1995 recording of his reading at Black Sheep Books. [Sound Effect: Tape sounds] It is among the first tapes to be digitized from the box Bob donated to the Lab.\n \n\n24:49\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg reading “Extreme Positions for bp” at Black Sheep Books in 1995:\tExtreme positions for bp. [Gentle Instrumental Music Ends] The lovely play language is / the lay of the poem / the place made / the dropping or adding of a letter / tension / Love crosses all bodies of water / or of land / violent / Love knows its own bounds but crosses these / willingly / Knows to stay / stray / brings the point of light / right up to the eye. Knows that all event is also a screen /  retina / page / where the hand trembles / to leave a mark in / violet space / so great the mind’s demand that a map be drawn / lines be drawn / against chaos / but also break the edge / put an S on things / put S in the world / sing / silent / space / spell / sound / light / words standing / alone / essential / free / The lovely play / love is / a language made / sign / against unknowing. [Sound Effect: Click of a stop button]\n \n\n26:17\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] My younger self never thought to ask Professor Hogg much about his own poetry. I had no clue that my professor had not only studied under Charles Olson in the early 60s at SUNY, Buffalo but  had written his thesis on Olson’s MAXIMUS POEMS under the guidance of Robert Creeley. As I sit with Bob in August of 2019, I feel so grateful that time’s turned as it has and I find myself meeting him again. I am beginning to get to know Bobby the poet.\n \n\n26:48\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] …general literature course and creative writing. Then in my third year, I could take poetry or whatever. And I actually got the credit for the poetry course by taking the summer conference. So, in a way I was with Bob Creeley and Ginsberg and all  the rest of them for that. [End Gentle Instrumental Music] But I knew Bob, and I hung around him to a certain degree, not a huge amount, but was in his presence and heard him read on at least a couple of occasions I’m sure in that year he was in Vancouver. Also, he read from The Island, which just came out. And when he read the prose in The Island when it first came out, and he read almost like a poem.\n \n\n27:19\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\tYeah, a big inspiration to me. Hearing him from these tapes, I have a recording. [Bob: Okay.] I could even play you some of it. What is it…[recites from poem] goddamn big car and drive. [Bob: Oh yeah. Drive he said, yeah.] Yeah, drive he said. But the way that he read it was so different than how I read that. I was sort of whoa. Even the way that—I thought, well, no, there’s a break there.\n \n\n27:39\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tThat’s right, in that particular poem he really freaked me out too. I never got that poem right until I heard him read it, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That’s funny, a lot of people misunderstood that poem. [Laughs]\n \n\n27:58\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Robert Creeley reading “I Know a Man”:\tThis is a poem called “I Know a Man.” As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking,–John, I // sd, which was not his / name, the darkness sur- / rounds us, what // can we do against/ it, or else, shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car, // drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going. [Audience laughter]\n \n\n28:17\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] Some critics of TISH say their work was too influenced by the American Black Mountain School. Bob explains to me that it was more their poetics than their poetry that had really attracted TISH members. Bob had met Olson at the 1963 Vancouver poetry conference organized by the Tallmans. In the Fall of ’64, Bob visits Buffalo and attends one of Olson’s lectures. With the support of Olson, the young Bobby is fast-tracked to his PhD at SUNY.\n \n\n28:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tYeah, very lucky. And then when I first went there, it was like many of us who were there for Olson were only there for Olson, we were not there for a PhD. [End Gentle Instrumental Music] Fred was there for that, I was there for that. Some of the English poets like John Temple and Andrew Crozier. Many many people that were hanging around Olson were there—‘oh my God this guy’s interesting, this is why I want to be here.’ Some stayed on and did the doctorate with either like, with him or, in my case, on him, later on, under Bob Creeley.\n \n\n29:10\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music ] The attraction to study with Charles Olson was in large part because of the incredible power of his poetic manifesto: the “Projective Verse.” The dense and poetic prose of the “Projective Verse” essay can be confounding. Olson works with words like a sculptor’s stone, shaping them physically, employing ALL CAPS and indents creatively with a force that opens the ear anew.\n \n\n29:37\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tBut I mean, I think it really, really was unique. And I’ve said this to so many people, [End Gentle Instrumental Music] when you read something like the projective verse essay, you weren’t just reading Olsen’s ideas, you were reading about his own percussive and projective style. It was the style in which that essay was written that was hammering itself out to you. And like you said earlier, like with the typewriter, the way Olson made use of the typewriter and typeface, which he also talks about in that essay, was extremely important. And so we’re talking about changing the morphology of language itself and the structure of language. And grammar. I was very interested in how the grammar of poetry was not like the grammar of prose, and that’s continued to interest me in all my own writing. So then when I got reading the “Maximus from Dogtown” poems, which is basically how the second sequence starts, the second section of the Maximus poem starts, I became really fascinated by the spiritual and mythological and cosmological aspects of that. And that became the center. [Sound Effect: Typewriter Typing] I was reading Jung for my own interest, and of course, he was big on Jung. He was reading psychology and alchemy and other things by Jung, Symbols of Transformation…\n \n\n30:44\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Charles Olson reading “Maximus From Dogtown I”:\n \n\nMaximus from Dogtown — 1/ proem. [Sound Effect: Typing Sound Ends] The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says// But the then she lay for heaven and she bear the thing which encloses/ every thing. Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing/ is anything but itself, measured so// screwing earth, in whom love lies which are unnerves the limbs and by its/ heat floods the mind and all gods and men into further nature// Vast earth rejoices,// deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things,/ everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness/ to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead,/ [Sound Effect: Ticking Sound Begins] [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] the man awake lights up from the sleeping.\n \n\n31:48\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Sound Effect: Ticking Sound merges with highway sounds and cars whooshing by] [Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] It’s the fall of 1964 and Bob, having completed his undergrad at UBC is ready to see the world. He hitchhikes to New York City via Toronto and Buffalo. There, he connects with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Carole Berge, and Ted Berrigan. During his final year at UBC, Bob became more involved with TISH magazine. Despite his immersion in TISH and his passion for verse, in 1964 Bob had yet to publish a book of poems. In New York, Bob writes most of the poems that make up his first book, The Connexions. His inspiration for that book—that pours out in a matter of months—is not the poetry scene around him, but a deadly illness that tears through his body. As he lies in his bed fighting for his life, poetry becomes a necessity for survival.\n \n\n32:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tSo, when I went to Buffalo in the Spring of 1965, I had already written in New York City quite a lot of poems about my illness there. And then I continued to write about that [Ticking Sound and End Gentle Instrumental Music] when I got to Buffalo because I was actually still ill and living in the infirmary on campus. And, so, I ended up with a book of poems in my hands called The Connexions, as it turned out. So the strange thing is that that book of poems was a-hundred-percent written in New York City and Buffalo. There might have been a scrap of a poem that was written in Vancouver before I left. Because there’s one that talks about the coast range of the mountains, towards the end. But whether I actually wrote it in Vancouver or wrote it in Buffalo, I can’t remember now for sure. When some of these poets from the States came up and did read in Vancouver, they did have a strong strong effect on some of us. And I know that Duncan’s reading had a huge effect on what kind of—how I would write my poems thereafter. [Sound Effect: Sound of tape rewinding] Although I didn’t sit down and write one that was like, that emulated “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”, right, which was the poem he read that blew me away. But I know that that poem sank into my bloodstream, as it were, and never left.\n \n\n33:53\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] [Sound Effect: Sound of tape rewinding ends] It’s the summer of 1965, and Bob has recovered from his near death experience. He has made it down to Berkeley, California where Charles Olson is headlining the 1965 poetry conference. He carries with him a manuscript of The Connexions. [Sound Effect: Protest Chanting Sounds Begin] Amid the growing upheaval in opposition to the Vietnam War and student protests at Berkeley, the poetry conference quietly continues. [Sound Effect: Protest Chanting Sounds End] Tallman was supposed to arrange a contingent of Canadian poets to read. As it turns out, Bob is one of two Canadians and one of five tyros, as he refers to them, to read at the conference. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n34:41\tAudio Recording, KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965:\tSo small falls in the Cariboo. My famous Cariboo, one of my friends anyway. Called Little Falls on South Bonaparte River. And when I was about 10 years old, we lived on a ranch in the Cariboo. And the neighbor girl was daring enough to walk across the precipice of this falls. And of course, all I could do was watch her, because I wasn’t about to walk across it too. This poem is written very recently. So it’s a memory from way back. [Begins reading poem] And the voice said, walk / Up river then / You will find her / at Little Falls / where I had left her / ankles amid flow / walking the precipice / brazen she was / not afraid to fall / or that she would fall / down / as the water as I did one fall / years later, walking up river / the rifle / clattered and fell / gouged by the rock / And I hurt my knee while hunting / I had meant to speak of an old woman / whose hair / and of a bend in the river / where / and of a tree whose leaves hang over / it was all mirrored there. [Ends poem] I’ll close the reading with a small poem, simply entitled “Song.” It’s also the last poem in this series that I have in The Connexions. [Begins reading poem] The sun is mine / and the trees are mine / The light breeze is mine / and the birds that inhabit the air are mine / Their voices upon the wind / are in my ear. [Ends poem] Thank you. [Applause]\n \n\n37:13\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Begins] It’s December 2019, and I have returned once more to visit Bob at his farm. There is snow on the ground now. I can see my breath as I walk up to the door. The fields of flowing wheat that once fed his mill turned to white sheets. This time, we don’t go into the barn but straight to the attic. I sit with my old professor in his attic writing room surrounded by his poetry books. There is a generosity of spirit in the air that seems to have expanded since my last visit in the summer. I imagine the spines of his poetry books bursting with ideas beyond my own ability to name. In preparation for a reading the next night, Bob is keen to share some of his poems aloud. I try to keep quiet and listen closely. I’m hearing something more this time. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n38:06\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tSo, this could interest you, ‘cause phonology of course is something you guys could do too, you know. [Begins reading poem] “The Phonology of Love” I speak of love/ as though it were // a word as though / it were syntactic // simply /said // oval /lips// breathe out / a gesture // lungs send / sound in a tongue curl // palatal L / down throat // a velar/ cord song // voiced / fricative // ending/  lip to enamel //teeth where/ resonant// air is /evocation // love / that is a dance of tongue// teeth and tendon / turn // breath/ into word. [Ends poem] So actually, it’s a description of the word love. These are all poems that are hopefully going to come out in this volume to be called “Postcards from America.” So these are poems that were written in Buffalo, never got published. [Craig: Yeah, they’re good. It’s good.] I think they are actually. Here’s another one…[Craig: Hot morning sun, read that one] [Bob Begins reading poem] To my friends / a hot morning sun / white for noon / through glass / waves of hot blood in my spine / line a blue vein / I go through / fluid as fire is / a kindling surge. [Ends poem] I wanted to read this poem too. It’s called “Four Seasons.” [Craig: Yeah, I was looking at that, it looks nice on the page.] Yeah, well it didn’t start like this. It started in a different form, and it started falling into tercets I’ve called them here, like little three line poems, right. Or three line stanzas. And I didn’t know what else to call them. So, and it was written quite literally by sitting on my deck, which you saw earlier. In the summer when the honeysuckles were blooming and the berries were falling. [Begins reading poem] First white and pink flowers / now little red berries / fall from the honeysuckle / onto our cedar deck / Next leaves browning / with summer sun / soon abundant snow [Poem Ends] [Bob Laughs] Which is what we’ve got now! [Craig: Yeah] Yeah. So there was the four seasons. Like I was just like sitting there…\n \n\n40:22\tAudio recording, Poetry reading at the Carleton Tavern in 2019, Ambient Sounds:\n \n\n[Bob’s voice fades into a recording from the poetry reading the next night. We hear the sounds of people talking before the reading as Craig’s narration begins.]\n40:27\tCraig Carpenter:\tThe next evening, Ottawa’s poets congregate in the back room on the second floor of the Carleton Tavern.\n \n\n40:33\tAudio recording, Poetry reading at the Carleton Tavern in 2019, rob mclennan:\tI’m not waiting for him. Thank you very much for coming to this, to our little annual event. The Peter F. Yacht Club, you know, holiday extravaganza. You’ve got to start calling it that, that would be cool. There are books in a book table…\n \n\n40:47\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Audio recording of rob mclennan speaking continues under narration] rob mclennan has invited Bob and other local poets to read at the annual above/ground press Christmas party. Bob tells me rob has mellowed with the years. Perhaps he has recognized his own gift to the community I think—his dogged persistence of publishing so damn much, now a document of the moving of time through the eyes of poets. The room is packed pre-pandemic style. Beers are flowing. The scene reminds me of my time here in the 90s. rob mclennan sits at a table registering the evening’s readers. When I approach to say hello, in typical fashion with a mocking gasp, he points out just how much I have aged. His signature long hair and goatee whiter now. But he’s the same lowercase rob mclennan. And, it’s true, he has mellowed. Or maybe it’s me who’s mellowed. Either way, I find myself happy to see him and smiling as he introduces the evening. [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] As the night draws to a close, a few of us head to a cafe for some food and drink. I think about the poets—all their poems still jangling around in my heart and mind. It was a good night. This is Bob’s community. It’s mine too. Poets don’t much like to form alliances. So, when poets do come together to create books, magazines or events like tonight’s—something turns. It’s hard to mark time. Like sound, we cannot pause it. It keeps passing. As I listen to Bob recite a poem he has dedicated to Bob Creeley called Dig-it, I sense time turn. It turns in widening circles of return.\n \n\n42:44\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Here. Can I read this one? [Craig: Please do.] This one’s called “Dig-it.” [Craig: Now, this is for Bob Creeley.] This is for Bob Creeley. I wrote it last night, or yesterday sometime. [Craig Laughs] Had nothing to do with today, it was just one of these things that came to me. Bob Creeley was always saying, dig it, dig it, you dig it, dig it—right? But if you take the hyphen out, it becomes a different word. Alright. So, “Dig-It” for Bob Creeley. [Begins reading poem] 11:11 my clock reads / 1 1 1 1 / marching across / the face of it / twice a day / just like that / marking time / we say / standing in one / place / one / minute / marking time [Ends Poem] [Bob laughs]\n \n\n43:35\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n \n\n[Gentle instrumental music rises and fades into outro narration.]\n44:19\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This episode was written, produced, sound-designed and voiced by Craig Carpenter, with additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox Collection, PennSound, and KPFA. The musical score was composed by Chelsea Edwardson. Special thanks to Karis Shearer, Robert Hogg, Deanna Fong, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell, and Judith Burr for their feedback on drafts of this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. 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It used the recently published volume, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry), as an opportunity to think about and discuss the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study – a subject central to the mission of the SpokenWeb Podcast. \n\nIn this episode of the podcast, Jason draws upon the recording of this event to revisit key moments: a presentation by Dario Llinares about the main theses of the book and his reflections on how the landscape of research around podcasting is rapidly developing; brief position papers from respondents Stacey Copeland (SFU), Elena Razlogova (Concordia U), Kim Fox (American University in Cairo), Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U); and questions and participation from event attendees. You can watch the full event as a Zoom recording on the SpokenWeb Project’s Archive of the Present: https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study-20-april-2021/\n\nHere’s a note from Jason about making the episode and using the Korg Monotron to score it:\n\nIn editing and producing this episode, my goal was to capture the feeling and flow of the original panel presentations and discussion, while speeding up the pace a bit, and creating new thematic sections and transitions, where necessary. To mark transitions between thematic sections I decided to compose some sounds using a lo fi instrument, the Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.  This little device has just a few knobs, switches, and touch ribbon keyboard, but can generate a vast range of sounds.  It is simple, DIY and accessible (anyone can play it), yet it also suggests endless possibilities of sound, pacing, tone and mood; just like podcasting!  It was also just there, sitting on my desk, ready at hand. For these reasons, I felt the Monotron was an appropriate instrument to use for scoring this collaborative discussion about podcasting as a critical medium.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\t Hannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: Intro Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As you, our listeners, may well know at this point, we’re a podcast created by and grounded in the scholarly research of the SpokenWeb project community. It’s natural, then that we’re interested in how podcasting is generally being taken up as a tool, talked about, and studied in academic spaces. It may seem surprising that this is happening, that podcasting is being studied as a form of scholarly production, as an important new mode of knowledge making and sharing. An episode of your favorite podcast feels and sounds so different from the written journal articles and conference papers traditionally used to share academic knowledge. What does it mean when podcasters engage with, infiltrate, maybe mess with and transform the way the production and dissemination of knowledge happens in the academic sphere and what critical work is currently being done to understand the impact that podcasting is having on specialized fields of research, scholarship and teaching?\n01:49\tHannah McGregor:\tJason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb project and he’s helped us think through pieces of this question in past episodes of the podcast. In our episodes, ‘Ideas have feelings, too: Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in Podcasting’ and ‘Cylinder Talks: Podcasting in Literary Sound Studies’, Jason, and his co-producers took us into the university classroom and showed us how students are using podcasting as a tool for critical analysis and communication. Scenes from these episodes demonstrate the emotional and intellectual depth and merit that podcasting has when used as a teaching method and research tool, and raise questions about what podcasting is doing in scholarly contexts. When Dario Llinares invited Stacey and Jason to discuss their cylinder talks episode for his own New Aural Cultures podcast, they got to talking and thinking that it would be fun to organize a panel with a bunch of scholar podcasters to consider the current state of podcasts studies. Is podcasts studies emerging as an actual disciplinary field of study in the way that film studies and radio studies have established themselves in the academy?\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does it mean to define podcasting as a distinct field of critical study? Is that something we really want to do? Jason and Stacey went on to organize the panel. They invited Dario to provide some opening remarks based on arguments he first outlined in his co-edited collection, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Stacey acted as a respondent along with Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, Michael O’Driscoll, and Deanna Fong, each of whom had something unique to say in response to the core question: what is podcasting as a field of critical study? In this new episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Jason has selected and arranged key parts of a conversation that was first heard live on Zoom on April 20th, 2021 in a virtual panel called “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. I, Hannah, hosted the panel and you’ll hear my voice alongside some of my esteemed colleagues who are deeply engaged in thinking about podcasting as a powerful medium of scholarly inquiry. So let’s get on with the episode, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music. ] “Revisiting ‘Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study’”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n04:12\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.] And what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies?\n \n\n04:17\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nHow are shows categorized? How are they discovered across different platforms?\n \n\n04:21\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nA new stage of podcasting, the industrialization of podcasting.\n \n\n04:25\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI want to challenge you to be more open and inclusive.\n \n\n04:29\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech, as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio and Hindenburg.\n \n\n04:36\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nWe felt a clear tension between ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast.\n \n\n04:44\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI hope the audience get in on this. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.]\n \n\n04:51\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHi, everyone. Welcome to “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. My name is Hannah McGregor, and I am going to be moderating the conversation today. For those who don’t know me, I am a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, as well as a podcaster as is the case with, I think basically everybody on this panel. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I think in this era of digital events, it’s harder than ever to ground ourselves in the places where we live and work and play, but it’s also more crucial than ever to think about where our knowledge comes from. And that includes recognizing whose territory we’re residing on, for those of us who are living on Turtle Island. So I would like to encourage you to add your own territory acknowledgment in the chat if you would like to do so, or just pop into the chat and say hi to the assembled group and tell us where you’re coming from. We’ve got quite [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] an international gathering here today.[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n06:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOnto the event itself: Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study builds on the recent volume podcasting, New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, to think and engage in discussion about the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study. We are going to begin with some comments from Dario about the book, followed by brief position papers from respondents, Stacey Copeland, Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, and Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. So first up, Dario Llinares is principal lecturer in contemporary screen media at the University of Brighton, and of course co-editor of Podcasting New Aural Cultures and Digital Media and co-producer of the accompanying podcast, New Aural Cultures. Note: this is a SpokenWeb panel that is also co-sponsored by the Media History Research Center at Concordia. So thanks so much from Concordia – to Concordia for helping us to put this together. That is all of the housekeeping stuff, so now I will stop talking and we will hear from Dario up first. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n07:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThanks, Hannah, very much appreciated. And thanks to Jason and Stacey for inviting me and for setting everything up [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and welcome to everybody. Glad you could join us. I was thinking about how to prepare for this event and since taking up podcasting, whenever I’ve given a lecture or a talk in another university or a conference paper, I’ve used only loose notes, usually just bullet points comprised of prompts that point me in the direction of what I want to talk about. This move away from writing a script and reading it out was actually one of the effects of podcasting – one of the effects that it had on my academic practice. So learning how to edit, hearing over and over again, the foibles of how I presented myself orally and how content came out as a result reminded me how much meaning is created and received differently through the speech that articulates thoughts in the moment. Rather than speech that is pre-prepared.\n08:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, on the other hand, if you’re riffing the speaker and listener have to deal with all the hesitations, the repetitions, the mis-speakings, and the possibility that one’s immediate thoughts actually don’t really amount to very much. So, today I’ve prepared a written text, as you can probably tell. And the reason I’ve done this is to try to articulate some of the ideas and questions that influenced the development of the book that I edited with Neil and with Richard: Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media – particularly with regards to what we might mean, what we do, and what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies. The book as a whole was an attempt to draw out and articulate the ways in which we as editors and the authors were making sense of the impact of podcasting practice, to recognize its significance in the cultural landscape because of these practices, and, in turn, an encouragement to think reflectively as to why this significance needs to be examined.\n09:18\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tTo put a name on this, Podcast Studies, was a call to engage with the possible parameters through which critical study could be done. Perhaps the most profound development since the book came out has been the extent to which podcasting, particularly in the United States, is discussed as an industry. The journalistic, popular cultural, and professional production narratives are overtly concerned with monetization, audience expansion, and corporate infrastructure. The focus on this from a critical standpoint is, and should continue to be central to popcast studies. The question of what podcasting is, which probably everyone here is engaged with in some form, is in many ways the foundational question of Podcast Studies, and I’ve tried as many of us have to intellectualize that through research, analysis and self-reflection. But in the end it still does remain somewhat personal and ineffable. Because of this, the introduction to the book does read are speculative. “Are people thinking the same way about this media as we are?” is the question we were implicitly asking ourselves.\n 10:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tIn order to try and schematize what we lay out in the book – I’m thinking about the myriad research I’ve read or listened to in the proceeding few years after the book was published – I offer now three interrelated strands that might help to engage with what Podcast Studies is doing conceptually. These are notionally and intentionally broad in scope. So I ask you for a little of what Malcolm Gladwell calls conditionality in your interpretation of this. These strands are communication, knowledge, and identity. To complicate matters though, I think these three categories can each be broken down in terms of the interrelationship between structure, form, and content. So in terms of communication, we may think of the structures that not only make podcasting feasible, but have manifested what we think of now as an identifiable and discreet medium. This might incorporate technological elements, such as RSS and iTunes, audio recording technology, podcaster apps, podcatcher apps, but also social media and internet functionality.\n 11:28\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow do these structures foster processes of production, distribution, and reception that we identify specifically as podcasting? Communication forms may relate to the aesthetic artifact itself. What do podcasts sound like? Are podcasting forms the same as genres? Aurally, what makes a podcast different from radio or, for example, from a piece of recorded audio that is simply accessible online? How might we consider the experience of listening, both in terms of apparatus the mechanics of how we listen and affect? – and I’m thinking here about the thorny issue of intimacy. Communication content engages with what a podcast episode and series is about. Interestingly, that area of research may look to leave the mechanics of podcasting behind. But isn’t an analysis of a podcast or podcasting that discusses content only – is that really Podcast Studies? To me, we have to think about this in a synergistic fashion. How does structure, form, and content merge in ways that allow us to engage with how podcasts work as a medium?\n 12:35\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tKnowledge, the second strand, reflects on how we might understand the impact of podcasting philosophically or epistemologically. For example, in terms of the structures of knowledge, to offer a student a podcast to listen to, rather than a journal article to read should make us reflect on how knowledge is made available to us and what function does it serve. If we organize our lives around listening to podcasts, how does what we listen to reflect our exposure to knowledge, and then how we might disseminate that knowledge further? It’s clear that a key element of Podcast Studies relates to its pedagogic use. So how might podcasting as a form of knowledge creation help students in the understanding and application of their own learning? What does it offer both in conceptual knowledge and in terms of skills-knowledge? I’m very much interested in the speech, text image relationship. In that context, how universities, the media, and politics frames knowledge is fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist.\n 13:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPodcast Studies needs to contextualize podcasting at heart of this, particularly where speech and knowledge is being fought over ideologically. A critique of big technology companies and their content gatekeeping analytics program decision-making is another question of knowledge structure, form, and content that we also want to investigate. The third strand, identity, relates to what we ask ourselves in terms of who our podcast producers, podcast listeners, and podcast fans. Furthermore, what do podcasts tell us about the lives of the individuals and groups they represent? Structurally, we can think about the demographics of producers and listeners, but a more vital question might be: how do individual subjects or community groups formulate a sense of self through podcasting? What might be the barriers to entry, even considering how we might assume the relative ease of access, there are many cultural, social and economic obstacles to creation, production, and even listening. We doubtedly want to consider and critique the replication of hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, et cetera. In terms of forms of identity, we might consider the crucial element of the voice.\n 14:49\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow might we analyze the voice as a key tool in podcasting? It’s texture, it’s timbre, it’s materiality, to be sure, but how does the disembodied voice then materialize a sense of embodiedness through its use in podcasting? Podcast Studies must consider what it means to have a voice and to be listened to. And in this sense, it has to advocate openness, equality, and diversity through its structure, form, and content. Of course, we need to think about Podcast Studies in relation to other disciplinary fields. In the introduction to the book that the relationship with radio was a key element, but the need for us was to interrogate and assumed filial relationship. Should Podcast Studies look to disassociate itself from the history, culture, and aesthetics of radio? No, of course not. It really can’t. But if there is to be a usefulness to Podcast Studies, there has to be a criteria of autonomy.\n 15:43\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tEven if we acknowledge that the very term podcasting is a flash of journalistic serendipity. We need to analyze the important influences of other forms of mediums that make podcasting the flexible, hybridized, liminal medium it’s been described as. This brings us to sound [Start Sound Effect: Echoes] itself, and the overlaps with sound orientated disciplines: sound study, sound arts, audiology, musicology are all areas in which Podcast Studies can take methodological and conceptual influence. Indeed, there is an interesting question with regards to how Podcast Studies should articulate the centrality of sound. The nature of sound on an ontological level, may be fundamentally of interest to Podcast Studies analysis. In turn, the recording, editing and production of sound could be envisaged as key to a particular angle of research. Furthermore, the cultural impact, psychological effects, and phenomenological shaping of our material experience through sound might be at the heart of Podcast Studies concerns. [End Sound Effect: Echoes] One of my favourite podcasts recent times was Hannah and Jason and the team at SpokenWeb – their episode on “How we are Listening Now”. Does podcasting make us listen to the world and therefore experience it in specific ways?\n 16:57\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, it is vital that podcasting has a focus on criticality from whatever perspective or approach acknowledges the essential sound artifact or process as a podcast. This, to me, is true of individual podcast criticism, audience research, industry analysis, cultural studies, or media technology. What gives the focus of research it’s “podcastiness” is the cornerstone of the discipline – and I’m still not a hundred percent sure whether I like that word. This may require the researcher to expand, extend, or challenge notions of what a podcast is. And therefore, we must accept and reflect that the parameters of podcasting ontology will continue to be a contested area. Thinking about the impact of one’s own practice of podcasting should also be central to Podcast Studies. But that leads to the question: should Podcast Studies academics be actively using the medium? I guess this argument depends on how much you see the discipline of Podcast Studies needing to push an agenda that podcasting and other forms of non-traditional media practice should be recognized as being both a research tool and a method of dissemination that doesn’t have to default back to the text as a guarantee of rigor.\n 18:10\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis requires us to challenge the mechanisms, both material and structural, of closed source access, publishing and peer review traditions, and attitudes to the very nature of knowledge and learning and their ideological function within academia. Finally, I argue in the book that podcasting sits in a liminal space, not exactly conforming wholly with producers or consumers, with professionals or amateurs, with teachers or students, with interviewers or interviewees. I think it’s important that we see Podcast Studies challenging the traditional status quo, but also reflecting on its place in relation to the highly uncertain digital future that we are all inculcated in. We all know podcasting is great, but that cannot remain an uncontested assumption. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 19:16\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOur first respondent is Stacey. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Stacey Copeland is a Joseph Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication here in Vancouver, Canada, where her research engages with feminist media oral histories and sound archives.\n \n\n 19:35\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nOh, great. Alright. So, thank you Dario. That was really informative and got me tweaking some of the things and thoughts that I brought to the conversation today. So in revisiting the collection, which I have of course my copy fresh, you can kind of see through the background that I’ve chosen to exist in today. I was brought back to the moment I first received the call for chapters back in 2016, a fresh faced master’s student at the time navigating my new found identity formation as a media scholar and a queer feminist. My gender and media studies professor at the time, Dr. Susan Driver, recommended I submit a course paper I’d written about The Heart, which I fangirl over all the time, as a proposal for the book. It seems so long ago now, 2016, a time when there was still a need to argue for the importance of sound as a valuable field of study. Podcasting was still so new in popular culture and podcasts studies, even newer, not quite yet a field of its own back then, and some would argue it still isn’t. Podcast Studies feels like it will always still be emerging.\n 20:52\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nThere’s a sense of newness about it that I, and many others, including Dario, would argue is key to the very ethos of the medium itself. A newness defined on the oldness of other media forms, particularly radio. As Lisa Gitelman so eloquently writes on the newness of new media, quote “This overdetermined sense of reaching the end of a media history is probably what accounts for the oddly perennial newness of today’s new media. ” Unquote. Podcasting is a new media with an old history. And the same can be said about Podcast Studies as an emergent academic field. Now I’m less concerned with defining podcasting as its own unique medium of study, as separate from radio or other media forms, and more interested in the ways in which the growth of interest in podcasting has opened up new or renewed conversations around mediated, spatial politics, platformization, sonic narrative form, and the role of sound-based media in shaping our subjective everyday experiences. In short, how identity and community, knowledge and power, power play out in the podcast arena.\n 22:03\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo I’m intrigued by some of the correlations and overarching themes that Dario has invited us to consider today. Now, what I particularly love about this collection and Dario’s work on podcasting, is that it straddles the two worlds of theory and practice. I truly do believe as scholars, we learn just as much, if not more, by embedding ourselves into the practical aspects of our field of study. Sometimes I’ve learned – something I’ve learned really through my time in radio and podcasts communities and something I continue to practice in my academic work. In the introduction to this collection, Dario, Neil and Richard write, quote, “podcasting imbued in us the enthusiasm of possibility.” And we see this term possibility spark again in Dario’s opening remarks. This line really sticks with me, drawing me back to the forever newness so key to podcast culture. Possibility, a sentiment we often hear in relation to podcasting, listeners and producers alike can hear this possibility, the potentials for podcasting to give space to voices unheard in the mainstream, to engage deeply with niche audiences, and communities across the globe.\n 23:20\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nStill, by approaching the sentiment of possibility with a critical ear, I would argue we must also consider the increasing constraints of the platforms on which podcasting takes place. We’re seeing major giants like Spotify and Netflix now enter the podcasting race. And these are important questions to consider. Echoing Dario’s early remarks on structure in relation to communication, knowledge, and identity, this is one of the key differences we can consider that defines podcasting from other mediums is it’s distribution and discoverability through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and more. Podcasts studies provides a grounding, a community in which to study these platforms and algorithms so deeply entangled in key questions of identity and representation, of possibility. How are shows categorized? How were they discovered across different platforms? And how is this changing now that podcasting has truly entered the mainstream? How long will this sentiment of possibility last and how true is it in practice? In a talk I gave at SCMS last month, I mentioned how in 2019, a search for “queer” as a term on Apple Podcast actually assumed that I was searching for the word queen, which was really opening my eyes to just how interesting these tools can be in study, who they are built for, and how.\n 24:39\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nDid queer not exist as a search term? Or was this a tongue-in-cheek joke coded into the platform by a fellow queer? So, all of this said, I still believe in this sentiment of possibility Dario, Neil, and Richard first wrote about. And as researchers, makers, and listeners, by establishing podcasting as a serious object of study, a cultural practice, we play a key role in shaping how this possibility unfolds into action. So as you scroll through your podcast feed today, I invite you to consider the age old critical question: what do you hear? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 25:24\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Stacey. Our next respondent is Elena Razlogova. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Elena Razlogova is an associate professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, though she is not coming to us from Montreal today, she’s coming to us from Moscow. She is also the author of The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture”, an issue of the Radical History Review.\n \n\n 25:57\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you very much. It’s great to be here. I was happy to be invited to participate on this panel. By the way, my background is my parents’ kitchen – that’s why it’s blurred. I’m in Moscow right now and I can’t have a fake background for some reason. So I was really happy to be invited to this panel because I’m a radio historian, rather than a full-on Podcast Studies person –so I’m kind of an interloper here. I’m most excited about podcasting as a fantastic teaching and public dissemination medium. And in my field history, especially, there’s a great variety of podcasts out there that demonstrate to historians alternative ways to tell stories about the past. From Nate DiMeo’s 10-minute Memory Palace that uses dramatic music and sound effects to tell stories about individuals in history, to Hardcore History where just one dude, Dan Carlin rants about history for over three hours at a time. You get professional historians like Jill Lepore and outsiders like Malcolm Gladwell, and you get 99% Invisible, a great podcast about the history of design, as well as More Perfect about the American Supreme court. And all of that is history. I have assigned podcast making in both undergraduate and graduate courses as group work and individual work.\n 27:15\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd podcasts as a term assignment introduces a creative element to coursework. It makes students think about sound effects, diegetic non-diabetic music, proper ways to intro and outro the narrative as well. After making the podcast, they no longer think of interviews as an optional research method. And writing for speaking, as Dario mentioned, writing for speaking aloud makes them better writers as well. So I’m looking at podcasting as a practitioner rather than simply an academic. And I also should say that I actually didn’t ever publish a podcast, but I work as well – I volunteer on campus radio, so I do a little bit of radio. So reading the introduction to the book, and the book itself, several chapters, it’s amazing how much podcasting has advanced since the years since its publication. It may no longer be a liminal medium, and it’s harder to argue for liminality today, than in 2018, because Spotify, for example, has this whole stable of gated podcasts, including the Michelle Obama podcasts.\n 28:20\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tJeremy Moore calls this new stage of podcasts the industrialization of podcasting, where standards, and barriers for entry are much higher and it is more difficult to stand out, as other speakers already mentioned. And research on platformization of podcasting aligns with studies of music streaming and algorithmic recommendations in general. So, I hate to come back to the point, to the question whether podcasting is radio or not, but as a radio historian, I have to come back to it. In the introduction, authors focused on BBC and NPR as radio counterpoint to podcasting. But I would like to come back to independent radio broadcasting rather than large scale government sponsored networks. A few features of independent radio broadcasting seem lost to podcasting, but perhaps can be recovered, such as real-time possibility for community organizing, the critique of commercialism, and border-crossing that pirate, low power, and community radio offers. For radio, national borders matter in a different way.\n 29:29\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd here I’m thinking of Black power activist, Robert Williams broadcasting his Radio Free Dixie from Cuba in the 60s to the still segregated American South, or more recently, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s work on low RFM radio service to local communities, or in [inaudible] Garcia’s work on Spanish-language radio warning of anti-immigration rates via real-time call ins. As well, independent shows and hosts often migrate to podcasting in a sort of “brain drain”. And here I’m thinking of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, or Benjamin Walker’s Care of Everything, both migrated from audience supported station WFMU. Or more locally, a show called Audio Smart, that started at CKUT at McGill University, and then was taken from the station and turned it into a podcast. So my question is: compared to these local community radio forums, how do we recover in podcasting the forms of solidarity and activism that these alternative radio forms have been doing and perhaps alternative or independent podcasting is the answer? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 30:40\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing. Thank you so much, Elena. Next up is Kim Fox. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Kim Fox is a professor of practice in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, where she primarily teaches audio production and other journalism courses. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 31:04\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you, Hannah. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] I’m really excited to be a part of this and thank you all. I really want to add something very important and build on the conversations that we’re hoping to have here. So thank you for having me a part of this discussion about the current digital cultural phenomenon that we know very closely as podcasting. And I’ve decided to freestyle a little bit, so I’m sure that I will not take up my full time, but perhaps I can get that time back at the end. I do want to kind of build on what Stacey was saying in terms of – about the listening and more or less like where to from here? In this short time, since the book has been published, we see this huge gap in terms of what has happened.\n 31:48\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021::\tI mean, there’s a huge gap in terms of what happened between now and last year, but where the future could go is more symposia like this, where we’re able to have these conversations that are really important, especially as we try to redirect the lens of what is podcasting? You know, and what is Podcast Studies specifically? And I’m also thinking about this multicultural lens. I’m thinking about the women’s centeredness of it, or perhaps a lack of it. And of course, LGBTQ issues, other marginalized communities, who we would think there would be a space for them in this independent world, but as we see the commercialization and capitalism that’s involved in podcasting, that perhaps they too will get left behind with this new platform and in the academic look at the platforms. I’d also like to add about the kind of research that we are seeing in the field.\n 32:50\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd there is a lot of cultural, there is a lot of critical, which is great. Perhaps we want to look at, how do we diversify that? And especially when I start to think about: what will be the Podcast Studies canon? Surely some of those people are in the room. Thank you, Richard Berry. But we’re also thinking about how much more depth will that have and what will that look like? Because we also see from the past what the history of theory, for example, in many fields, if you’re thinking about classical social thought and how do we grab a hold of the field now to help decolonize before it becomes something that we want to avoid that has already happened? Also, we want to think about the critical production that we’re aiming to produce, and looking at it in terms of, is this an opportunity for us to again, make a concerted change? I really liked the points that were made about the embodiment and disembodiment of voices. Again, that’s something that is very valuable to us. But as I wrap up, I do want to say, I want to challenge you as media scholars to be more open and inclusive in your future research. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] So that’s both in terms of content and in collaboration. Thank you.\n \n\n 34:31\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Kim. Our final respondents are Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Michael O’Driscoll is a professor in the department of English and Film Studies in the faculty of arts who teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories, including material cultural studies. And finally, Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, also in Montreal where her research project towards an ethics of listening in literary study intersects the fields of oral history and literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices.\n \n\n 35:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Hannah. Deanna and I would like to use our platform to share our recent experience in producing an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast series. The episode was launched in early April and was titled “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” We’re interested in particular in talking about podcasting as a form of self-reflective critical practice and reflecting on our experiences during this collaboration. We entered into producing this podcast with a specific meta-critical goal, listening attentively to our conversations about listening. We did so with certain presuppositions about the imbrication of theory and practice as mutually constitutive activities. And we did so with a focus on listening through an ethical lens, asking particular questions about how we listen, why we listen, the material conditions of that activity, and with attention to the conventions of listening within the constraints of podcast production. The episode was an open-ended experiment that involved recorded and non-recorded dialogues with scholars who perform, gather, curate, and analyze spoken word performance across a range of audio textual genres. The queer cabaret performance, the oral history interview, the circulation of an archive of Indigenous creators, and scholarly engagements with spoken word recordings.\n 36:39\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThroughout, we felt a clear tension between our own ideals about ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast within the affordances of the medium and the conventions of possible podcast genres. We listened as our interviewees represented their own practices of listening and worked to achieve a certain attunement to the convolutions of critique. And I mean critique in the truest self-reflexive sense of that term, with an openness to difference, to the incalculable, and to the indeterminacy sees this scenario provoked.\n \n\n 37:16\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tSo for me, coming from a background in oral history and literary study, particularly a study of sounded poetry, making this podcast was an important meta-critical experiment that deepened my understanding of my research goals and methods in these fields. Listening has always been at the forefront of my work and as an attendant theoretical concern, paying attention to how we listen, what we listen for and the different modes of listening that are occasioned when we shift contexts from readings to interviews, when we speak of genre or from live events to digital and analog recordings when you speak of media. One of the fascinating outcomes of our foray into the podcasting world was new forms of deep, and I would argue ethical, listening that it invited at every stage of production. Before recording the interviews with our respondents, Michael and I had informal unrecorded conversations with them, both to create a level of comfort and intimacy –there’s that word again – but also to zero in on what we wanted to talk about in the interview.\n 38:10\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis genre of interviewing differed from the meandering type of life story interview that I’m used to conducting. As Michael suggested in our conversations leading up to this panel, what we were listening for in this case was expertise in lieu of, or at least in addition to experience. Our listening practices continued as we edited and transcribed interviews shaping them into a continuous, or at least resonant narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio inHindenburg, adding an extra two seconds, pause to let an idea, breathe or editing a sentence to best reflect the speaker’s line of thought – with their permission of course. Underlying each of these editorial decisions is a complex set of ethical questions. How we represent the speakers who give us their ideas and voices, but also how we connect with and create a listening environment for an imagined audience. On the other side, the podcast’s extensive engagement with the voice gave us multiple opportunities to critically reflect on our own practices as scholars and carry those observations forward until the other academic work that we do.\n \n\n 39:15\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPerhaps one of the most provocative moments in the podcast is our conversation with Simon Fraser University scholar, Clinton Burnham, who proposed that while listening is without doubt an ethical imperative, it does not always in and of itself constitute an unalloyed good. That is, Clint reminded us the position of one who listens –and you might think here of judges, priests, analysts – is structurally configured as a position of mastery, a master position in which what is received is put back into circulation in a revalued – you might think extracted refined, reprocessed – form of judgment, absolution, cure and so on. You might extend this insight into all forms of listening, especially those in which a listener, however well meaning, receives the disclosures of those who have been harmed in some fashion. The unaddressed question here is how a listener might disavow, or acknowledge, or act in response to that structural configuration, and how listeners constitute themselves across a range of listening practices.\n 40:21\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd I’m thinking having just listened to Kim’s words that this has perhaps particular resonance with the call to decolonize and diversify. One of our thoughts on this front is that if podcasting remains yet in its formative stages of development, and that question is on the table right now, if podcasting is a germinal cultural practice, studying offers enormous possibility and a little shout out here to Stacey and Dario, even while constrained by its own ideological and historical horizons, the process of podcast production offers rich opportunities for such ethical engagements, born of the very contradictions inherent in this cultural practice. And furthermore, we might ask ourselves whether this kind of self-reflexivity is germane to the practice of podcasting: do we all listen to our listening? Or whether podcasting is itself, a field of cultural production that has only begun to engage [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] in a practice of self-reflexive critical collaboration?\n \n\n 41:33\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing, thank you both so much. There were [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] a lot of really beautiful threads that were weaving through that and a really interesting conversation already starting in the chat about canonicity, which I think is really fascinating. So maybe we can start the round table conversation there thinking about the sort of idea of canonicity. So Dario, maybe you can start us off on this idea: is it time for a podcasting studies canon?\n \n\n 42:05\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question specifically. I mean, I think what’s interesting is whenever you’re talking about canons, these are sort of not neutrally organic developments, but they are an outcome of the – both the structures and the people who are defining what is being talked about, what is being written about, what is the focus of interest. So I think that the idea of there is a group of scholars or a group of works that are going to be forwarded as part of the canon will happen because of the way that universities look to define these are the works that we need to be engaging with. So the question then becomes, how does everybody – as Kim was talking about – how do we open up the possibilities of access, both in an academic sense, and also in a production sense for podcasting to be this inclusive area where we do podcasting, we talk about podcasting, and we self-reflect on how it represents people? And then the analysis of that will hopefully naturally come out as not being a problematic, bounded kind of canonical approach or set of texts. Now, maybe I’m – maybe that’s slightly naive. You know, maybe we need to make that happen more. I guess that’s both– that’s my first sort of opening gambit now on that I suppose.\n \n\n 43:38\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’m really interested in the possibility of an audio cannon. I think Richard Barry mentioned it in the chat because it is a time – and I agree that canon is a terrible word in the sense that it’s always about exclusion. And then it needs to be always attacked and reconsidered, but starting it, it’s kind of exciting to look back three years or five and already knowing what was important. So I wonder what you guys would think. What would you put there?\n \n\n 44:07\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThoughts? What would you put into an audio canon? It’s a fascinating question, I think particularly for folks who teach podcasting, is the sort of the incredibly lateral world of podcasting as a medium, the sort of deep niche listening practices make it difficult to establish shared objects of study that conversations can circulate around.\n \n\n 44:31\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, by audio canon, Elena, do you mean specifically pieces of audio that we would use to create canon over texts or both?\n \n\n 44:39\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nNo, more like a mixtape of podcasts to share with other people.\n \n\n 44:45\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI love that. I love that – we should record them onto tapes.\n \n\n 44:48\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s what the kids call a playlist. So yeah, mixed tape is old school [Laughs].\n \n\n 44:53\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nMixed tape is good. It creates this awareness of looking back – the history of old media and the new media. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] [Sound Effect: Creaking Wood]\n \n\n 45:08\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI wonder if we might [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] – one of the things that was really striking to me about the sort of overlap between all of our panelists’ comments was about the relationship between practice and theory of Podcast Studies. And Laurie has put the question really well in the chat here, that it is important for podcast academics to also be practitioners and Dario your point that that may be more so than for other media. Laurie would like you to expand on that, but I would also love to hear from the rest of the panel about how you think about the relationship between practice and theory in podcasts studies and whether that feels – I think particularly if people coming in from, from different disciplinary perspectives – how’s that different from the relationship between theory and practice in film studies, or in literary studies, or in radio studies, which are all media-engaged disciplines.\n \n\n 46:03\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThat was just kind of born out of experience. And when I was doing podcasting, it was making me look at the way I write and the way I speak, not just in an objective sense, but also the identity of that. But the difference, say between something like film, which is the background that I came from, probably is just for the fact that film has 120 years behind it –\n \n\n 46:23\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs].\n \n\n 46:23\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t–and therefore there’s 120 years of people saying what film is, and you don’t have to start a film studies essay by having to – three or four pages explaining what you think film is –.\n \n\n 46:38\tSeveral Voices:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n 46:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t– in a way, whereas a lot of Podcast Studies papers do because we’re still arguing about it. So, I think maybe that’s where my assertion that having a practical sense of podcasting leads you to a wider understanding of what it is at this point.\n \n\n 46:55\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s really, hasn’t been my position for some time, especially coming from a radio background that I find when people who don’t have that background, they really do teach it from a perspective of like, well, that’s not how it works. Like that’s not how news is made. And once you’re in the room and you know how the meat is made, then you kind of have a better insight and your positionality is so much more informed than your previous self. And also think about this, when anthropologists embed in communities, there’s a reason there’s a certain observation level that takes place from that perspective. And so when I’m trying to coach students into producing audio, storytelling, and podcasts, it really comes from a place of, I know this process and I can help you develop this story into something – into something really interesting. So I think having that practicality under your belt is really useful and it’s something that everyone should venture into, even on a short series, a podcast, or just an interview podcast, whatever. I think everyone should have that experience.\n \n\n 47:58\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo this is a great conversation to have and something that I’m constantly engaging with in my own work. And I think it’s interesting to think about it in the broader sense of media studies as well. So as a media studies scholar, documentary researchers for instance, have been making their own media for a very, very long time. And that’s a field I look to quite often for what that might look like in the podcasting realm as well, both radio documentary and film documentary. And I think what those fields can tell us is podcasting is an interesting place to bring together practice and theory, because it’s also a medium that is very much grounded in a personal practice, in an individual researcher. Even when we’re thinking about large podcast productions, teams are still realistically quite small, maybe five or six people who are actively working on a podcast series together. These aren’t the same as a large Hollywood film production, which would be a much more difficult thing for a scholar to, well get the funds to do, but also the resources and people to actually put it together. So thinking about podcasting, I think in relation to film and radio documentary is quite useful in this way. And we see, of course, people like Siobhán McHugh writing about this. And we need to look to those scholars for some answers around this connection as well.\n \n\n 49:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI just wanted to throw a term into the conversation because I think I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about it. And I keep thinking, as I’m listening to you, keep thinking about the concept and the practice of research creation and I’ll do a shout out to my colleague, Natalie Loveless, who has an amazing book called How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation. I think in many ways there are a whole set of well articulated practices and theories coming from colleagues in the creative and performing arts about what it means to bring practice and theory together in this way in a manner that is very much about the production of research and insights through this. And I think there might be some real opportunity there for thinking about how podcasting might itself constitute a form of research creation.\n \n\n 50:09\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tGreat point, Mike. Yeah, because for myself, I’m coming to the field with this kind of wide-eyed naivete, in that I really, I think only listened to a podcast for the first time in maybe the last six months, before embarking on making my own. [Laughs] But I think as I was trying to suggest in our response, that so many of those ethical decisions, that one makes that one is really attuned to, come from those editorial decisions of figuring out like, oh if we have four guests, do we need to balance things out? What parts of all of these incredible interviews do we keep in? Do we put music beneath people’s speech? Does it enhance the experience that their words? Is it music that they ultimately hate and want to change? Like all of these very, very small material decisions matter in how we’re representing other people’s voices. And, for me, that’s just absolutely essential in grappling with those ethical considerations on a material level.\n \n\n 51:09\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. And there’s wonderful – it’s a beautiful chat and there’s I think really, really significant sort of amplification of those questions of materiality. It’s a great point here from Jennifer Lynn Stover about the way that a focus on practice could become another form of gatekeeping. Because access to the possibility to even experiment in audio composition goes hand in hand with certain material conditions. And it does seem like there is an interesting overlap between this question about practice and this question about canonization, which has to do with what forms and genres and styles and structures to be introduced to our students as the way that podcasts are made. That there is possibility for implicitly creating canons through how we ourselves practice podcast making, or teach podcast making. So these all – just a beautifully tangled [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] set of questions.\n \n\n 52:24\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nLet’s let the audience get in on this.\n \n\n 52:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions sort of flagged here. So are there sort of emerging recognized genre forums in the podcasting world and where is the experimental genre-defying work happening?\n \n\n 52:42\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWell, I know that PhD student Anne [Inaudible] – I don’t know if she’s here, Anne – but she’s doing work on the genres and forms, which is interesting because I think what she’s talking about is the way in which traditional genre categories related to things like film and television music don’t really work in the same way for podcasting as they do for those media. So there’s a kind of layering of how you would have to think about podcasts in terms of taxonomies and categorizations like that. And I think it’s just indicative as well of the difficulty of that whole process in the way that Apple podcasts, when it did its revamp just seemed to add to the problem.\n \n\n 53:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs].\n \n\n 53:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs]. I think. So, yeah. I mean, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting question about, about genre distinctions in terms of podcasting.\n \n\n 53:32\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI really appreciate that you brought up Anne, Dario because Anne and I have had some really great conversations around this, and Kim’s been in many of those conversations as well as part of our podcast PhDs group. And we’ve been talking a lot about genre, about how we define podcast genre, and how we approach storytelling and narration. And for me, because I guess because my media studies background, I do see quite a lot of correlation between a genre’s set up in TV, film, radio being really just pushed onto podcasting because it’s what’s familiar already. That said, because podcasting is really this messy mishmash network of all of these different media forms put together, we do of course see experimental work being done as well is just less talked about, as we see in all other media forms as well. It’s really about where the money is, and those are the podcasts that we see and hear, versus maybe some more experimental work that’s being done. And I’d encourage anyone interested to maybe look more into soundscape composition work and experimental radio for where those ideas are really coming from.\n \n\n 54:43\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tRichard Barry has suggested three – a sort of typology of podcasting here, which is narrative, conversation, and experimental, which I think is a really sort of interesting non-generic way to break down the world of podcasting. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 55:06\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was wondering [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] what is the space of the critical writing in podcasting, not academic writing, but critical writing. There is some, there are recommendation articles and magazines, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be the place to make the marginal mainstream, because that’s how mainstream manual music happened in particular decades. Not always, but occasionally it does happen that music journalism drives certain genres to prominence. And I think as academics we could participate in that kind of boundary crossing activity.\n \n\n 55:44\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tA good site is somewhere like Bello Collective as a starting point for that. They do pieces that –they do kind of recommendations in terms of kinds of lists and stuff, but there is some what you call journalistic longer form critical writing about podcasts. What’s interesting is that the – it is people who are just interested in podcasting doing the writing as well as producers and some academics. I think the difficulty is if you look at long form journalism in film, again, that is now contracting, it’s all short form listicles type stuff or academia. I mean –and especially the pandemic that sort of, the idea of the long form magazine [Inaudible] all these kinds of things, they’re managing to survive, but it’s such a small kind of base. So I think, again, it’s in terms of academics doing that and just generally producers, whoever’s interested in podcasting, is kind of having to do it off your own back.\n \n\n 56:42\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was just adding in the chat, how I know that there are some journals that are – not only will the journal have a podcast, but in the physical journal, they are accepting podcast reviews as you would with a book review. So that’s one way to get sort of a critical look or maybe a critical conversation going about a specific podcast or series or something like that. And of course, Radio Doc Review, which was mentioned in the chat as well.\n \n\n 57:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s interesting to think about that historical formation that, is it anything about podcasting that doesn’t lend itself to long form critical analysis, or is it just the way the emergence of podcasting aligned with the sort of disappearance of that particular form of critical writing from our media landscape? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n 57:21\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] There is a question in the chat that I actually think will be useful probably for a number of the folks here. This is from Devin Bait. They say, “I noticed that the word intimacy was brought up a couple of times and seemed to carry some weight: why? I’m brand new to Podcast Studies.” [Laughs] Which I love –that I’m brand new. Why is intimacy spoken with such a tremble?\n \n\n 57:54\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, I’m happy to start. [Speaks closer to the microphone] Is it better if I speak like this? Is this a bit more intimate for our particular talk of intimacy? So I put in the chat, I actively avoided using the term intimacy in my provocation today, and that was intentional. So the word intimacy gets thrown around so much in the discussion of podcasting and there’s great work being done by scholars like Alan [Inaudible], who’s just finished up their PhD on podcast intimacies specifically. And we see this term used in radio as well, but less so in public broadcast radio and the kind of radio that reaches out to the masses and more so radio and podcasts that are speaking to you as an individual listener, the individual you in your ears. And that has created some really interesting scholarship around the relationship between headphone listening and intimacy with podcasts and even deep into discussions of how podcasts are produced, among producers as well, being produced for headphones to kind of create this internal sense of a voice in your head, in the experience of listening to podcasts. So there is a ton you can dig into in relation to the term podcasting and intimacy together. But maybe that’ll start off the panel on the subject.\n \n\n 59:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWhen you actually sort of get down to it, what do you really mean when you’re talking about intimacy? And I think with people that are writing a paper and they’re setting out criteria of what they understand by intimacy is fine. Just get on with it! It’s when it’s like oh, podcasts are an intimate medium. That’s too broad and a little bit too problematic, I think.\n \n\n 59:46\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’ll add to that from a bit of a different perspective and maybe this comes from my radio days, but I really got used to the Zoom world and especially all of these black squares, because I just feel like I’m on the radio. And, who’s really listening? Who am I talking to? And occasionally with Zoom, someone will talk back, but with students at eight in the morning, you’re usually just talking to the ether. So that sort of dynamic in that intimacy, when we think about the famous phrase from NPR in their “driveway moments” that either it’s in that car radio space or if you’re wearing earbuds and it is like Dario and Stacey mentioned that – the tenor of the voice, what is it that really makes us feel connected?\n1:00:31\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd even when teaching podcasting and teaching audio storytelling, you’re writing in a certain kind of way, there’s a writing for radio style and that you’re writing for one person, potentially. I tell students now about design thinking, you’re designing this prototype of a listener and then you’re going to talk to that listener so that you really create this connection. So that’s a little bit of what I think about intimacy and podcasting and radio.\n \n\n1:01:01\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Well, I will say for my part on the idea of physical intimacy I definitely affected a calming ASMR lady voice for my podcast [Laughs] which I don’t know why, but it seemed like the thing to do. But on a more social level, I would say the most interesting thing that came out of our podcast was all of the forms of intimacy that happened outside of the episode, that spilled over the container of the episode. Which are the many conversations that we had with the interviewers, getting in touch with bill bisset and Maria Campbell who had excerpts of audio in the podcast, knowing that they were listening to the podcast. So I think actually if we look at the podcast, not necessarily as contained within the media form itself, but as a broader set of social practices, then we get into this really sort of exciting territory of community building and social intimacy, which to me, I think is probably the most exciting part.\n \n\n1:02:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. I love that emphasis. That makes me think back to what Elena was saying about pirate radio practices and the possibility of community [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] formation. And how do we build for community in this asynchronous medium? There has been a wonderful conversation [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and links and resources shared in the chat here. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful panelists. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:02:42\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nCan everyone on mute and say goodbye? So that’ll be some good sound for the podcast.\n \n\n1:02:46\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nEverybody unmute! We need 46 goodbyes. Let’s go.\n \n\n1:02:50\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs]\n \n\n1:03:01\tVarious voices:\tGoodbye! [Laughs] Bye!\n \n\n1:03:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] Love this audio. Love it.\n \n\n1:03:07\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s a sound poem if I ever heard one.\n \n\n1:03:07\tVarious voices::\t[Laughs] [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:03:07\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n1:03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb project director, Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, and Elena Razlova for their contributions to the panel discussion featured in this episode. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] From all of us at spoken web, thanks for listening to season two of this SpokenWeb Podcast, and we hope you’re ready for season three, coming soon with brand new episodes from the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9614","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E1, Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’, 4 October 2021, Bloom"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Myra Bloom"],"creator_names_search":["Myra Bloom"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/79174225341311352865\",\"name\":\"Myra Bloom\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/373cabca-0ad8-4c98-a73d-97905d0a3b23/audio/4f64fdd9-c42b-40c8-ac20-6eff2555de43/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:09\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,340,674 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-10-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23334883\",\"venue\":\"York University Glendon Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6\",\"latitude\":\"43.72824305\",\"longitude\":\"-79.37750288670469\"}]"],"Address":["2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6"],"Venue":["York University Glendon Campus"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.\\n\\nMUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549699428352,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you. \n\nOver the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.\n\nFeatured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.]\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n \n\n00:50\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to Season Three of the SpokenWeb Podcast. We are so excited to bring you another season of the podcast, featuring the research and ideas of the SpokenWeb community and a few special guests. We hope this podcast is a source of joy, inspiration, and learning for you. It certainly is for us.\n \n\n01:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWe want to open Season Three with an invitation to collectively reflect on the sounds we’ve been listening to. And the questions we’ve been exploring – beginning with a conversation about sonic literary research with episode producer Myra Bloom, followed by a replaying of Myra’s Season One episode: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. Myra and I go back to her episode to ask: how does listening to archival audio shift our relationship to the authors we’re studying or reading?\n \n\n01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThis question is at the heart of the SpokenWeb project, which is dedicated to the discovery and preservation of recordings that have captured the literary events of the past. Writers and artists have been avidly documenting their performances of literary works, events, and conversations since portable tape recording technologies became available in the 1960s. Yet, most of these audio archives remain inaccessible or in danger of imminent decay. Even those that are digitized are often hard to discover, siloed on different institutional websites. Our goal is to help researchers and the public engage with these sonic literary artifacts today. [Start Music: Instrumental Jazz] Now you might be asking, why should we care about decaying old recordings? In the very first episode of our podcast, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod interviewed SpokenWeb researchers about how they got interested in literary sound and the SpokenWeb project. [Sound Effect: Tape Being Put in a Recorder. Beep of Recording Starting]\n \n\n02:41\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Michael O’Driscoll:\tArchives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. They –we only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them.\n \n\n02:51\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Annie Murray:\tWhat we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets were going on reading tours [Audio Recording: Overlapping Voices Performing Poetry]. We were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings. Where [Audio Recording: Audience Applause] did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read?\n \n\n03:11\tAudio Recording,  S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Jason Camlot:\tI was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach. And the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class, played to me by my professor, John Miller. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” [Audio Clip: Muffled Recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade]\n \n\n03:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ve discovered that once we make old tapes listenable again, the results are powerful –\n \n\n03:43\tAudio Recording, S2E6 “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”,  Mavis Gallant:\tThis is a story called Grippes and Poche.\n \n\n03:45\tHannah McGregor:\t[Audio Recording of Mavis Gallant continues] –like the voice of Mavis Gallant, inspiring producers, Kate, Kandice, and Michelle, to ask new research questions about her life and literary work.\n \n\n03:55\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\t[Sound Effect: Beep of Recording Starting] Why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984?\n04:00\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kate Moffat:\tWe wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed, or not, from that of the individuals attending the event.\n \n\n04:05\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kandice Sharren:\tIt was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n04:11\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\tIt’s like, where is this voice coming from? It did seem really unusual.\n \n\n04:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] Actually hearing an author reminds us that literary works can have a presence beyond the page. Like this moment that Katherine McLeod documents in a series of ShortCuts minisodes about Muriel Rukeyser – [Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] a moment of author and audience sharing a literary experience.\n \n\n04:36\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Muriel Rukeyser:\tYou know, this part of the story.\n \n\n04:38\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Katherine McLeod:\tI can see by your nods. You know this part of the story. By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are.\n \n\n04:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] The sounds of literature are embodied and emotional – they resonate within us. As the SpokenWeb Podcast begins its third season, we’re continuing to reflect on our mission asking ourselves questions like: how do we ethically manage and share old recordings with care? What can literary scholars learn from studies? What is present and absent from the sonic archive? And how does gathering sounds of the past change the way literary research happens in the present?\n \n\n05:27\tHannah McGregor:\tNow that I’ve set the scene, I’m delighted to bring Myra Bloom into the conversation. Myra is an assistant professor of English at York University, and was the producer of our Season One episode, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. In this episode, Myra used archival audio, her own narrative reflections, and interviews to examine the great passion behind Smart’s famous work By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – and the obstacles that impacted Smart’s literary career.\n \n\n05:56\tHannah McGregor:\tCould you start off by telling us a little bit about what the process was like for you of making this episode originally?\n \n\n06:03\tMyra Bloom:\tSo I –as anyone who knows me knows, I love Elizabeth Smart and I love By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and I had been thinking for a while about doing some kind of project about it. I’ve written about it before, I wanted to do a critical edition of that book, but for issues of obtaining the rights, I was a bit thwarted from that project. But I still had it in my mind that I wanted to do a lot of kind of archival research and primary research. I had done a lot actually. And I talked to some of the people already who were important players in Smarts, kind of afterlife, her biographers. I’d talked to Kim Echlin, I talked to Rosemary Sullivan, and I wanted –I loved the way that they spoke about her. And so I knew in my mind as I was conceiving of the piece that I wanted to bring in other voices, other women in particular, who had been inspired by Elizabeth Smart. And then it suddenly occurred to me that even though I’d spent some time in the archives looking at various documents, I’d actually never heard her voice. And so I decided – I looked around and tried to find if there were any archives of her actually reading. And I found two pieces that I ended up including in the episode, one of which was a video that I harvested the audio from, the other of which was an audio recording of a reading. And that’s kind of where the piece began to take shape for me.\n \n\n07:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo what was it like for you hearing her voice for the first time? How did that shift your relationship to the work?\n \n\n07:37\tMyra Bloom:\tIt was very jarring, to be honest with you. Many of us have this image in our minds of Elizabeth Smart as this passionate young, beautiful, intense, almost tragic heroine figure. At least that was sort of the image that I always carried with me. I think that book is so powerful and transcendent and youthful and it’s spirit and language. It’s very accomplished, but it’s the passionate intensity of a young person. And as I say in the piece, those are feelings I really had related to as a 19- 20 year old encountering it for the first time, full of that kind of passionate intensity. But the thing about Smart that’s kind of interesting for Canadians is that we only really encountered her later in life. She came to Canada as a writer in residence in 1982 and she died in 1986.\n \n\n08:29\tHannah McGregor:\tWow.\n \n\n08:30\tMyra Bloom:\tSo, yeah. And so that’s really kind of the Elizabeth Smart that Canadians knew. And it was this feeling of belatedness – a lot of people spoke about this at the time that we kind of discovered her too late. And that was really the feeling that I had almost listening to the audio, not just that it was too late, but sort of the poignancy of the fact that Smart as an older woman was sort of reanimating this work from her earlier life. But the texture of her voice – this is a woman who drank a lot and smoked a lot and led a pretty Bohemian life. And you can hear that in the grain of her voice. So hearing her read that audio, I was really connecting with the older Smart, as opposed to the younger Smart I thought I had set out to encounter.\n \n\n09:20\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Which really sort of contextualizes the whole sense of what that book means differently.\n \n\n09:26\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And you know, she’s a fascinating figure as well because that book is such a magnum opus and it presages such amazing things. And then she sort of had lifelong writer’s block, a lot of the works that came after The Assumption of the Roads and the Rascals –her other novella – is good, but it’s not the same level of good. And her poetry in my mind is not quite as accomplished as the novellas. And so, there’s a way in which she sort of lived on the laurels of that work and was kind of forced to re-encounter it again and again.\n \n\n10:04\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd there’s always this sort of element of, I don’t know, maybe regret or a feeling of not having achieved what she could have achieved potentially. So the disappointment –there’s a sense of disappointment I always hear in the reading. In fact, in some of those archives, she reads a poem twice because she starts out reading it at the beginning of the reading and then it gets a good reception. And then she says, I think I’m just going to read that one again. And you can really feel her kind of like soaking up the attention, which was, which was really denied to her for so much of her life when she was raising her children and kind of wallowing and obscurity [Laughs] – not obscurity that’s the wrong way to put it because she was a very successful copywriter. She just was never heralded as the great modernist that she really was.\n \n\n10:48\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s remarkable to be able to hear that in the recording too, the sense that your encounter with this voice in the archive is also a sort of re-encounter that what you are hearing is a sort of much later articulation of a relationship to this work. And it is this reminder of the way that author’s own relationships to their work transforms over time. And often you can only hear that in the audio record.\n \n\n11:15\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And I think, if she had gone on to write consistently throughout her career, maybe she would offer something in her late style and then throw in a hit or two from her juvenilia, which By Grand Central Station would have been at that point. But because she never – she was kind of a one hit wonder – not exactly, and again, as I say, I don’t mean to diminish the rest of her output, which was considerable. I read somewhere that she was the first person to use sexy in an ad, the word sexy, although I have to independently verify that fact, because if that’s true, it’s amazing.\n \n\n11:47\tHannah McGregor:\tAmazing.\n \n\n11:47\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah, it’s amazing. But yeah, but she kind of had to figure out what work was going to mean to her for the entire rest of her life over and over after the George Barker of that work.\n \n\n11:59\tMyra Bloom:\tI mean, not again – my interests are very much in severing biographical readings of texts from the text itself. I think that’s too facile a conflation, but certainly George Barker, her lover, was a kind of animating inspiration for the love affair we see depicted in that book. And by the time she’s reading in Canada – their relationship, they had produced four children, it had completely fallen apart. They were friends and then they were frenemies and then they weren’t speaking. And this is like having to summon the passion of a relationship that has – is decades exhausted. So it’s interesting in that sense too.\n \n\n12:37\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, that is really interesting. So to follow up on that, your interest in severing the biographical tie in particularly women’s writing. We know this is something that haunts women writers in particular that while male writers are generally allowed to be making art, women are always read as operating in the autobiographical mode. This is like the great Sylvia Plath conundrum. How is that relationship complicated by encountering this work read, but in the authors’ voices?\n \n\n13:12\tMyra Bloom:\tElizabeth Smart was really canny about how she herself framed this work. So when it originally came out, sometimes she and George Barker would appear at readings together and sort of play up the biographical elements of the work. Sometimes she would say, “Oh, this is, this is about a great love affair.” She would really emphasize that aspect. Other times she would lie about its composition. She would say, “Oh, I sat down for two hours crying and writing this book”, which is not true. It evolved over a number of years. So she would make it sound like it was an outpouring, but the moment that kind of biographical reading would get applied to her, like when they tried to do an adaptation for, I think for film ,where the characters were named George and Elizabeth, she totally freaked out and completely recanted that biographical conflation.\n \n\n14:03\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd so I think that– I was aware going into it that she herself had played in that gray zone between the biography and the art. I think for me hearing it read in the voice of an older woman, it was no longer about George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. It was much more about an older woman’s relationship to her younger self. And to me that’s so fascinating because what draws many of us to this book is the sort of cult of youth and beauty and passion and all these transcendent emotions. But, anyone who’s heard this piece or will hear this piece that I ended up producing knows that it’s really much more about a kind of – it’s a more reflective piece. It has a more – I tried to take a more reflective tone and just to kind of open it up to a broader rumination on art making and the things that impede women from art making. I opted for a more sober, reflective tone to the piece, ultimately.\n \n\n15:02\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd so, I know that you have recently gotten funding to do a whole podcast series. Can you talk to us a little bit about sort of what inspired you to propose that in the first place and what that series is going to take up?\n \n\n15:17\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. I am currently writing a book whose provisional title is Evasive Maneuvers. And the book is all about the ways that certain contemporary Canadian writers subversively inhabit the confessional mode, which historically has always been a powerful mode for women. It’s – we wrote in letters and diaries and journals before we could access the publishing sphere and certainly confessional poetry and the United States and the 60s was a very powerful mode. And I should say that obviously persists to this day where confession is a very popular internet, social media, these kinds of first person narrative mode for women. But historically at every moment, the confession has also held out a kind of trap or a snare for women in that the moment you use it, you get accused of being overly effusive, of being not a serious writer, of being kind of compelled by your hysterical passions, right?\n \n\n16:16\tMyra Bloom:\tFeeding into these stereotypes of who women are and what forces they’re animated by. And in the internet, a lot of women try to use first person writing as a way to become published and then kind of immediately had those doors slammed on them when they were subsequently perceived as non-serious writers, precisely because they were writing about “I found a hair ball in my vagina” or something like that. Anyways. So keeping in mind all of this, this backdrop, I was interested in how women find ways to negotiate these confessional aporias or confessional problems in their work. And I’m really interested in kind of auto fiction or hybrid genre works, or the insertion of autobiographical content into poetry, or all these unexpected venues where the confessional kind of wells up in this ambiguous subversive way. So I’m working on the book, but I also realized it would be so powerful and interesting to hear women talking about these things in their own voice and to have the chance to actually do some interviews.\n \n\n17:16\tMyra Bloom:\tI was thinking today about how within the discourse of CanLit, social media and the internet has come to play such an important role and identity politics are really triangulating a number of these issues in a very, very personal way. So I thought, oh, well, maybe I could talk to some of the people who have tweeted very personal things about their experience that have gone on to factor prominently in the so-called CanLit dumpster fire. So I just realized there’s a lot of possibilities for talking to people that open up when you do something in a forum, like a podcast, rather than a book and different modes of scholarship, modes of engagement, modes of approaching an issue. And I am a huge, huge podcast listener. I have a very active podcast listening practice, and this was my first experience producing a podcast myself, for SpokenWeb. And I enjoyed the experience so much, I thought, okay, now I’m ready to really take on something at a larger scale. So yeah, so ultimately the SSHRC insight development project that I’m doing is going to be this multi episode engagement with this question of how contemporary Canadian writers and maybe even scholars are using confessional modes.\n \n\n18:21\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s very exciting. Okay. One last question. And that is, if anybody who is listening right now is an academic who wants to dip their toe into the world of podcasting, but is hesitant to do so, do you have any advice as somebody who went from a first time podcaster to now a passionate podcaster?\n \n\n18:42\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. So my advice is the same advice that I would give to anyone who wants to be a writer or wants to practice any skill. The first thing you have to do, if you want to be a writer, is be a reader. And the first thing you have to do, if you want to be a broadcaster, is listen to podcasts. Just start listening to the medium and get a sense of what you want to do and what you like, and then just try it. It’s great. It’s very rewarding.\n \n\n19:03\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks again for joining us. Myra. Now here is Myra Bloom in our January, 2020 episode [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] “The Agony and Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n19:19\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n19:31\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI thought, if it’s agreeable with you, that I’d read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven’t read it. Well, I fall in love and they’re dashing away across America, madly in love.\n \n\n19:55\tMyra Bloom:\tI first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time: the beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I’m pretty sure there’s a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth, or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren’t the stories they told me.\n \n\n21:28\tSina Queyras:\tIt was on Vancouver Island and I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the walls and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n21:36\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is poet and professor Sina Queyras.\n \n\n21:40\tSina Queyras:\tAnd I was sitting there reading this – somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras’ A Lover and they’re sister books, right? They’re totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart was that there’s just no Canadian voice that’s anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness, like she’s so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There’s just nothing –I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that’s not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it’s like Sappho, it’s like Sappho wrote a novel.\n \n\n22:57\tMusic\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n22:58\tKim Echlin:\tMy name is Kim Echlin. I’m the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother, and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental] Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it’s embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force.\n \n\n24:01\tKim Echlin:\tI think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebird’s Castle or some of John Donne’s poetry or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name, when I think of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, “love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman’s point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman. But before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n25:17\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tBy Grand Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone, It leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces, everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they totter into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there’s no redemption. It’s the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly signs, which wear away peace, but which I cannot understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation. It might’ve shown me all Dante’s dream, but there was no way to endure.\n \n\n26:53\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd what did it mean for you for Elizabeth Smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you?\n \n\n27:00\tMaya Gallus:\tIt was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent. [End Music: Instrumental Jazz]\n \n\n27:10\tMyra Bloom:\tDocumentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus.\n \n\n27:13\tMaya Gallus:\tSo I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well, because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother’s generation and previously of Elizabeth’s generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth’s writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems. A poem like “The Muse: His and Hers”, I still find is a very relevant, in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tNow, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it’s a feminist poem. I hope this won’t give any offense. [Audience Member: Why worry?] I’m not worried. Anyhow, it’s called “The Muse: His and Hers”. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I’m waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn’t a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me.\n \n\n29:58\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tShe said till old age came to assuage. /Now Muse, now you can have your way. Now, what was it I want him to say? /And used, abused and not amused. The mind’s gone blank./ Is it life you have to thank?/ Stevie, the Emily’s, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self/ But she said, try and see if it’s true and without cheating. My muse can do./ Can women do? Can women make? /When the womb rests animus awake./ Pale at my space starved and thin, /like hibernating bear too weak to begin./ To roar with authority, poems in the spring./ So late in the autumn of their suffering./ Those gaps. It’s decades of lying low./ Earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew./ Is it too late at 68?/ Oh fragile, fresh reanimate./ Oh flabby, teetering, body concentrate./ Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy/ useful in the dark in articulacy./ But drop it like poison now if you want poetry./ Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again./ Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM/ till the Muse commands her ritual hymn./ See lucky man, get off his knee./ And here now his roar of authority./ This test case woman could also be,/ just in time for a small cacophony/ A meaningful scream between folded womb and grave./ A brief, respite from the enclave.\n \n\n32:09\tRosemary Sullivan:\tI remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading.\n \n\n32:15\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart’s biographer.\n \n\n32:21\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply. And it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was [Laughs] because, she’d written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn’t write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she’d say, I’m my son Sebastian, the poet’s mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not T.S Elliot, but Dylan Thomas, kind of knocked her down.\n \n\n33:17\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa, put forward by her mother hobnobbing with the prime minister’s set, and so on. She said, “I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down.” Then of course you asked her, well, why did you keep – what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, “oh God, he had such a sense of humor.” [Laughs] So.. I did meet George.\n \n\n33:55\tMyra Bloom:\tWhat was he like?\n \n\n33:57\tRosemary Sullivan:\tExactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elsbeth, you know that he had – this could not happen now. He had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children. And then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that he can’t be given today. But here I was at Elsbeth’s and she was lovely. There was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn’t work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time you –if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man, right?\n \n\n34:44\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\t[Start Music: Jazz Instrumental] Yes. You – in another of your poems you talk about – this is the trying to write one, that you read last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write.\n \n\n35:00\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes, yes. And somebody asked me last night too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel that I’ve always been thinking about that you really have to be ruthless to write. And it isn’t– so it isn’t a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good, perhaps, but they do conflict. If you’re good, you’re not ruthless. You always think somebody else, they want to come in and tell you about their troubles. You’re writing. You don’t say “No, off. I’m busy.” You say, “come in.” And I listen to them.\n \n\n35:31\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tThis is called “Trying To Write”. Why am I so frightened to say I’m me / And publicly acknowledge my small mastery? / Waited for sixty years till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre with triumphant voices? / I know this won’t happen until it’s too late / And the deed done (or not done) so I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do it in my place! / Giving love to get it (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write.\n \n\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tAnd so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory.\n \n\n36:39\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tThat it’s egocentric to write.\n \n\n36:42\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tYeah you really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind been rather squashed so that I feel I have to get it back a bit.\n \n\n36:50\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tAnd do you think this is a particularly female problem? That it’s a problem of the woman writer?\n \n\n36:53\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tWell I do because whatever people say, I do think that women are – perhaps it’s a training, I don’t know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful, don’t they? Maybe that’s because they’re in that position.\n \n\n37:10\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tWhen you speak about – it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless. I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:18\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tThe angel of the house.\n \n\n37:21\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:25\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\n \n\nWell that’s it, that’s the same thing.\n \n\n37:26\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tShe could not, no longer be if she was going to write, she couldn’t be responsible in this way or recognize or wait for family in her house or else she would never find time to write.\n \n\n37:35\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd then most with children and the house, I mean, you’re always, you’re fragmented your mind. You think, “Oh dear, we’re out of Vim”. Or “the soap flakes are down” you can’t, you know, these sort of things that are in your mind.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd you’ve got to remember to go and get this. Well the men, well they are doing it more now, but there was never any question: they wouldn’t notice if you’d run out of lavatory paper or something.\n \n\n37:57\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Yeah.\n \n\n37:59\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tIn fact, George would just tear out a sheet of a book. [Laughs]\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tReally?\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYeah. No respect for literature.\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tNot his own books?\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes! Yes, his own ones. He wouldn’t care.\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tAnd yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, I know you’ve written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people hark back to the book you wrote many years ago –\n \n\n38:29\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tOh no, I’m delighted to have a little attention so late in the evening.\n \n\n38:31\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Well, so many people, particularly I think women, do identify with it. It is a love story, which must’ve been very unique, still is unique. But when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time, it must’ve been thought, well this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it would be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction?\n \n\n39:07\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes. I think I mentioned last night that they said “a trivial subject”. Women’s feelings are trivial subjects. And nobody said how shocking to say it’s a trivial subject, they just took that.\n \n\n39:20\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tWell, does it make you angry when they said that?\n \n\n39:24\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI didn’t know. One just thinks, that’s the way things are. I don’t really make any judgment. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:34\tMyra Bloom:\tDo you really feel that Elizabeth writer’s block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don’t necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children? [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:47\tRosemary Sullivan:\tYou know, I know people who’ve raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what’s so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth’s work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George. So he was simply the embodiment of it. After that, I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it’s easy to – writing is such a fragile activity. I mean, I haven’t written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into time before I can write. Everything’s going horizontally. There’s every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing. But also Elizabeth would – she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they’d have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was – she had a professional life. But some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n41:12\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tA warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But houses the demon. Hello my dear, sit down. I’ll soothe your pain. I’ve known what you’ve known, but won’t again. Though passion is not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. And love falls like napalm, over the school.\n \n\n42:13\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n42:15\tMaya Gallus:\tOh, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And also some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, “A Bonus” is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, “feeling dirty and roughly dressed” and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion.\n \n\n43:06\tMyra Bloom:\t[Reciting Poem] “A Bonus”. That day I finished/ A small piece/ For an obscure magazine/ I popped it in the box // And such a starry elation/ Came over me/ That I got whistled at in the street/ For the first time in a long time// I was dirty and roughly dressed/ And had circles under my eyes/ And far, far from flirtation/ But so full of completion/ Of a deed duly done/ An act of consummation// That the freedom and force it engendered/ Shone and spun/ Out of my old raincoat.// It must’ve looked like love/ Or a fabulous free holiday/ To the young men sauntering/ Down Berwick Street./ I still think this is most mysterious/ For while I was writing it/ It was gritty it felt like self-abuse/ Constipation, desperately unsocial/ But done, done, done/ Everything in the world /Flowed back/ Like a huge bonus.\n \n\n44:20\tMaya Gallus:\tI can’t think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and we’ll continue to be relevant for continuing generations.\n \n\n44:35\tMyra Bloom:\tI hope so. Okay. Thank you.\n \n\n44:39\tMaya Gallus:\tYou’re welcome.\n \n\n44:46\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tGood morning boss. A cup of coffee and two fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy begot with that knife. He’s all the world that is left. He is American better than love. He is civilization’s heir oh you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years? Well, it’s too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartres Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corn cobs to the genitals of the male, everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep? [Audience Applause]\n \n\n45:56\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. The episode we replayed for you today. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” was originally released on January 6th, 2020 and was produced by Myra Bloom. The new introduction to this episode was produced by Judith Burr and me ,Hannah McGregor, with special thanks to Myra Bloom for coming back to discuss her episode again with us. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our transcriptions are created by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9615","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E2, Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive, 1 November 2021, Polyck-O’Neill"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creator_names_search":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3d1f947d-a26e-415a-9002-caeecdb1698e/audio/9aee09d9-16e3-4499-b25f-e666c04ae3a4/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,801,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/15396822\",\"venue\":\"York University Keele Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 \",\"latitude\":\"43.77417545\",\"longitude\":\"-79.50474900961275\"}]"],"Address":["4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 "],"Venue":["York University Keele Campus"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” No More Potlucks, 2018, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019. \\n\\nMorra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. “At the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, 1994: Launch of XEclogue on January 8, 1994.” PennSound, n.d., https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Robertson/Robertson-Lisa_Reading_Kootenay-School_Vancouver_01-%2008-1994.mp3. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.\\n\\nTaylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549701525504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, SpokenWeb contributor Julia Polyck-O’Neill shares an archived recording of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson with us and talks us through two interviews she recorded with Robertson. Polyck-O’Neill invites us to consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections in light of the relationships between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. In examining these conceptual, material and immaterial dimensions of the archive within Robertson’s personal narrative history of the Kootenay School of Writing, Polyck-O’Neill points to how creative and feminist approaches to the archive and to archival practice are exist within Robertson’s practice. Polyck-O’Neill shares with us how Robertson’s archives are influencing her research and the ways she approaches the topic of archives and intimacy in her work and her life more broadly.\n\nAddendum: Listening Notes\n\nNancy Shaw (1962-2007), a celebrated curator, poet, writer, and organizer, at times collaborated with Lisa Robertson and also wrote work in dialogue with Robertson’s poetry. Robertson wishes to mention how greatly the absence of her good friends Shaw, Stacy Doris (d. 2012), and Peter Culley (d. 2015) has affected her. Additionally,  XEclogue was, in fact, Robertson’s first book, although she published chapbooks prior; additionally, she does not think of her books as collections, as they are written as single, cohesive works. The new edition of R’s Boat is titled Boat and is being published by Coach House in Spring 2022.\n\n00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Creating an archive of literary lives and events can be a daunting task. Think about an author you admire – if you want to preserve their legacy in a box of materials, how would you do it? What would you save? How would these materials communicate the realities of the present to those living decades in the future? And how do sound recordings fit into – or even enhance -an archive? Archival collections or fragments of memory – a curated set of materials that has been gathered and preserved to encapsulate a moment, community, or person. Archives preserved at universities, museums, and other places contain all kinds of materials from mundane lists and notes to photographs, to sound recordings – our speciality here at Spoken Web.\n01:33\tHannah McGregor:\tIt might feel counterintuitive to think about the need for archiving today when so much of our lives are ceaselessly recorded. There are many digital outlets that people can use to collect and share moments from our lives and our literary present. But this abundance of material is also a call for curation and intentionality around what to protect and pass on. We can’t save everything and we probably don’t want to. So what should we choose to save? Today, our episode producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill leads us into one archival project: the archive of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Julia is caring for and studying part of Robertson’s archive as part of her postdoctoral work on the complexity of archiving the lives and works of interdisciplinary artists. In this episode, Julia shares a recording of Robertson from the archive and plays clips of Robertson discussing the challenges of forming her own archive. Julia uses these clips to reflect on creative and feminist approaches to archiving and on her personal connection to Robertson’s life and work. This episode is a fascinating and moving glimpse into the power of sonic archival material and the weight of memory, mortality, and trust in the archival process. Here is Julia Polyck-O’Neil with season three, episode two of the SpokenWeb Podcast, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:18\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Hello, thanks for listening. My name is Julia Polyck-O’Neill and I’m a post-doctoral researcher, theorizing interdisciplinary artists archives, according to feminist and digital epistemologies. This podcast episode, on which I’ve been working for quite some time has recently been re-imagined according to my private emotional responses to two long and surprisingly intimate conversations I recorded with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, a feminist writer who was a member of the Kootney School of Writing in Vancouver in the 1990s and early 2000s.\n03:55\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI’m considering Robertson’s archive as part of my post-doctoral project. [End Music: Strings Instrumental] My conversations with Robertson and meditations on the connections between her body of work, biography, and her archive form the bridge between my recently completed dissertation work on Vancouver’s critical conceptualism in art and writing and my work re-examining and analyzing the complexity of the archival collections of interdisciplinary artists. Robertson’s work has figured into both projects in a formal way, but now, I wish to consider how her archives, and our collective thinking about her archives, is influencing my research and the ways I approach the topic of archives and intimacy in my work and my life more broadly. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Listening to our conversation months later invokes all kinds of feelings related to the relationship between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. Archives have an emotional weight – a kind of affective tenor that is challenging to describe accurately with language; objects begin to stand in for complex lives and relationships.\n05:05\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn this episode, I’m going to introduce you to Robertson’s poetry and my research. First, I will share a recording of Robertson reading in 1994. Then, I’ll share clips from an interview I conducted with Robertson earlier this year on Friday, April 16th, 2021, over Zoom with Robertson at home in France and me at my desk in downtown Toronto, months before Robertson’s 60th birthday (in July) and just before the announcement of the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award in fiction (for which her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal would be nominated on 4 May). Throughout this episode, I will be putting these recordings into the context of my thinking and research on her work.\n05:49\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections and the reflections she shared with me in light of a creative, conceptualist interest in the archive. I also propose these as aesthetic strategies related to histories of feminist material analysis that reconsider archival practices according to feminist ethical and effective methods, including feminist and affective approaches to audio recordings and the material (and immaterial) histories, they impart as Deanna Fong and Karen Scherer argue in their 2018 essay, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental]\n06:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI want to start this episode by listening together to this 20 minute recording of “Eclogue Eight ” at the January 8th, 1994 launch of Robertson’s book, XEclogue, which exemplifies important characteristics of her writing and her work with the Kootenay School of Writing. In this recording from the PennSound archive, you can hear the sounds of community participation. So central to the ethos of the Kootenay School. Of course, we might primarily focus on the poet’s own powerful voice, but I’m also drawn to the other voices we hear: the voices of other members acting as the “Roaring Boys,” an amateurish chorus, and the contributions of poet, artist, and organizer Nancy Shaw. But in this recording, in light of my interviews with Robertson, I’m most drawn to what we overhear in the background, the voices of audience members laughing and reacting in a way that suggests a deep, warm familiarity with the readers. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] The sounds of community. Part of an archive of community sounds. After we listen, I’ll talk about how this connects with my research, and I’ll share excerpts from my interviews with Robertson. [End Music: Strings Instrumental].\n \n\n07:46\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Eight: Romance. The Roaring Boys fan back.[Footsteps] [Audience Laughter] [Audience Chatter]\n08:01\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe March trees torch the prophetligate sky because I say so. [Audience Member Laughs] A tiny flopping boy with sullen fits drifts like a sheet of golden lust. In this empire of no-tense he bullies the dust. He lends the block street, a gleaming arch. He flaunts his hidden rope burn like defeat. So what about his consummate latinady? He has been moving in the pale night with the urgent authority of a meaning. The flicked fringe of his anger flatters mangled angels. And he weeps like a twin in the heat. The Greenwood never wanted him nor the puckered gully he calls thought. A seabird rises like an angel in the night and shrieks it’s brackish laughter at his dream. The Swains of justice pinch out the lights. A pronoun’s snout is gentle torture dressed in the dust of the jejune Northern sky. He scissored to that pilgrim’s grief. His marble whippets snap at piety; they’re pearly lust encrypted as confession. Under the empires, arches swooning flower chasers confuse scripted infamy with paradise.\n09:25\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey blindly submit to the loutish bonus of roaring boys’ dreams. As if the Greenwood were the room of philosophs. As if their yearning arms were half tree. They had been moving all this time towards a rose of dust in the street, calling it golden, calling it the sodden issue of their belief. They clasp their girlish secrets like tiny, glowing wreaths. In the tender platinum sky, a pronoun gallops, a pronoun shifts, a pronoun shifts. Hey, Venus kick in paradise, revolve outside March trees of piety. Gently the golden whippet snouts of gorgeousness lust in the tragic streets, touch supine forms of girlish hooligans. A bud will clasp its profligate secret rather than submit to gold stiff piety. And the pale jejune week unfolds through the lattice of confusion. Who is not a Pilgrim carrying grief like an image through the Northern sky? Already dressed as a boy, his dream of justice fucked.\n10:41\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tHe had been moving through this adult and gentle world of gentle laughter. Softly he flicks out his wings on the marble steps, the quiet of philosophs peaks in their rooms. Hey Nancy, what’s that colour falling in the heat, like a twin? Like a tiny flapping soft scissor and mistake. The fringe of his wings licks the dust like pearly fingers. Hey, Venus, get dressed in a better latinaty. Wear that salted harness beyond the need for abnegation. He quotes a crumbling dream and dares not say so. These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued [Audience Laughter]. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing. It is an anthem sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues and fluent scandal. Reigned with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched. Caressed by an accent has rubbed for murmurs to the sneaking night sulking as a flipped skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserve. Dirty per se.\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] [Intermittent Audience Laughter] Rear all you face and wave to the enormous night. Since love’s pure need lures [inaudible] credit through hungers creamy trap well suss a petty sight. Pass floral delight and sip at feeble kisses. Permit us a sip from that gaze quiet tremor. [inaudible] or crop that tricky verb. We’ll either sap or wet Nancy’s sultry transit. Sufficient ardor to us. [inaudible] This time of filming will quote Cupid’s vulgar luck to taste her silly statement. [Laughter and Applause]\n \n\n13:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tBut pathetic lays all that’s left of freedom in the cloistered night. Like a lock of Helen and the dangerous summer having bloomed from the silvered style of an anxious wrist who’s blunt syntax lackers opacity with greed. Yet crushing nothing more than the dampness that moves across the nyloned air with rancid gusts in an age of tawdry indolence that breeds such smear doubles for a calling, for a bruised structure, for a dupe sincerity that flaunts escape. The next pretty boy emerges like a rape from his crisis to find the concept does not need him. A slick whisper weaves across the commodities. Are you looking for fragrance? There is no sea and no forest and no boats passing. It’s eight o’clock. The glass world curves into history, leaving a bear pronoun to bask on the roof of a promise. Read them, audacity’s slim wrists cuffed in elegance, wandering fingers clipped to the pulsing sky by those bannal enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent.\n14:24\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tRead them as mere exitation, pooling products of neglect. Nancy straps the audible sulk of a method to her hips and presses bitter lips against an image. Let’s go down to the water’s edge. Who fished the ineffable from this slick tissue of an absence dripping it’s regret. She spends the loose coins from a lisped purse on important grammar that opens that goes on sheer, a girl-boy’d mirror, a compact Nancy pins them to the glass. Roaring Boy Number One is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of his mind as a great dusty silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. He could be said to profoundly resent his inability to control his desire for an impenitent extrovert.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWhen he closes his eyes, he asks, “shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight?” He is skinny and pure as a calling. Roaring Boy Number Two ,boy with the volute heart of a girl names, the faithless toss of an abandoned guest’s exactitude. He gives his thought with the sinews rigor of a cut silk garment. Lives looking at the sky, waiting for the specificity of a pleasure whose deferral is underwritten by a constriction of memory. The violent stammering of a repressed structure. The plains of his face point to the exquisitely even surface of a late antique life. He has begun by setting aside holy dread. Deferral is his darling. Roaring Boy Number Three, rather than submitting to the trial of action, wants deeply to possess an opinion [Audience Laughter] than having to possess, to distribute it with maximum efficiency. Since the spectacle of luxury pleases him and others, he embarks on a gradual, to the point of imperceptibility, inflation of his own verbal style and a concurrent almost compensatory deflation of his person. He is both febrile and duckerish – decorish [Laughs]. [Audience Laughter] A foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis.\n17:29\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Nine: History: Knowing memory only bruises the past, Lady M scans the face of a faint document whose ardent stammer she has already echoed than languidly rejected.\n \n\n17:47\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe cannot think tranquility a throne, yet time exceeds is barely tolerable pleasure.\n \n\n17:53\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIt is a crumb in our syntax.\n \n\n17:55\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe need not innure ourself to peace and luxury, but our privilege lies in understanding how the senses detect what is not servitude.\n \n\n18:03\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWho then would write the biography of their desires?\n \n\n18:07\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWe ourselves will claim the requisite authority.\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey wished for lips of red thread, like so many spies. They received through the veil of expression, a heart moved only by etiquette. They wished to experience thought as we would be compelled to remember it. It became a language impossibility. Their heart was lodged in an audible sentence. They wore nervousness on their spine and wrists. Their small soft edgy world was an intoxicant. The superb crumbling of the afternoon, so secret and so intense identified itself as history. The ground shelved gently to the water side, flowing from the flushed pulse of vulnerability under full, soft, hot light. It was a challenged mesh from which our presence had been washed.\n \n\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIf we were to imagine that contradiction as a landscape overwritten with vast exhausted melancholy quenched in mauvis tasseled wind, we would only perpetrate the vain in position of a hoax.\n \n\n19:17\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tYet the sea’s novice rhythm seems to reek of freeze. The Roaring Boys drift aimlessly, believing their thoughts imperius. A background ground of shimmering woods fetters our weary gaze. The black brow of a rock parches the trees. Sister of a lynx gert with quiver steps, cunningly and cheats the light. Recall the echoing crags a shore’s lip keeps happiness for itself. The woods breast is pierced with sight. Why may we not clasp the revolving night? The dusky grove bleeds virtue. For we saw two maids clashing with men whom the black storm had scattered. We saw one bear knee break the ghastly dark. We saw a strong hand raise the bow to slash the weird decrepitude time had wrought. Undone by our vision we began to move tirelessly among the wending dwindling paths. Though they appeared with grace, then faded into cruelity without apparent motivation. Slowly, we came to understand how the forest was fraught or thatched with use. Capital had tagged or lurid route. We asked ourselves, will this delicate world of deliquescent charms compel a future? Then answered ,the ground breeds sentiment, but what else is there to walk on? Sullenly we raised our glance, the coy foliage swung open to reveal this Moston scription.\n \n\n20:56\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] Shirk off the moderate little grace of vain Cupid and grease the silver and lascivious age as livid qualms dope our cool arrival. Rich poems sag like great nuns, arch cheeks, tongues, martyrs.\n \n\n21:14\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tFrom the lip of slavish shade, the guilty land reclines swollen in a thousand livid tents. All around us everything’s humming. In the low valley our futures writ on winking leaves. Texture Brit brushes, drenched texture in a glamorous frizane of wit. The cushioning ground urges us to remeasure our impatience. May we muster sufficient elegance to court this pangs mobility? Sunken moss we dream of the lustrous pitch of a truculent tissue. It means we are traders for we do not accept the idea of the present. We dream we are treading the sloping orthodox street etched with a scammed pride of hunger. It means memory has been defaced, implicated by the effects of poverty. We dream that their desires have become transparent to us so that we may suavely recite. What does Lady M want? To bask in unfathomably strange beauties. Political beauty, liberties, beauty, undeniably gorgeous beauty of a girl’s mind. A wrist’s quivering beauty. Beauty of the skin of boys’ backs. Beauty of burnished hoaxes deepen a clamoring taxi cabs. Appalled beauty of a scholar’s nervous heart. Cleft beauty invaded by splendid lucidity. We dreamed the night as far spent. Inexorable, thick lacquered, private. It means we have mistaken an invitation for permission. Yet still we feign this new erudition. Inappropriate and demeaning. With a movement of tearing we wake and cry out, we are not our own! Then find this freight’s scrap pinned to our sleeve.\n \n\n23:06\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tLopsided interpolations following a wrinkled blind eye. Oops.\n \n\n23:13\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe crooning leaves shut around a mercurial ankle. The stir and toss of the stroking breeze begs belief. Through the screen of grief, we glimpse an ear’s profane frill, luminous and insulting. These two have transformed us into what we are: green laurels that lose no leaf. What we call thought is cleft and afternoons olden freeze is cracked and lacking only verisimilitude. We wish to seize the real as a tissue. Leave the milieu of the curious and enter that radiantly tortured grove. Yet we are history’s minions. so again, we draw on the opulent glove of sleep. We dream. We have the will to think with the points of tiny scissors. It means luxury teaches us to dream of luxury. We dream of a barren, unbroken hunger blazing up in wild proportions that we taxi through a wet night on thrumming streets. That a city’s sumptuous edifice wanes like so many abandoned ghosts. That the shock of recognition twists like a blurred salvage, like a roped horizon, like a girl waiting in a car. We see the cradling flowers as taunting apostrophes. Through thick glass, the granular light slats among fronts, the shining mud sucks at thought, the leaves reek of rust. Girls whose memories caused the clamoring see in all names of ease. Quit tossing us such shoddy dreams. We dream we are dilations of banality. It means we are the willing captives of their metaphor. [Pause]\n24:58\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Aside to Audience] And I’ll just finish by reading the epilogue. [Returns to reading] I’m afraid I’ll be misunderstood. Asleep and sleeping in the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning like a dahlia or some other flower with the strong odor of clothing. I am reminded of my conceit by a row of pale scars on the ceiling whose shy origin I shouldn’t identify. Speech bites into my walls. Maybe for that I will never forget the bus. In my dream of an intersection we eat and hear as we relax. We felt this as the cabinet swung open, we felt a strong burst of vitality. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n25:59\tMusic Interlude:\t[String Instrumental]\n \n\n26:08\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Music Continues: String Instrumental] XEclogue was not Robertson’s first collection, but it is among her earliest published books and signals a formative moment, both for her and for the Kootenay School of Writing. The recording we just listened to captures aspects of her writing practice [End Music: String Instrumental] as it developed as a member of the Kooteny School of Writing in Vancouver: the sense of the formation of a feminist subject, and the development of a feminist ethics of care and leadership within the membership and community, which seems to come out in the ways Robertson includes community participation in her reading.\n26:43\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tWhen approaching the corpus of Robertson’s writing in relation to her archive, including these sound recordings, it might be useful to observe that although her writing career began in and was situated in Vancouver when she was in her early thirties, the writing she completed during her moves around North America and relocation to France still bear a solid connection to the physical and emotional site of these beginnings. Importantly, while Robertson’s environment and community in Vancouver influenced her engagement with and conception of the archive, her practice also demonstrates and maintains a personal engagement with feminist, conceptualist thought. Her poetic and artistic networks in the city framed archival practice as a form of creative and political institutional intervention, as well as a method for feminist self-realization and reflection. More pragmatically, the connections between cities and selves are maintained by her generative engagement with her own archive, both as an idea, premised in affective self-reflection, and as a studious method for a form of intuitive, meditative writing.\n27:51\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn many ways, Robertson takes an ongoing reflexive, relational approach to the institutional concept of the archive in her own fonds. She does so by means of the maintenance of different archives for different purposes: and official archive in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University; and two personal, unofficial, or what literary scholar Linda Morra has named “unarrested” archives. Robertson’s divided fonds demonstrate how her poetics actively engage with the theoretical-ideological, feminist legacies of the KSW and its institutional contexts, while also maintaining a certain emotional engagement not immediately present in the content of her formal writings as they’re published.\n28:38\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRobertson’s methods enact another manifestation of her relational approach to the archive, in the ways she implicates her archive in her work itself. She does so by incorporating regular readings of her personal archival collection, kept with her in her home in France. Doubles of some of these materials are held in her official fonds at SFU, while other more recent items she actively retains, mostly journals, as future contributions that aren’t currently too important to her ongoing work to send away. Yet another small collection is currently under my care – that which I have named her “maternal archive” –which she shared with me after our first interview in 2017 to help me with my early dissertation work. With her consent, I published an article in 2018 titled “Lisa Robertson’s Archive: The Feminist Archive, Singular and Collective,” in the academic journal, English Studies in Canada.\n29:37\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThese archives – that which is housed at SFU, her own, and that which was accumulated by her mother Lynette Mullen, and then passed along temporarily to me – demonstrate how archives, particularly when imagined holistically and beyond the conventional structures of the institution, are anything but static and are inherently distributed and dynamic, expanding and contracting across space and time.\n30:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t“It is a slightly weird thing when one thread of your life becomes an institutional topic,” Robertson said during our conversation in April, reflecting on how her lived and embodied experience differs from published narratives. The recent interview was noticeably more intimate than the first, probably because so much has happened since 2017, and possibly because we communicate from twin spaces of isolation during a global pandemic that unites everyone in indescribable melancholy. It has also possibly because I unwittingly have pulled Robertson into an exercise of thinking through her life by means of archival materials in different ways. When she read my article before submission, she commented on how important her mother’s collection of objects now seemed –admitting that she had felt uncomfortable passing along such an unwieldy unremarkable accumulation, which she may have referred to lightheartedly as “junk”.\n31:09\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIt is a global pandemic. For the first time, I realize, in a material way, that archives, “the archive,” is a concept entangled with notions of death and dying, and, intrinsic to these extremes survival and trauma. This is an essential, material component of the archive: birth, marriage, and death records, or vital statistics form the basis of national public archival collections. The immaterial memorial aspects of archives have been theorized in several different ways. Feminist theorist Ann Cvetkovich writes about the idea of an archive of feelings as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are included not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception”.\n32:06\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe archive, imagined broadly, brings to the fore not only recorded events, but also the lived experience, the rolling background of the lives that contain them. Critical of conventional archives, scholar Diana Taylor, in her book, The Archive and the Repertoire from 2003, explains that in arguing for the repertoire as an expansion beyond the archive, she “tried to put limit events into conversation with the daily noneventful enactments of embodied practice” in her study, foregrounding the importance of context within memory structures.\n32:46\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe feelings and emotions invoked by an archive, by one’s own archive, can be hard to isolate and express, much like an event might be challenging to extract from its lived contexts. In scholar, Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, her 2018 book of creative nonfiction, the narrator’s desire to archive what she describes as sensing “what [movement philosopher] Erin Manning calls the “anarchive,” that strange and stunning “something that catches us in our own becoming”. The narrator goes on to explain the ineffable quality of this realization: “This is the future archive. The archive of alterity. And like yours and mine, this is a body that has gone up in flame. A body that is an excess, that is another world and also this one.” For Taylor, the body is incompatible with the archive, and for Singh, it is inseparable from it.\n33:48\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tFor Robertson, the tensions between texts and embodied experience are embedded in her archive. In our conversation, we meander between themes in a way that draws out these relations Robertson. And I talk about the late Nancy Shaw, one of the original members of the collective in Vancouver who we heard in the previous recording, and Robertson begins to reflect on how so many of her formative relationships are contained in her archival collections, although they likely remain inaccessible, relegated to footnotes or snapshots. In so doing she meditates on the limits of narrative to capture lived reality and how key figures in her memory are omitted from many representations of her life. She observes how this is a fact of habit, of “how we receive and reiterate narratives.” Histories that are intertwined are separated, and textures are smoothed over, she explains, noting how patriarchal structures are internalized. “Feminist, queer, and Marxist working class circulations through KSW were extremely complex from the get go,” she says, and encourages me (again) to look more closely at Shaw in my research. “She was fucking brilliant…and she stood her own at the bar,” she emphasizes.\n35:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: String Instrumental] We talk about an envelope of photos from parties she recently sent to SFU, and how objects get imbued with new relational significance over time. Listen to Robertson describe her changing relationship to ephemera and her archive in our conversation last April.\n \n\n35:35\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Robertson, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n \n\n39:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRevisiting the archive can be integral to Robertson’s writing practice. She is currently revisiting and writing a companion piece for her 2010 book, R’s Boat, a book that evolved from her 2004 chapbook Rousseau’s Boat, and which will eventually be republished as a new edition by Coach House Press in Toronto. We discuss how she has been using her archives as a starting point for writing or rewriting this work, as what she calls “a programmatic method,” and she remarks that she finds it useful to track how the psychological experience and the emotional experience of gathering material is “putting pressure in a certain way on what is a very avant-garde, constraint driven composing technique without actually entering the poems as content.” For Robertson, this process shapes the poem. Now I’ll play a clip of my interview with Robertson where you’ll hear her describe her process in her own words.\n \n\n40:15\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Roberston, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n44:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tNoting her upcoming birthday Robertson observes how the process of reworking the material from her archives [End Music: String Instrumental] has a distinct relationship to reaching a certain point in her life. She explains, ” Language is emotional […] Subjectivity is linguistic. For me, you don’t need to directly refer to emotional content in order for it to be present.”\n44:36\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tAt first, I interpret these words at face value, thinking about the corpus of Robertson’s writing, but then I step back and apply it to the broader context of her archive. I think about the interconnections between her archival collections and her shifting relationship with these objects and records, and how these – the relationships, the objects, the records – are imbued with emotions: hers, and those of many others. I reflect on how these emotional resonances, whether foregrounded in conversation or completely silent in the background, are what have always drawn me to want to spend time wading into the archives as a site of lived history. [Start Music: String Instrumental]\n45:22\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tTo close this episode, I would like to consider how Julietta Singh opens No Archive Will Restore You with a passage that captures the tenor of my last conversation with Robertson and my ongoing relationship to her archives (especially now during the distressing and ongoing quietude of the pandemic). Singh describes the beginning of her graduate studies and her entry into the ambiguous, precarious, but intimidating environment of archival studies. She writes, “We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect that few of us know what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.” But in contrast with the picture of the grasping desperate graduate students Singh presents in this chapter to give context to her eventual revelations, that archives are much more than the cold, institutional entities whe first encounters, I see the instability of this kind of mystery or unknowing as an invitation for engagement that tests the boundaries between academic and emotional selves. In the context of my conversations with Lisa Robertson, I can now better understand how relationships to the archive, and the collections that constitute archives themselves, can shift and evolve over time and across space. An archive that is in a constant state of transformation is a proposition for new kinds of thinking about relations between methods and modes of representation and lived, embodied experience. [End Music: String Instrumental]\n \n\n47:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb contributor, Julia Polyck-O’Neill. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And don’t forget to rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod:mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9616","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E3, Forced Migration, 6 December 2021, Wilson"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Wilson"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Wilson"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michelle Wilson\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/90aa09d2-eddd-4ff8-8ef9-b401cde0a6c6/audio/0eab67ed-3d02-4825-a7f7-3c1d6483e027/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:48:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"46,487,554 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-12-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/161607238\",\"venue\":\"Western University Ontario\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7\",\"latitude\":\"43.00937\",\"longitude\":\"-81.2618335\"}]"],"Address":["1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7"],"Venue":["Western University Ontario"],"City":["London, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In the Spirit of Atatice:\\nhttps://csktribes.org/more/videos/in-the-spirit-of-atatice/in-the-spirit-of-atatice\\n\\nTo Wood Buffalo, With Love, by Chloe Dragon-Smith and Robert Grandjambe:\\nhttps://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/to-wood-buffalo-national-park-with-love\\n\\nForced Migration:\\nhttps://scalar.usc.edu/works/remnants-wallows-and-outlaws-a-multidisciplinary-exploration-of-bison/forced-migration\\n\\nGardenShip and State at Museum London:\\nhttps://www.gardenship.ca/exhibition\\n\\nBuffalo Treaty:\\nhttps://www.buffalotreaty.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549706768384,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land\n\nAs uninvited guests on Indigenous land, we are continually told that national parks, and our conservation system in general, are a benevolent inheritance from our settler ancestors. The creators of parks and conservation societies crafted archives in the form of magazines and biographies to document the salvation of charismatic species like the bison. In this episode, artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines these archives to create alternative stories of the bison’s path to conservation. These audio essays reveal how ideologies around capitalism, human exceptionalism, and white supremacy have influenced settler relations to the more-than-human world.\n\nIn this episode, we will hear from poet Síle Englert who helped distill Michelle’s more extended essays into these shorter, affective pieces of prose, and musician and composer Angus Cruikshank whose score enriches Michelle’s audio storytelling.\n\nMichelle’s project seeks to extract narratives from a white supremacist, patriarchal written tradition and play with the immediate and affective possibilities of audio performance and sound design.\n\nThe audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map “Forced Migration”. It is on view at Museum London as part of the GardenShip and State exhibition until January 23rd, 2022.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n \n\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThere are sounds in the archive, and there are also silences. Here on the podcast, our producers engage closely with what we can hear in archived recordings, but also ask hard questions about the stories behind and around the sounds. When and why was the recording made? Who created this old record, and what story were they trying to tell? How does power function in the archive to uplift some beings and stories, erase others? For everything that we can hear or read in an archive, there are just as many questions about what has not been included, and who has been left out.\n \n\n01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThe episode we bring you today takes a creative and critical approach to archival records to present a collection of stories about bison, violence, and the history of Canadian conservation. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson uses archival records to trace what happened to the bison whose descendants ended up on the land now designated as Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta and in most other conservation herds across Turtle Island. Almost all the plains bison in the North American conservation system are descendants from the herds Michelle investigates in her research. With the help of sound designer, Angus Cruickshank and poet Síle Englert, Wilson brings us a collage of critically interpreted and creatively imagined stories. These stories strive to grapple with the impacts of colonialism and to give voice to the more-than-human characters at the heart of the research. Michelle and her collaborators on this episode are special guests from beyond the SpokenWeb network. Their work builds on conversations we have had on this podcast about critically engaging with archival artifacts, the practice of research creation and audio work as a form of scholarship. In addition to appearing here on the podcast, the sound works in this episode are also part of an exhibition called “GardenShip and State” on display at Museum London until late January, 2022. We are delighted to bring you producer Michelle Wilson with Season 3 Episode 3 [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Forced Migration. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:06\tMichelle Wilson:\tHi, my name is Michelle Wilson. I’m an artist, mother and researcher.\n \n\n03:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tBack in 2016, I was lucky enough to be invited to do an artist residency at Riding Mountain National Park. I intended to listen to, record, and learn from bison communication and speak to the people who work with them. It was a thrill to find the bison each day and to sit and watch and listen. I learned so much from those who shared their knowledge about these bison, but just as instructive was what was left unsaid about how they came to be corralled for display at a national park. I have been tracing the story of these bison’s ancestors ever since.\n \n\n03:50\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe audio artworks I’d like to share with you today come together to tell this story; the forced migration of a lineage of bison. I will take you from so-called Saskatchewan to Manitoba, Kansas and Texas, Montana, then Alberta, and finally to Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles Alberta and the Northwest Territories. This story spans centuries and zooms in and out from microbes on a blade of grass tickling a bisons nose to national policies.\n \n\n04:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tThese short vignettes emerged from a collaboration with poet Síle Englert, who took my 8 to 10-page essays, found their essence, and remixed them into short affective pieces of prose, and Angus Cruickshank, who created layered soundscapes that in a way, bring their own parallel narratives to the pieces. We will hear more from them later.\n \n\n04:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tA note before we listen to these works; I identify as a woman of settler descent, so it was vital for me to tell the story of what settlers did to the bison and their kin. It seemed fitting for me to draw my research from the colonial archive, infuriating as it often was. What I have created here, however, is not a recitation of facts. It is an alternative archive that centers specific and bodied perspectives.\n \n\n05:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tI have found in my research that citing practices did not prevent the transmission of false information and faulty worldviews, so I am taking these stories out of a written tradition. I’m not using the trappings of the academy to give myself authority. My voice as the narrator is never softened by the need to appear objective. On the contrary, it is impassioned and personal. Sometimes I even take on the perspective of a bison. This recentering of the inherited “facts” changes stories of salvation and domination into stories of connection, empathy, and survival.\n \n\n05:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tOur first story takes us to the banks of the north Saskatchewan river in 1873, where the circuitous route to colonial conservation starts.\n \n\n06:08\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] Charles Alloway tried to hold onto a bison bull, to place to anchor them post. But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n06:21\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] Until his dying day, Alloway controlled the myth of how he “saved the buffalo.” His story: the white hero, the repentant slaughterer. His words are the ones that survive in the colonial record.\n \n\n06:33\tMichelle Wilson:\tOne word – half-breed –tried to obscure the body of the Honourable James McKay, Scottish and Cree, trader and guide with the piercing grey eyes.\n \n\n06:45\tMichelle Wilson:\tTogether, McKay and Alloway drove their oxcart down the rutted mud streets and out of Winnipeg to meet a convoy of Métis hunters. Searching for bison to slaughter for hides and pemmican.\n \n\n06:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tA matriarchal band of cows and calves moved through meadows, just emerging from winter’s grip. Grandmothers, aunties, mothers. The bison and must’ve stampeded as the first round of bodies fell. Brown-headed cowbirds took to the sky, their liquid chirps and trills drowned out by hooves and bellows as they abandoned their posts on the bison’s backs.\n \n\n07:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tEncamped at a distance, the women and children heard what they couldn’t see: “a sound deep and moving like a train moving over a bridge… acontinuous deep, steady roar that seems to reach the clouds.”\n \n\n07:36\tMichelle Wilson:\tClose to the carnage, McKay and Alloway felt the guttural calls of anguished mothers resonating in the cavities of their chests. The hunter’s sought cows, their flesh more palatable than the bulls’. Which meant the next generation were in their bellies when they fell.\n \n\n07:54\tMichelle Wilson:\tWomen were brought in to butcher and process the bodies. Calves lingered near their fallen mothers, watching.\n \n\n08:05\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] These “pitiful creatures” were run down or lassoed at McKay’s and Alloway’s command. The partners recognized that the current rate of slaughter could not be maintained.\n \n\n08:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tFive freeborn bison calves were captured, survived, and reproduced, forcibly adopted by domestic cows. But their relationship to the land died.\n \n\n08:28\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn the establishment of Buffalo National Park, Alloway said:\n \n\n08:33\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “The animals will increased under natural conditions of peace contentment. Everyone of them came from my original group three heifers and two bulls.”\n \n\n08:43\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhen the last Canadian bison were being slaughtered in 1878, Alloway sent out a hunter who brought him back 30 bison hides –\n \n\n08:52\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “We cannot see distant things from the all absorbing present sometimes,”\n \n\n08:56\tMichelle Wilson:\t–he lamented. In trying to anchor the bison bull, Charles Alloway was left with scars on his hands that he carried –\n \n\n09:04\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] –to his grave. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n \n\n09:08\tAngus Cruikshank:\tHi, my name is Angus Cruikshank. I’m a musician and composer. I’m Michelle’s partner as well. I did the score for “Bedson” and all the other tracks to this project and I also did a bit of editing and some of the mixing.\n \n\n09:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tHey Angus, thanks so much for talking to us about your process. Can you speak to the track we’re about to hear, “Bedson” and tell us a bit about what the story means to you and how you approached composing a score for it?\n \n\n09:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think “Bedson” is my favourite track because it’s a very –I don’t know – moving story that has so many different parts to it, and it just comes together so well. And so, I think when I approach the track and listen back to Michelle’s performance of the reading, it’s like this very bittersweet tale of the bison and obviously their relationship to Bedson Stoney Mountain, and the plains in general. And so, I didn’t want to necessarily create like a doom and gloom type sound to it or composition to it, I wanted there to be almost like a pensive reflective type sound where you’re – it is kind of in a minor chord but there are like major chords in it that maybe convey some sort of, not hope but empathy to the story?\n \n\n10:39\tMichelle Wilson:\tI do like how you haven’t made it just a simple minor score because there are moments of lightheartedness in this piece and so I was wondering if you could talk to us about what you were doing with those upper register notes.\n \n\n10:54\tAngus Cruikshank:\tUpper register notes that are just really kind of holding down a beat and so it kind of gives this it – it kind of gives the piece sort of like a galloping feel to it, which I guess you know you could link back to maybe the bison, but also just sort of this running feel. Its like a [Sings] “duhn duhn dat dat dat dat dat”. So I don’t know I just it felt really right and it felt like it really worked for the mood and the theme of the piece.\n \n\n11:25\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhat do you see as the themes in “Bedson” and how did that influence the kind of sonic imagery you came up with?\n \n\n11:32\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think the theme of the song “Bedson” is one of incarceration and the penitentiary, the structure that still exists today and is still a penitentiary and one of the oldest in Canada if not the oldest. I think a lot of people aren’t aware of that and how it played a role in essentially isolating, confining people who resisted colonization. And kind of the isolation of the penitentiary itself within this vastness. And having lived out there, and sort of seen vastness, that isolation of winter in the prairies, it’s sort of a very beautiful yet morose vibe, because nothing can really survive out there, yet the sun is shining and its 40 below. Yeah, nothing except bison can survive out there and it’s beautiful. And I think it worked really well with, when I picture Stoney Mountain Penitentiary just sort of sitting there alone, or when you listen to it you sort of maybe hear that maybe hopelessness, but maybe frustration, but also like an empathy towards those who are incarcerated there, both human and nonhuman such as the bison. I think musically it works so well, and I think why it is my favourite is because it really captures that vastness I was talking about, the use of delay it’s really just like kind of two chords, and then yeah then a slight variation as the song progresses.\n \n\n13:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tOkay Angus, one last question. We’ve collaborated together for a very long time. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about what it’s like to collaborate by layering on someone else’s words?\n \n\n13:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tYou’re really interpreting and trying to compliment what is being said, and that can be kind of hard sometimes because the music is there to support the story. You have a lot of leeway, but at the same time it’s really hard to capture the essence of what is being said and it does take time to kind of get that right feeling. Because if you don’t have it then it could distract from the actual story itself, and that is really the most important part.\n \n\n14:13\tMichelle Wilson:\tWell thanks so much Angus, I really do think that you bring life and texture to these pieces and a lot of the empathy that people perceive in them comes from your compositions so thank you, and here is “Bedson”. [Start Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank] It is a testament to how remarkable the sight of bison were, that in 1880, 800 people attended the auction that determined the fate of just 13. Because the bison were once so plentiful here that at a distance, they could have been mistaken for a churning, brownish-black river surging across the plain. The winner of the auction was Samuel L. Bedson, the warden of Stony Mountain Penitentiary. In the early hours of a frigid morning, a tawny bison calf was born onto trembling legs. Still wet with afterbirth, he had barely taken his first tentative steps when his herd, now 14 in number, was roused from slumber by men sent to drive them to their new home.\n \n\n15:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tImagine the wind whipping across a sea of flat, uniform ground on a painfully bright February day. On top of a sudden swell in the land sits a three-story sandy brick building. Dozens of elegant arched windows peer down upon you, the bars not discernable from a distance—that’s what those 14 bison saw. The bison were often corralled in a stone pen near the farm on the prison grounds. This complex was nicknamed “the castle,” and Bedson was its king. He was no great hunter; he was a collector, always trying to domesticate wild animals for the amusement of his family and neighbours. The farm at Stony Mountain housed a collection of wolves, deer, bears, and badgers, but Bedson’s moose were local favourites; a pair had even been trained to pull a handsome sled in the winter.\n \n\n16:17\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn a Christmas afternoon, Bedson tried a similar trick with a two-year-old bison bull. His shaggy brown body was hitched to a toboggan. Eight merry makers loaded on the sled while five or six of the incarcerated men held onto a rope tied around the bison’s neck. Imagine this ludicrous game of inter-species tug-of-war, the free laughing and playing while the prisoners, human and bison, were scared for their lives. A tense calm lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes until suddenly the bull leapt into the air, scattering prisoners and guests into the snow. There was no catching the bull once he had gained his freedom. Months later, Bedson received a letter from North Dakota that a lone young bull had been found grazing with an old rope tied around his neck. Bedson sent a hired man across the border to bring his property back. [End Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank]\n \n\n17:32\tSíle Englert:\tMy name is Síle Englert. I am a writer, editor, and visual artist, and I feel very grateful to be a small part of this project, in that it was my work to edit in a sort of cut and paste way, like a collage, to take these longer pieces describing the history of the bison and rework them into shorter narratives to be recorded, like storytelling.\n \n\n17:55\tMichelle Wilson:\tSíle, could you tell us a bit about the story you most enjoyed working on?\n \n\n18:00\tSíle Englert:\t“Fight or Flight”, I think is the piece that probably affected me and stayed with me the most. Maybe, because you’ve written it in a first-person perspective from the mind of one of the bison and that means you brought an immediacy to the history. It changed the language you were able to use to describe the experience, allowing human emotions and familial relationships so that the listener completely empathizes with the bison’s and experience. I think the shift to a first-person perspective makes the process of creating this piece, step-by-step even more interesting too. You’ve done an incredible amount of research, collecting historical accounts, stories, and statistics. And collected, the picture that all of this information paints is sad and disturbing, evocative of the horrors and the pointless suffering that humans put these animals through. But in “Fight or Flight” in particular, we hear the story from one of the bison herself. And it’s a sort of magic, I think, to take this pile of numbers and information and create a first person account of some of these moments where you can feel the pain of it right in your chest.\n \n\n19:30\tSíle Englert:\tAnd then you sent the longer story to me and my part I think was another kind of archaeological process: digging through this wealth of matter to find pieces that felt like the essence of the story. And then figuring out how those pieces fit together as a narrative. And there’s there’s an emotional element to the process too. When so much damage was done to both these bison and to the environment that we share, when so much pain was caused, how do you decide what’s most important? What people should hear? I had to make sure I kept enough of the spirit and the experience of the bison as you wrote it, and enough of the horror so that those listening could understand what these creatures went through – and to maintain that organic flow that’s kind of difficult to describe in words that movement you can hear in the story. All of that comes through in the final step, in the recording you’ve done, the sound and the music, these bison, this particular bison comes to life –her wants and needs and experience and pain. I think several steps of distilling this down to its essence from history, to story, from information, to emotion allows those listening to connect with something real, something far beyond numbers and statistics.\n \n\n21:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much Síle for that generous and thoughtful reflection. And now here is “Fight or Flight”.\n \n\n \n\n21:22\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] [Michelle performing ‘Flight or Flight”] We are grazing, hidden in the breaks between sand hills. Always alert, our ears panning for the sounds of men. My body orients toward the wind, waiting for the odour that twangs my fraught nerves and triggers our flight. I don’t want to leave this place. The snow has just melted from the slopes, moistening the thirsty earth below, reviving the scrubby grass after a long winter. There are so few of us, now. So few babies. We cannot let down our guard to breed as we used to. Two lame bulls follow us but they barely have the energy to register when we are in estrus. When we do conceive, our bodies can no longer nourish the unborn. We are haunted by those stolen from us. Mothers who aren’t killed fighting off the snatchers return again and again to the site of their loss. As the night lifts, my body is alive with sensation— rain drizzles, a sweet, pungent balm rises from the earth. I don’t detect them until they are among us. We bolt toward the wind. We cannot stop moving. We might still outrun them. The bulls cannot keep up and drift away, but these predators are not enticed by weakness. Night settles again and they keep pressing us. The sun rises and they are still there. Three nights and days they keep at our heels. Urine, sweat, and dead skin wafts toward me on a breeze exhaled from a canyon mouth. I turn, lead my sisters and their young onto an open prairie. My instincts have betrayed me, betrayed us. I hear the oscillating whistle of a lasso and the desperate, grunting cry of a calf. I hear him fall. A thud, thud, thud, dragging and scraping. The man’s rope finds another of our young and pulls him down. But now we know what he is here for. My sister is a blur of bristled hair as she charges him. There is a crack of thunder, and mushrooming from the deafening sound is the acrid, smoky, rotting smell of water that cannot breathe. My sister staggers a few strides from the source of her pain and sinks to the earth. Disoriented by the sound and smell of death, I barely register the hum of the rope when it strikes out and brings down our last baby. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n24:14\tMichelle Wilson:\tThis next story runs parallel to the one you just heard. “Fight or Flight” and this story “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” were created from autobiographies of a man named Buffalo Jones. “Fight or Flight” uses his observations to understand the beings he prayed on, while “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” confronts the attitudes used to justify the hunt.\n \n\n24:41\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Piano and String Instrumental] [Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] Some people would have you believe that Charles Jesse ‘Buffalo’ Jones got his nickname for his conservation efforts. Please don’t believe them. Jones heard God’s call in Genesis 1:26 –.\n \n\n24:54\tVoice Actor:\t[Church Choir Singers Underlaid] “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over all the earth and over everything that creepeth upon the earth.”\n \n\n25:17\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] – He set out to capture the last remaining remnants of the great southern bison herd, not as some noble conservation effort, but as breeding stock for his own grand experiment. On the first three expeditions, he took only calves. He learned as he went, and the bison he encountered suffered for his mistakes. The calves refused buckets of water and called relentlessly for their mothers. Jones and his men rode out, looking for range cows to forcibly milk, but instead found two of the bison mothers wandering the site of their loss. Jones shot one of them for her meat and milked her dead body. When calves became rare, he resolved not to leave any bison on the plain. Capture myopathy was not identified until 1964, diagnosed in another endangered species. The stress of being captured triggers the creature’s biological defense mechanisms, and the prolonged or intense engagement of these mechanisms causes massive, often fatal system failure. The animal suffers lethargy, muscle weakness, incoordination, rapid breathing, shivering, dark red urine, and hypothermia. Their blood turns to acid. Their muscles suffer necrosis and die as the animal is still struggling for life. This is how the last of the Southern bison died. Jones believed that there was no place for wild bison on their former ranges. Man’s mastery transformed these arid tracts into productive farms “made exceptionally fertile by the manure, bones, and flesh of the millions which lived and died there during centuries past.” With a name like Buffalo Jones, it would be easy to believe that he saved the bison. [End Music: Piano and Strings Instrumental]\n \n\n27:35\tMichelle Wilson:\tAfter Buffalo Jones’ bison schemes went bust, he sold his herd, a mix of bison from the Southern Plains and decedents of the Saskatchewan calves, to two ranchers at the Flathead Reservation in Montana. These two ranchers, Michael Pablo and Charles Allard were adding to their captive herd. But how had these bison come to be protected within the Flathead Valley? Tracking down this history was, for me, a journey through a twisted game of racist telephone. It was really fascinating, in the way that a disaster is fascinating, to see how white authors used quotes and citations in articles and dissertations to give legitimacy to each garbled version of the past. I followed this path until at last, I arrived at a telling shared by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. In the show notes, we’ve linked to a video produced by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes about the return of the bison and their fight to continue their stewardship and sovereignty over their lands. You will hear the following two stories back-to-back, they share how the bison came to be on the land, and how they were forced from it.\n \n\n28:53\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe search for facts goes in circles. I find a fact and follow it back to its source, only to find every new telling contaminated. [Start Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds] Who first brought the bison back to the Flathead Reservation? A white trader named Charles Aubrey inserted himself into history by recording his story.\n \n\n \n\n29:12\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Reading Charles Aubrey’s words] In the year 1877, I was located at the Marias River and engaged in the Indian trade…Among the Pend d’Oreille Indians… from across the mountains, was (a)… man… whose Christian name was Sam. He was known to the Blackfeet as Short Coyote… A rather comely girl had attracted the attention of Sam… (and) she became his wife. I told him very frankly that he had made a mistake…I said to him; “You are a strong Catholic and your Church does not permit polygamous marriages” He feared he would be punished by the fathers of St. Ignatius Mission…I thought there was still a chance to make peace with the soldier band of his tribe by getting a pardon from the fathers… I then suggested…he rope some buffalo calves…and then give them as a peace offering to the fathers at the mission. Sam herded his buffalo with the milk stock for five days, resting and making arrangements for his trip across the mountains… seven head in all is my recollection of the bunch… I afterward learned… that immediately upon his arrival upon the reservation he was arrested and severely flogged… In the course of time I heard of Sam’s death…passing away peacefully in his lodge…\n \n\n30:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tOther tellings of Sam’s story seep into my consciousness as I wade deeper into newspapers and websites. Racism oozing between every word. They describe Walking Coyote’s meeting with Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, who bought the bison calves. They speak of him “brooding… over gleaming piles of wealth.” They record his death as “a less-than-heroic exit” under a Missoula bridge, resulting from “a drinking spree,” and “one that matched the spirit in which he had lived and captured the calves that were now prospering on the rich grasslands of the Flathead.” The words sit like bile in my mouth. Walking Coyote’s legacy as a drunk, greedy Indian became entrenched in the dominant archive. I wonder if the tendrils of Aubrey’s story have made their way into others. Did interviewers seek out those that would corroborate their stories? Or did the keepers of more profound knowledge withhold it, for fear of contamination? In 1978, when he was 87 years old, Pend d’Oreille Elder and historian Mose Chouteh recorded the story of how bison returned to the Flathead reservation. I will let Mose Chouteh’s words speak for themselves:\n \n\n31:40\tMichelle Wilson, reciting Mose Chouteh:\t[Reading Mose Chouteh’s words] While I was growing up I heard this told by many elders…It is about a man called Ataticeʔ. (While on a hunt several buffalo followed their camp) And so in the evening, (the men) went into the tipi. The chiefs were smoking… Ataticeʔ said, “Hello. I have come to ask you, my chiefs. I think that it would be good if we took these buffalo back to our land to live there.” Some of the chiefs said, “that’s exactly right.” And some chiefs said… if we take them back to our land, we will be tied down… We will not be able to go anywhere. We will just be in one place as we gather our food.” The chiefs disagreed with each other. Half of them said yes and the other half said no. (After three days the council remained at an impasse and out of respect for the tribal need for consensus on major decisions Ataticeʔ withdrew his proposal). As he mounted his horse… He waved at these buffalo, like sending them to different parts of the prairies. Ataticeʔ said to the buffalo… “it will be up to each of us whatever happens to you and whatever happens to me. That is all.” And all these buffalo turned towards the east, the rising sun… They were going away. And Ataticeʔ cried. Ataticeʔ’s son Ɫatatí having the same deep connection to the buffalo as his father, renewed his father’s request to capture calves in the 1870s. The council, seeing the effects of the unchecked settler slaughter of the buffalo, approved Ɫatatí’s plan. Six calves were brought over the mountain range, they soon flourished and became twelve. Ɫatatí’s mother, meanwhile, remarried Samwel Walking Coyote. While Ɫatatí was away, two people went to see Samwel. One was called Charles Allard, and the other man was called Michel Pablo. These two men met with him and told Samwel, “we’ve come to buy your buffalo.” Samwel said, “ok, it will be so…” Ɫatatí returned to his house… all the buffalo were gone… he asked his mother, “where are my buffalo?” And his mother told him, “your stepfather sold them.” And Ɫatatí cried. [End Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n34:07\tMichelle Wilson:\tMichel Pablo’s bison were sold to the Canadian government in 1907. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental] Extraction from the land was violent and rail travel for bison was perilous. I wonder if the removal triggered memories of their previous transfer from Kansas to Montana. The only recorded death during that transfer of bison was a calf who was trampled to death in the stifling, shifting, rattling cars. In my imagination, the calf is still a reddish caramel colour. She is not yet weaned. Was she with her mother? Had her mother been born into captivity or was she dragged by lasso from her own mother’s side? I know that somewhere in her matrilineal line, a cow fought a man to keep her calf and probably died in the process. Did this trampled calf carry that memory in her bones? Did her mother listen to the imperatives of her instincts and keep her calf close? Did her own feet bring her calf’s death? The egg that became my daughter existed in my genetic code when I was an egg inside my mother. What of my mother’s trauma is playing out in my daughter’s body? How does this kind of trauma make its way into genetic material? They say a butterfly has sense memories carried over from its caterpillar self, even though it basically becomes a gooey soup of cells in the chrysalis. I imagine the phantom call of a calf falling under shifting panicked feet, echoing in the body of another cow who died shortly after being loaded onto a wagon train on the Flathead Reservation. Cowboys loaded her into a reinforced wagon without her calf. The calf grunted and called to his mother. The call of her offspring drove her into a frenzy. In desperation she rammed her horns through the two inches of wood that imprisoned her. Her horns became lodged in the wood and in thrashing against it she broke her own neck. She was butchered, and her hide sold. I don’t know what happened to her calf. I know that 19 other bison died in the round up. 708 were shipped off the Flathead Reservation.653 made it to the ill-fated Buffalo National Park. 55 stayed at Elk Island National Park and founded a herd there. The colonial story of bison conservation is one of rescue. The Confederated Salish And Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty, are writing a new and yet ancient story. It is theirs to tell. It is incumbent on us to find it. [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n37:11\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe now arrive at Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. The archival information around this now-defunct park demonstrates an absolute indifference to the agency of other beings and to the specificity of this place. The result was an ecological and economic disaster. In this piece, I tried to speak with two voices, one that personifies the Parks service’s approach to resource management and another that takes the lives of bison and their kin seriously.\n \n\n37:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tNumbers. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] They transmogrified breathing, eating, shitting, connected bison into numbers. That’s what happens when a being becomes a commodity –\n \n\n37:57\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] 20 to 60 million bison ranged North America before colonial contact.\n \n\n38:03\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Surveyors and homestead inspectors came looking for a home for the government’s newly acquired bison. What they saw was land that had no value because it could not be settled or farmed. It was worthless, but maybe it could be made useful. This place, southwest of Wainwright, Alberta, became Buffalo National Park in 1908. Reducing the bison’s lives to numbers –\n \n\n38:29\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] In 1888 there were 103 wild plains bison in North America.\n \n\n40:13\tMichelle Wilson:\t–The land and the bison had sustained one another. The bison compacted the arid ground, helping it hold on to precious moisture. Cows and bulls felt their way across the grassland, stems and blades tickling their nostrils as soil stirred up by a roving muzzle and probing tongue was inhaled –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] By 1912, 748 bison had arrived at Buffalo National Park from Michel Pablo’s herd.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–There was an intimate interconnection between bison and the thousands of “microbes; fungi, bacteria, and protozoa” populating each square centimetre of forage. These microscopic beings had the enzymes to break down cellulose in the grasses the bison eats. Neither being could live without this symbiotic relationship –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] The government wanted quick and exponential growth. By 1922, 6,780 bison were sharing the park’s limited resources with large deer, moose, and elk populations. The land strained under the pressure of all these mouths and bodies.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Reciprocity and movement had co-evolved over centuries, enabling the dunes and desert-like conditions of the Hills to sustain vast herds over the winter months –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] Over 19,141 bison were slaughtered over the park’s thirty-year existence.With Canada’s involvement in World War II looming, the park was declared a failure. On December 30, 1939, the last bison were shot; untold numbers of deer, moose, and elk followed them to the abattoir. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t– Just numbers.\n \n\n40:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe have been on a journey through space and time. In this final piece, we arrive at Wood Buffalo National Park in the year 2021. I wrote this closing section in response to an article by Chloe Dragon Smith and Robert Grandjambe in Briarpatch magazine. We’ve linked it in the show notes as well. Chloe and Robert live off the land within their ancestral territory, which falls within the bounds of Wood Buffalo. Their article is a missive from the future to their future children. It references an imagined fulsome and personal apology delivered by Parks Canada to the 11 Indigenous nations and councils whose traditional territories the sprawling Wood Buffalo occupies. In this section, I used the archival information around Wood Buffalo to imagine what that apology would need to atone for. This apology felt like the only way to address the ongoing violations at Wood Buffalo, but also not nearly enough. So, for me, it is simply a place to start.\n \n\n41:38\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound ] I want to speak to you today about what we did— our predecessors— the many branches of the Dominion government and the people who ran them; the treaty negotiators, the Department of the Interior, and Parks Canada. The creation of Wood Buffalo National Park was an act of “ecological imperialism.” From its first inception, the Park was designed to be a place that excluded Indigenous peoples, a place where Canada could extinguish treaty rights. We created a swath of Land where vital relationships between human and non-human have been severed. We saw the bison as an exploitable resource and used their bodies to make money. Our park wardens slaughtered bison one day and persecuted your hunters the next. We turned exercising your rights and sovereignty into a privilege. We used racial dogmas to determine who had hereditary rights within the Park, and we used a politics of purity to drive communities apart. We separated families. We ignored letters pleading to be reunited. We contributed to the residential school system and intentionally engendered dependency instead of acknowledging your right to hunt and practice lifeways on your own lands. We chose to believe that pulling the strand of bison from this web wouldn’t cause it to unravel. We armed police and then wardens to arrest and harass your guardians. We created a policy of surveillance and intimidation. Even when we built abattoirs and killed hundreds a year, still we kept you from the bison. Our attachment to conceptual borders extends to policing the boundaries between Wood Bison and Plains Bison, between pure and hybrid, between contaminated and uncontaminated. Steeped in white supremacy, we did not see how these logics of purity were weaponized against both bison and your people. These imagined borders place bison and Indigenous peoples outside the protective bounds of white and human. This pattern has continued. Our pools of knowledge are shallow, and our spatial and temporal scales are different than yours. Your pools of knowledge are deep and dependent on a connection to place and language. We have come to embrace the term “two-eyed seeing,” as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall. It is a concept of “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together for the benefit of all.” But first, we acknowledge that for nearly a century our laws stripped Indigenous peoples of their treaty rights if they pursued a university education. We tried to outlaw “two-eyed seeing”. We are ashamed that we fought for nearly a century to avoid fulfilling our Treaty commitments to your Nations. We apologize to you. We apologize for making your communities fight for what was theirs. We would like to work with you, the descendants of the dispossessed, to make restitution for these wrongs. To move beyond access and towards true sovereignty on the Land. We recognize that decolonization is not a metaphor. [End Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound]\n \n\n45:37\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much for coming with me on this journey. The audio pieces I have shared with you today have many lives. They can also be experienced as part of an interactive textile map. It will be on view as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition at Museum London, in London, Ontario. We will link to the exhibition and documentation of the piece in the show notes as well. I hope that this collection of stories has illuminated how bison conservation has been a tool of colonization. The sources I have drawn from want us to believe conservation stories are ones of rescue, but as Indigenous literature scholar Pauline Wakeham puts it, conservation narratives attempt “to overwrite colonial violence” and locate it in a distant past. If you are interested in a future where a decolonized relationship with bison exists, please check out the work being done by Dr. Leroy Little Bear, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty. We’ve linked to an excellent site that documents the work of the Buffalo Treaty to get you started on this journey\n \n\n46:57\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Michelle Wilson. The audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map, “Forced Migration”. It’s on view at Museum London as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition until January 23rd, 2020. See the links in the show notes and the image gallery on our episode webpage to engage more deeply with the research and stories behind this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us, and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. 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Our Trailer, 20 September 2021, Burr and McGregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creator_names_search":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Judith Burr\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4df61375-c766-4dc5-8d86-ca0f12d5fc53/audio/f79cc9ff-2d57-41a0-a9e2-aaf1fbbc5216/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,018,043 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-09-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Clips Featured:\\n\\nKPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from\\nS2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\\n\\nMavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from\\nS2E9 “Mavis Gallant Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\\n\\nMathieu Aubin, in\\nS2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\\n\\n“Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, and Katherine McLeod in\\nS2E8 “Talking about Talking”\\n\\nPenn Kemp, from\\nS2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\\n\\nWisdom Agorde, from\\nS2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1: The Language of Talking Drums”\\n\\nKlara du Plessis, from\\nS2E1 “Deep Curation: Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice”\\n\\nStacey Copeland, from\\nS2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\\n\\nTreena Chambers, from\\nS2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”\\n\\nMusic –\\n“Slapstick” by Moon Juice\\nfrom Blue Dot Sessions\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549762342913,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Another season is upon us! At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue to bring you episodes that journey into literary history and explore our contemporary responses to it. This season, researchers from across the SpokenWeb community – and a few special guests – produce audio stories that creatively engage with literary recordings in the SpokenWeb archives and put this archival history into context. We will dive deep into clips of preserved sound, reflect on the power of poetic performance, and consider how sound studies can inform our understandings of history and literature. We will look closely at both the individuals and communities that have shaped our literary world. We will consider how our podcast episodes can be a form of scholarship. We will listen closely together.\n\nThis podcast is for everyone who holds a love for literature, sound, archives, or history – and for all those who love learning something new by listening. We hope you’ve enjoyed our past episodes, and we can’t wait to share this new season with you – coming to your podcast feeds on October 4, 2021!\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Start Music: Upbeat Instrumental] What is it about a voice –.\n(00:07)\tAudio Recording, KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from S2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\t…and the voice said, “walk” –.\n(00:07)\t\nHannah McGregor\n– that can bring Canada’s literary past back here into the present?\n(00:13)\nAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from S2E9 “Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Into Recorder] You see I’m a fetishist, the watch has to be there and not there.\n(00:15)\nHannah McGregor\nWhat might have been forgotten if no one had pressed record or listened to these voices in the archives?\n(00:24)\nMathieu Aubin, in S2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\n[Sounds of a printing press] Like a cacaophony of lesbian liberation print sounds.\n(00:27)\nHannah McGregor\nOn the SpokenWeb Podcast, our producer researchers have investigated the stories behind the sounds [Audio Recording: Intake of breath] we’ve saved. [Audio Recording: Intake of breath].\n(00:36)\nAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, from S2E8 “Talking about talking”\n[Audio Recording: Intake of breath, repeated] Listen to Black women/ As a Black woman.\n(00:39)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve immersed you in the mystique and –\n(00:41)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n[Underlaid sound] [Repetitive non-verbal sounds as sound poem is performed].\n(00:41)\nHannah McGregor\n– joy of Penn Kemp sound poems.\n(00:43)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n–can I hear you please? [End Music: Upbeat strings and cello]\n(00:46)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve grappled with questions of sonic communication in our episode, Drum Codes.\n(00:51)\nWisdom Agorde, from S2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1”\nThe talking drum travels several kilometres. [Audio Recording: Talking Drum] [Start Music:  SpokenWeb Instrumental]\n(00:57)\nHannah McGregor\nWith the deep curation of poetry readings –\n(01:00)\nKlara du Plessis, from S2E1 “Deep Curation”\n[Audio Effect: Voice Echo] I wanted to really curate a poetry reading.\n(01:02)\nHannah McGregor\n– with teaching audible history in “Cylinder Talks”–\n(01:05)\nStacey Copeland, from S2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\nInviting students to engage in audio production.\n(01:08)\nHannah McGregor\n– and, with the ethics of listening.\n(01:10)\nTreena Chambers, from S2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”:\nYou don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for just for the sake of listening.\n(01:19)\nHannah McGregor:\nNow in season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue this audible research and storytelling. We have new stories to look forward to, more histories of Canadian writers and poets, more on the technologies of talking drums, and more explorations of the places that preserving sonic history can take us as tools of memory, teaching, and wonder. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. We hope you’ll subscribe and join us for season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast coming to your podcast feeds on October 4th. [End Music: SpokenWeb Instrumental Music]\n "],"score":1.0},{"id":"9656","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.4, You Are Here, 18 January 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d8a35593-1877-46bf-94c7-d64f56737bdb/audio/faa70c17-eb76-4ddb-b635-578765ff8576/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,450,101 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.\\n\\nRukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series). SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\\n\\nFind out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549765488641,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts minisode listens to one of the January readings that we heard about last time: a reading by Muriel Rukeyser that took place on January 24, 1969. Along with listening for mentions of January in the recording, this minisode listens to how Rukeyser’s reading enacts the very connection that she describes – a connection being created between the poet and the audience during a live reading.\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. You are here. Last time we listened to clips from the SpokenWeb audio collections in order to try to hear time. Or rather to hear an anticipation of the new year, a marking of time. Whenever the host would say something like “our next reading will take place in January”.\n01:42\tAudio Recording, George Bowering:\tThis is the final reading of the fall series, and we’ll be picked up again in January…\n01:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are now, in January. And let’s imagine that we are at one of those January readings that we heard about last time.\n01:55\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 1\tI’d just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and his blasphemy with us tonight, and to remind you that our next reading is with Muriel Rukeyser on Friday January 24th. Goodnight.\n02:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tArriving to the reading, most likely in big winter coats, the audience has been looking forward to it. And now it is here…\n02:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 2\tI’ll now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause]…\n02:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tRukeyser is in front of us, reading her poems, in Montreal on January 24th 1969. Along with knowing that it took place in January, we can hear a sense of time in the recording. Let’s listen to this clip as our “short cut” into the archives for this minisode. She has just read “Elegy in Joy,” ending with these words that lead her into a story about something that marks this recording in time.\n03:00\t[Simultaneous] Katherine McLeod and Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t“Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion and the world unbegun.”\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It’s a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico, I wonder whether you saw it. I heard of it yesterday in New York, as a little, three line story, in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada in the States. And to that test, came five scientists, in Utah, in the States, to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground test made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack.\n04:29\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tThere’s a crack in the earth, big enough, they said — the way we talk — big enough for the Empire State Building. There’s a crack there, and deep under the crust there’s a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts —unpredictable parts — of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now, last night, before I came here, on TV — late news in New York — they said that there’d been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are, I give it to you simply that something has happened to shift the under-crust – there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground, the way we are bound to each other, we are also bound to each other through the air and the fall out has come over Canada – this is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story…\n05:33\tKatherine McLeod:\t“I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story.” By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are. We are listening to the relationality created there in that room. Now, if this is sounding familiar, you might recall that in minisode 2.2, we listened to how Rukeyser introduced this very same reading. She talked about why on a cold January night we come out to listen to poetry…\n06:06\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t…it is partly out of curiosity, and looking at the person. And I go to see – what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms…\n06:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd because of something else that is created while listening together…\n06:22\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tWe come to something with — almost unmediated — that is, the poem among us, between us there…\n06:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn her reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Well, I would say that the story that we just heard of how we are all bound to each other does precisely that by asking us to think about our relation to one another. But that was through a story, an extra-poetic diversion between poems. What about in the poems themselves?\n07:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s listen to one more ShortCut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and the audience, but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. In a recent collection of poems called, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, there is another “Anemone” poem by Canadian poet Erin Robinsong – and I would say that Rukeyser’s “Anemone” poem could be in this collection too as she too is responding to the climate crisis in her own way in 1969.\n08:23\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tAnemone, my eyes are closing. My eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing. My mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing. My sex is opening. You are singing and offering the way in. My life is closing. My life is opening. You are here.\n09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Muriel Rukeyser reading “Anemone” a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate. And a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”\n09:22\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] I’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. 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Macmillan, 1963.\\n\\n—. “Käthe Kollwitz.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006. \\n\\n—. The Life of Poetry. Current Books, 1949.\\n\\n—. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969), https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549766537216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. Rukeyser once said that poetry is “a meeting place” and this minisode suggests that, like poetry, a podcast is a meeting place. Listen to find out how we arrive at this meeting place and listen, once more, to the voice of the poet who spoke these words: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n\n\n(00:10)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb‘s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:14)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts. This season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a recording of American poet Muriel Rukeyser. [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] We’re going to stay in that recording, immersing ourselves in it, for one more minisode. We’re going to do that for two, no three, reasons: one, this recording lets us talk about spontaneous and unexpected moments that can happen during a reading and then end up being recorded; two, this recording lets us reflect on what this medium of a minisode on a podcast feed can do to create connections; and, three, this recording lets us continue to ask the question taken up in the past two minodes: How can we hear time? [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]. With that, let’s begin our archival listening to specific clips in the reading by Rukeyser.\n(02:08)\tSpoken Web Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(02:08)\tKatherine McLeod\tOn a cold January night in 1969, Muriel Rukeyser started her reading in Montreal by asking the audience to consider …\n(02:27)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tAnd as you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you’ve got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n(02:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn minisode 2.2 we listened to those opening remarks and we thought about how it creates a relationship between the listener and the poet, or really between the listener and the event of the reading. One of the poems she read that night was “Anemone.”\n(02:53)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\t“Anemone. My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening, you are looking at me with your waking look…”\n \n\n(03:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to that poem in minisode 2.4 as a way of hearing the relationality that she spoke of as being created through the poetry reading, and how it was enacted through that poem. We also considered how an archival listening creates a connection between the past and present. Rukeyser’s critique of nuclear testing in 1969 speaks very much to our current climate crisis.\n(03:30)\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter making those minisodes, I shared the link, I tweeted it out, and I was elated to see a notification [Sound Effect: Phone Notification]: “Muriel Rukeyser has liked your post” No, it wasn’t Rukeyser herself haunting my Twitter feed, but it felt as though she had heard it – it was the Twitter account of the archival project, Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. They had listened to ShortCuts and were excited about the recording that existed of Rukeyser – a recording that they had not yet been aware of.\n(04:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tMuriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive is holding a symposium during the same week when this minsode will go live – the entire symposium is based around Rukeyser’s series of “Elegies.” I assumed that there would be many recordings of Rukeyser reading from “Elegies” but it turns out that there are not – in fact, there might be very few – or even one. I know there is because, yes, it is on that very same 1969 reading by Rukeyser here in Montreal. Not only does this recording have a rare sound in that Rukeyser reads from “Elegies” but also when she introduces it she notes that she has never read it like this before. She cuts it up, and we’ll listen to her read the poem “Elegy in Joy” as our short cut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] this month…\n(04:55)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tHere’s one piece of a long poem. It’s the last of a group called “Elegies,” which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It’s called “Elegy in Joy.” And it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. “Elegy in Joy.” Now green, now burning, I make a way for peace. After the green and long beyond my lake, among these fields of people on these illuminated hills gold, burnt gold, spilled gold and shadowed blue. The light of enormous flame, the flowing wide of the sea. Where all the lights and nights are reconciled. The sea at last. Where all the waters lead and all the wars to this peace. For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine. The sea is the real sea. Here it is. This is the living. This peace is the face of the world. A fierce angel who in one lifetime lives fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die. Becoming forever, the continual God. Years of our time, this heart. The binding of the alone, bells of our loneliness, finding our lines and our music. Branches full of motion, each opening in its own flower. Lines of all songs, each speaking in its own voice. Praise in every grace, among the old same war. Years of betrayal, million deaths breathing its weaknesses and hope buried more deep, more black than dream. Every elegy is the present freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion, and the world unbegun.\n(07:29)\tKatherine McLeod\t“Every elegy is the present” – what an ending to that poem. But, that is not how the poem ends on the page. However, by choosing to “cut it up,” as she says, she creates a new version — a version in sound — that lets those lines ring out, as though they were the end of the poem. “Every elegy is the present” is a line that reminds me of how she ends the entire reading by asking the audience to encounter the present moment. She reads “The Speed of Darkness” which ends with a question: “Who will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?”\n(08:09)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours, no of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you? [Applause]\n(08:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe juxtaposition of those three sounds I find incredibly affecting: the powerful call out to you, the barely audible “thank you very much,” and the roar of applause that goes on for some time. I listen again and again to that…\n(08:50)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThank you very much.\n(08:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI am in that room and can see her standing at the front with the microphone and her papers; and it is as though the entire room takes a collective breath between the reading and the applause, an in-between space, an in-between sound. That voice who had just spoken these words with such volume: “who will be the throat of these hours?” A phrase that reminds us of the body as the source of sound. This is the same voice, the same body, who wrote and spoke these words within the past year of this reading: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n(09:40)\tKatherine McLeod\tNow hear the applause again, all 25 seconds of it. If we listen to it all the way through we hear the announcement of the F.R. Scott reading on February 14th, bringing us back in time to the present moment of the reading, and back to Montreal with F.R. Scott the Montreal modernist. Let’s hear all of that again.\n(10:07)\tKatherine McLeod\tWho will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?… Thank you very much… [Full applause for 25 seconds].\n(10:46)\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer at Muriel Rukeyser Reading, Montreal, 1969\tWe wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott and that will be on February 14th at the same time in the theatre in the basement of this building. Thank you. [Audience Background Noise]\n(10:57)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Start Audience Background Noise Underlaid] As you can hear, the recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room, this is the sound of the audience, this is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as there are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event. We are hearing what Rukeyser has described as defining the poem: the poem as a meeting place. It is a point that Jane Malcolm makes in her brilliant analysis of this recording. Do check the show notes for that reference. And it is a point that I hear again, listening now. A meeting place…\n(11:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think of the conversations that I’ve had recently with Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive and I hear it almost as one of these conversations happening after the reading; but, it didn’t happen after a reading, it happened after a listening. That makes me imagine what connections can come of future sound-based criticism as forms like the podcast continue to circulate and to be heard. The podcast, like poetry, relies upon its “moving relations” – to quote a phrase of Rukeyser’s – moving relations within itself and with its listeners. And, to me, it seems that, like poetry, the podcast is a meeting place…\n(12:41)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(12:44)\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about ShortCuts and The SpokenWeb Podcast. And head to Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive to find out more about the symposium on Feb 19. If you are tuning in after the symposium, thank you for listening and for being part of these connections. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [Audience Background Noise Continues And Fades]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9658","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.6, Living Together, 15 March 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7da3e459-6a0f-453f-89b9-abab0f2e6c07/audio/8d91254e-ec0f-4b5e-b988-11cda316e954/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:16:54\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,283,734 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nArchival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967.\\n\\nAudio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.\\n\\nAudio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin were recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.\\n\\n@mathieujpaubin. “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980.\\n\\nAvison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982.\\n\\n“Listening to Winter Sun: A Virtual Ghost Reading (Margaret Avison, January 27, 1967) [led by Katherine McLeod.” SpokenWeb, https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-listening-practice-guided-by-katherine-mcleod/.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Margaret Avison reading ‘Thaw’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 30 March, 2020, spokenweb.ca/margaret-avison-reading-thaw/. Accessed 12 March, 2021.\\n\\nSarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.\\n\\nNickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.\\n\\nQuebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records, 2006.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549782265856,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["March is a time of year when you can hum along to “It Might as Well be Spring,” but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. Can we hear spring in the archives? And what does it feel like to listen to sonic representations of change – at a distance – together? Listen to Margaret Avison read “Thaw” (on 27 January 1967) as our ‘short cut’ this month. Then, get ready for the first ShortCuts audio challenge when a special guest joins us to talk about a perplexing moment in archival listening.\n\n\n00:00\n \n\nMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. It’s March 2021. Our deep dive into the SpokenWeb audio collections continues to ask the question of how to hear time. We’ll be listening to a poem that describes the moment between winter and spring. I’m recording this minisode in a city where the month of March feels a lot like winter. Here, March is a time of year when it might as well be spring, but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. It is a time of year when you can hear snow melting – a sound [Sound Effect: Snow Melting] that tells of the coming spring, and a sound that conveys the lasting presence of the past season, a frozen archive of winter… What does it feel like to listen in and to this season of change? Can we hear the spring thaw in archival recordings of poetry?\n02:21\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess, about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass – separating inside from outside comes into it, a certain kind of sky that goes with that which is like glass again…\n02:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThe sun has not absorbed this icy day and this day’s industry in behind glass hasn’t the blue and gold cold outside. Though not absorbing this sought that…\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Canadian poet Margaret Avison introducing her very wintery poems on January 27, 1967. She read that night at Sir George Williams University, at what is now Concordia, in Montreal. That is the first event you’ll hear audio from in this ShortCuts. The second event was also held on January 27, but in a different year, not in 1967 but in 2021. On that January 27, I played some clips from Avison’s reading as part of a SpokenWeb Listening Practice.\n03:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn choosing to listen to the recording on the same day, it was like organizing a Ghost Reading, a listening activity in which the reading is listened to on the same day as it would have taken place and, while listening, listeners make things out of the listening (such as notes, doodles, booklets, paintings and more). I thought I’d try out how the Ghost Reading translates into a virtual environment in which we are listening together, but not in the same place. How would we listen and what would we make?\n04:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tPoet Barbara Nickel joined us for the Listening Practice and I asked her what it was like to hear that opening that we just heard of Avison introducing the wintery poem “The Absorbed” from Winter Sun…\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Barbara Nickel, Listening Practice:\tI spent the whole morning just reading Winter Sun. I have, from years of reading her, I have a certain voice in my mind: the voice of the page. And then to hear her voice for the first time … I can’t put words to it – it’s so mundane to me, her voice, it feels mundane in one sense it’s almost disappointing; but then, on the other hand, I find that the articulation of the consonants, something I love so much about Avison’s work, comes through so clearly, and articulates those sounds to me in a way that I’ve never noticed before.\n05:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAlso listening was poet Stephanie Bolster and she had a very similar reaction to Barbara, in that this poet who she had spent so much time listening to on the page was now audible. I asked Stephanie if she had ever heard an Avison recording before…\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tNo, I never have, that’s what was sort of magical about it is her authentic voice, having had the voices of poems in my head, but never attributed any particular voice. And I guess I’m getting a sense of expectation of formality based on the work itself, but never really having thought about what she would sound like.\n05:46\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Listening Practice:\tYeah, I think, that’s such a great point, even to introduce her voice to us – to start with – because she’s somebody who —we’ve seen titles of her work — she has a book called Listening. So you think: what is this voice going to sound like? Or all of her work — say the poem “Snow,” maybe encountering that as an undergrad, and her words about “the sad listener” or “optic heart” that get so often quoted from that poem, but thinking: what does her voice sound like reading it?\n06:15\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I started riffing upon Stephanie’s point, she added a comment into the Zoom chat that it was important to remember that Avison’s voice is mediated through recording technologies. So that really raises the question of where the authentic voice is, and whether there are other ways of understanding it’s embodied and material source – where the voice is coming from. Let’s hear more of Avison’s voice from this archival recording, as she reads the poem…\n06:45\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967\t“The Thaw”. Sticky inside their winter suits / The Sunday children stare at pools/ In pavement and black ice where roots/ Of sky in moodier sky dissolve. / An empty coach train runs along / The thin and sooty river flats / And stick and straw and random stones / Stream faintly when its steam departs. / Lime-water and liquorice light / Wander the tumbled streets. A few/ Sparrows gather. A dog barks out / Under the dogless pale pale blue. Move your tongue along a slat / Of raspberry box from last year’s crate. / Smell a saucepantilt of water / On the coal-ash in your grate. / Think how the Black Death made men dance, / And from the silt of centuries/ The proof is now scraped bare that once/ Troy fell and Pompei scorched and froze. / A boy alone out in the court/ Whacks with his hockey-stick, and whacks / In the wet, and the pigeons flutter, and rise, / And settle back.\n08:15\tKatherine McLeod:\t“Thaw” is a poem that I wrote about last year in March 2020 – when ShortCuts used to be Audio of the Week – I chose the poem as a way of coping with the uncertainty of the pandemic. By chance, the poem ends up having a reference to the plague in it. There I was, trying to find a poem to guide us from winter to spring, through a transition, and I was forced to confront the pandemic again. I could have pressed stop, but I chose to re-play the poem and to re-listen to it again, as I have done again here and in the listening practice. The poem depicts a solitary image – “a boy alone,” making a sound with the hockey stick, causing the pigeons to “flutter and rise and settle back” – a scene and a sound of winter solitude and of repetition. What was it like to listen to this poem together?\n09:22\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything, and slow it down and take in the details, just the density and abundance of details. I was scribbling things down, and couldn’t keep up. And, in that sense, it really felt the same sense I would have had in a live reading. Even though it was recorded, because we were listening to it together, I couldn’t just stop it and go back. And so I think it really did replicate that sense of having a communal experience. Sharing something, and gaining all that I gained and also losing what one does lose in a live reading.\n09:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we were on January 27, 2021, listening to a recording of Avison from January 27, 1967, and we were struck by the immediacy of her voice. I couldn’t help but think that maybe all of these online readings were making us even more attuned to the recorded voice. With nearly all literary events as virtual over this past year, we are practising our skills of hearing an archival recording as a performance, one that is mediated and live. Let’s liven up the end of this miniside – get ready for our first ShortCuts audio challenge, [Sound Effect: Fanfare] solving mysteries in the audio archives, together! There’s a very curious moment in the recording of the Avison reading. I had wanted to talk about this curious moment in the recording but we didn’t have time in the listening practice… Then a couple weeks later I saw that SpokenWeb researcher Mathieu Aubin – a friend of ShortCuts as you may recall he guest-produced a minisode last season – he had posted a tweet about this very same moment. He agreed to revisit this moment in the archives together.\n11:02\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tSo, thank you for joining me for this conversation, and welcome back to ShortCuts.\n11:09\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tHi, happy to be here.\n11:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWhat was the tweet that you wrote after listening to the Avison reading? Would you mind reading that out for us?\n11:16\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, of course. So “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a badass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.”\n11:35\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI think it is just beautiful, but nobody gets it unless I explain, so I’ll explain, it’s like you take a piece of 8 by 11 typing paper….\n11:44\tAudio Recording, Audience Member  at Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nDon’t explain, just say it.\n11:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison:\tAlright, you can tell me then, eh? “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.” Now, come on… [Audience Laughs] Hmm? Does anybody want the explanation? Well I’ve read it. It’s just a crumpled-up letter, you know, you get it and you read it and you cry and you crumple it up and you throw it down and the mic goes up…now I’ll read it again. “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.”\n12:45\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tWhen I was listening to it the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately – it’s different with you, obviously, because we’re actually responding and we’re both in on this is about to happen – but it’s, first, the audacity of that anonymous man just interrupting her and then telling her to do something, on the one hand. On the other hand is her being like, come on, do you want to do it? Do you, do you really want to – just calling him out and you could feel it generations later of that awkwardness and everyone is like ‘eee’….\n13:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI’ll read it again: “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter. Eureka!”\n13:35\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tThat point that we’re almost, we’re listening, almost anticipating knowing what she’s going to do —.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t— I love thinking of all the sounds in there. Even I’m wondering what this is: it almost sounds like she stamps the desk with her hand or something. So, I’ll just play this here…\n13:52\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tAll right. You can tell me then. [Muffled Bang] Eh?\n13:58\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, you’re right! I didn’t notice that — I was paying attention more to the sorts of the words that I could understand. But you’re right. You hear the book hitting the — I don’t know the podium or whatever it was.\n14:07\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tYeah, just that sound. It really sounds like either hitting something down onto the desk or a book hitting… but it punctuates it. [Sigh] It’s also interesting that the whole joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then, this, if she does like slam the book down, the presence of the weight of the page is right there.\n14:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\t[Recording overlaps with Katherine] It’s just a crumpled up letter – you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down…\n14:36\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t[Katherine overlaps with Avison recording] You cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down – and there are so many emotions happening in this moment.\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nNow I’ll read it again…\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tDo you feel like, do you feel like you get it?\n14:46\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview\tYeah. I think –I mean I’m trying to picture it in my head and obviously when I’m listening to it and I can kind of see it. Do I immediately get this symbolic significance? Not necessarily. At the same time, I think it gains more significance with what’s happening in that moment, and in the performance, like with the “Eureka!” – the here we are! Like what you were saying earlier, almost like drawing a parallel between what’s happening with the paper and her using the paper and speaking up. If I were to read it on the page, I would probably sit with it a bit longer, but that’s the thing about audio, right? You can pause it, but you’re trying to listen along and trying to be in that moment.\n15:27\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWe talked about it even more than I could have imagined from the clip itself. So thanks so much for listening back to this moment in the archives and for joining me once again on ShortCuts.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\n \n\nAnd it’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\n15:40\tMusic:\tPiano Interlude\n15:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s leave this mystery unsolved. And, more than solving the mystery, I hope that this audio challenge will unite us as an audience – in 1967 and in 2021 – as having to figure something out, together, as having to share our confusion and our curiosity. My name is Katherine McLeod, [Piano With Distorted Beat] and ShortCuts [Sound Effect: Chime] is produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. This minisode was recorded in the city of Montreal, on the unceded lands known as Tiohtià:ke by the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. A special thanks to Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, and to all of the listeners in the Listening Practice. And, of course, to our guest Matthew Aubin for taking on the first ShortCuts Audio Challenge. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives, and next month… it might be spring."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9660","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.7, Moving, 19 April 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/191afc43-7900-41f2-b82e-38b41a4e5eba/audio/a4fd83fa-8a12-4186-b289-0d1e5be20e02/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:13:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,786,339 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018. \\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/. \\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\n—. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965. \\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549802188801,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is April – the month of poetry. The audio we will be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. In fact, it is a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space and that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. How is a poem held in the space in which it is spoken, and what happens to desire in this speaking? How are they held in the archives?\n\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] from the SpokenWeb archives. Our last minisode ended up being the most interactive so far. It was a collaborative listening that ended with a conversation, trying to figure out what was happening in a confusing moment in archival listening. It was one of those moments that you wish you could go back and talk about. That’s what we did, and we’ll be talking about more of those moments in future ShortCuts.\n \n\n01:46\tKatherine McLeod::\tWhat kinds of moments might we be revisiting? One of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by Simon Fraser University is called the Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest collection. It’s a series of recordings of a radio program called radiofreerainforest that produced by Gilbert in the 1980s. Coming up in future minsodes we’ll dive into that audio collection, especially to talk about some of the spaces where the recordings take place. One reading happens on a bus, yes, it was recorded on a bus travelling through Vancouver’s downtown streets. Another recording has Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading and talking together on a panel, but where did the panel take place? And what was it like to hear this panel on the radio?\n \n\n02:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll try to figure all of this out. Plus, we’ve been diving into audio collections from the past, but coming up we’ll be listening to recordings of literary events that took place much ore recently. That’s what we’ll be listening to next month. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast if you haven’t already to stay tuned for that, along with, of course, the full episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast on the first Monday of each month. This month, it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we will be listening to in this ShortCuts is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. It is in fact a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space, that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces Naked Poems to her Montreal audience in 1966…\n \n\n03:30\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least you vote for the Montreal Star at this particular point – exclaimed of the price – because there are so few words in the book [Audience Laughter]. It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter]. These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and and came at a bitter price. I may say, to me. They came quite as a surprise. I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them – the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic, in them. And realized that here was something – almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to write oh a couple of hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I don’t know, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation let’s say. I’m going to read the first14, which comprise the total poem– in a sense, the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that clip, we hear that Naked Poems has recently been published around the time of that reading. It’s an example of hearing time in the archives, coming back to a theme running through this season. As for how we can hear in this minisode and in the archive of podcasts it is creating, we can think this month of April and what this time brings to our listening to Webb’s poem and to Webb herself. April is the month of Webb’s birthday, and I hope that the sounds of this minisode travels through the airwaves to her on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. I was able to meet with her there a couple years ago while working on articles about her poetry and she graciously made time for a visit. I had hoped to meet again but the sound of this minisode may make it there first before I can travel from Montreal to BC. And so, it is with this spirit of sending the sound across from Montreal to Saltspring Island that I cut the audio of this ShortCuts and make it into a gift, crafted with deep respect and gratitude for your art, Phyllis Webb.\n \n\n06:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s now hear Webb read from Naked Poems. The reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn MacEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would be sitting in the audience listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems…\n \n\n07:26\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\t“Suite 1” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude.\n \n\n09:36\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tThe sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor.\n \n\n10:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air, we see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room, we feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire, to be contained within the archives of this reading series –\n \n\n11:32\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n11:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page …\n \n\n11:43\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tQuietness. In the room. We knew…\n \n\n11:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear the turning of the page. The room–\n \n\n11:51\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nThe room that held you. Is still here…\n11:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are listening to desire in the making, every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving…\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nYou brought me clarity. Gift after gift, I wear. Poems naked, in the sunlight, on the floor.\n12:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n12:29\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and this ShortCuts minisode was produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland. It was recorded in the city of Montreal, or what is known as Tio’tia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about The SpokenWeb Podcast and tune in next month for another deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":1.0},{"id":"9661","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.8, Contrapuntal Poetics, 17 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/478fa03a-47f5-46f5-84ee-548433c59706/audio/22aa5df2-7658-4204-997b-9a175efbae6e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e8-shortcuts.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,380,831 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e8-shortcuts\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAudio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.\\n\\nAudio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016),  https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nGibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019,  http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.\\n\\nMoss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.\\n\\nPerry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019. \\n\\n—– Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549803237376,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this ShortCuts minisode, listen to the contrapuntal poetics of poet Alexei Perry Cox. In a recording made at home, Alexei reads and improvises in response to a second voice in the room – the voice of her daughter Isla. Their interaction itself could be heard as a poem. Meanwhile, sounds of place enter and exit the room of the recording, with what sounds like cars passing by outside and even the “Zoom room” becoming audible at times. The audio you hear in this ShortCuts was recorded, over Zoom, as part of the first online version of The Words and Music Show on March 29, 2020. What are you listening to when you listen to an online reading? From where do you listen? \n\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Each month, we listened closely and carefully to a shortcut or cuts from SpokenWeb‘s audio collections. The recent ShortCuts have been from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but last season we ventured into a more recent collection in episode three, when we heard a truly innovative way of starting a reading.\n \n\n01:42\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words and Music Show:\tI want to forget/ 1980s /high school fever / forget articles in the Herald/ in the moment of heavy evangelical / black-haired teens from reserves / who drank themselves to death in macho contests/activity and much extreme conservativism/ trying to prove to themselves that they exist/ as night drifts into next days headlines / some of the challenges that arise growing up and trying to live and become oneself in a climate like that / I want to forget my stupid conviction that a boy had to be distilled into a man/ that the Caribean bloodline had to be spiked with rum / which seems to be a climate that is re-emerging/ that amber alcohol…\n \n\n02:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. And the audio collection for Words and Music is where we’re headed to you for this minisode. But we’re not going to be listening to audio that was recorded at Casa de Popolo where so much of the Words and Music show has been recorded live over these past 20 years. No, we’ll be listening to the Words and Music show recorded from home — the first one to be online and hosted on Zoom. On March 29th, 2020, the Words and Music Show took to the Zoom stage. Co-hosted by Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot. That first online show was meant to test if it worked. And it did.\n \n\n02:58\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tI wonder how many people can hold.\n \n\n03:01\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\t300 people.\n \n\n03:02\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nOh wow. Okay.\n \n\n03:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nI think we’ll be okay.\n \n\n03:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince then, the Words and Music Show has been online usually every third Sunday of the month. By now, most of us are used to attending Zoom events, or at least whereas used to it as we’ll get — or want to get. But back in March 2020, it was incredibly new. The reason why among the many recordings that are now part of the archive of pandemic poetry readings I’m selecting this one, is because it demonstrates the blurring of the public and the private through sound. In these archival recordings we listen on ShortCuts, we often ask: what are we listening to? And what are the sounds around the poem that tell us about the space, the sociality of the room, and how the sound was recorded? These sounds around the poem give context. They become part of the relationality of the listening. Sound doesn’t exist on its own, but in relation. What is our relation to this sound now? What does it feel like to listen to it? With that in mind, let’s listen to the ShortCut for this month: A reading by poet Alexei Perry Cox on March 29th, 2020.\n \n\n04:21\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tAnd the next thing we have is a video which was created under extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18 month old child on her bed. And it’s by the poet, Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen. Yeah, here she comes.\n \n\n04:46\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tThe unequivocal [french word], according to the [inaudible], comes in the chorus that has a lullaby. It makes use of emphasis on the incantatory present participle and is a consultation. Tropical, the island breathes, and this was where I long to be. Time is portrayed as malleable and is a journey. The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time. We are taken there to this Isla Bonita, and there is wherever we are. In a vice grip with my lover in exile. As time went by, my lover was gradually overtaken by an urgent desire whose futility exceeded all measures, but the circumference of the universe itself. I desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see a system’s undulating veil. In the universe of our civil war, systems have the insubstantialabily of hummingbirds song and the iridescence of its plumage. While their manifestations were immutable. Told that my lover, my love for my lover, told that my love for my lover was a vice. That loving another woman wasn’t very womanly of me [Baby Speaking] that our civil war as being against ourselves. Wasn’t the same as their civil war as being against us. [Baby: Coos] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect in congress would get through to human kind. In exile, in Paris, in Sausalito. I want you to touch me here and here. I want it to be worn for me, for you. I want to love systems that are women so that you can enter them by being untrue.\n \n\n07:10\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at the Words and Music show online on March 29th, 2020. She’s reading from “Finding places to make places” and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla her then 18 month old daughter –\n \n\n07:35\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Coos] La revolution ….\n \n\n07:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat are we listening to in this clip?\n \n\n07:41\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Cries] \n \n\n07:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] The poem? The interaction between Alexei and her daughter that becomes a duet? The improvisation, or to the quality of the sound, the audibility of the Zoom room? –\n \n\n07:57\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\nThe entropy in an open system –\n \n\n07:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t– [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] When listening to a recording of Phyllis Web reading from Naked Poems on a previous ShortCuts, I suggested considering how desire is held by the archives and how the poem creates a space for the listener. Similarly, how does this recording hold the poem’s desire and how does the poem make space inhabit space? From where are we listening?\n \n\n08:25\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tTo a certain logic for disappearing. You cannot live the same life as you imagine. [Aside: Alexei laughs at baby] You must live a smaller life. A more compact life. [Aside: Yeah? Laughs] [Baby: Coos] The life is too capacious. You will lose your balance. Driving home, I think this. [Baby: Coos with increasing volume] A door opens on an eye, an eye opens on a line. A line of eyes, looking into a coffin, carrying the body. Body to the river and into a vision. You know your conscience cannot forgive what left you long ago washed away by summer floods like a body loosened from a grip into something death made transformative.\n \n\n09:21\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] As I listened to this back in March, 2020, I was right in the middle of making an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast with Jason Camlot. We were making an episode called “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence”, which you can have a listen to if you feel like revisiting that time of March 2020 sonically. When I heard Alexei read at the Words and Music show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices, what improvisation at a poetry reading. Plus it felt like her reading was enacting exactly what the podcast was trying to say: that we are missing the noise around the signal. We still miss it now. We miss the buzz in the room, the social sounds around the signal, the voice of the speaker. I know I can’t wait until I can stand in a crowded room and listen to Alexei read on stage at a microphone again. By the way, [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]in January 2019, I was at an album launch for the Montreal musician, Jessica Moss and Alexei read poetry as the opening act. She read with her newborn strapped to her chest.\n \n\n10:38\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Album launch, 2019:\n \n\n[Baby: Cries] Even as a new you moves about the womb –\n \n\n10:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis little voice that we’re hearing in this recording had already been with her mother on stage for a poetry reading. [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]\n \n\n10:48\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox,___, 2019:\n \n\n– the world is smaller than the center of your eye. But when I –\n \n\n10:51\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] Going back to readings onstage doesn’t mean that we will not perform with our full selves, with the public and the private self coexisting. Even if the audience doesn’t always see it or hear it that way. With that, let’s return to Alexei and Isla who inhabit a poem with “Womb or the World”.\n \n\n11:15\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \t[Baby: crying and cooing] A book without room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from out of time, brimming with life. Fabulous a wing, unfolding in a poultry field appearance while night finds no constellation in night but in it’s eclipse. Like this. [Aside: Kisses baby]. [Baby: Coos].\n \n\n11:54\tTheme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:54\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nAnd there’s bye-bye to Alexei, who was being seriously upstaged there.\n \n\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat continues and fades]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9662","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.9, Situating Sound, 21 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/93f41bc8-fa9e-4603-96f3-5d3b5b1679ca/audio/cf8f93b4-3c4a-42b3-91f3-f2b8c931f7b8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,480,658 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nDionne Brand, recording played on radiofreerainforest, 7 August 1988, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“#101 Renee Rodin.” BC Booklook, 28 January 2016,  https://bcbooklook.com/101-renee-rodin/.\\n\\n“Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto arts publishing.” Art Gallery of York University, https://agyu.art/project/desire-lines/.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549804285952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection: Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection, accessible through SFU Library’s Digitized Collections. We’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in Vancouver with Lee Maracle of the Stó:lō nation. The recording of this reading was then played on the local radio program radiofreerainforest on August 7, 1988. What would it have been like to listen to this reading live in 1988? On the radio? And what is it like to hear it out of context in the archives now? This ShortCuts minisode is about the archival research process. ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod takes us on a brief journey into the research behind an archived tape in SpokenWeb’s collection, all started by and ending with a reading of poetry by Dionne Brand.  \n“a motion heard on my inner ear” – Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive (1982)\n\n\n00:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listened to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project pitch an episode to ShortCuts Season Three. You can start with a blog post on SpokenWeb blog, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n \n\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]  Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights at every second week, following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? Shortcuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spoken web.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Theme Music] [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n \n\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts. On ShortCuts we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Audio Effect: Scissor Snip] from the archives. On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection, [Underlaid Sound: radiofreerainforest clip with various voices overlapping] radiofreerainforest. radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s.\n \n\n02:16\tAudio Recording, radiofreerainforest clip:\t[Echo Effect] [Various Voices] radiofreerainforest.\n \n\n02:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tRecordings that were played on that program were kept by its producer and host Gerry Gilbert. And they’re now one of SFU’s many audio collections currently being processed by SpokenWeb researchers. Something I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts, is what kind of a framework does audio clip out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound. I could select a clip and just simply play it. But I feel like that doesn’t give enough context, but I also don’t want to give too much context. My hope is that I can guide you into the listening and then you can take it from there. Where I’m leading you to is a reading by Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio, on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988. The tapes of this recording and yes, tapes in the plural – more on that in a moment –indicate that it was Dionne Brand reading with Lee Maracle. It took place in Vancouver and as to where, that required a little searching. One tape says R2B2 Books. And I figured out that it was a bookstore on fourth avenue that had once been the location of Octopus Books and later became Black Sheep Books before closing in the early 2000s. I remember going into Black Sheep Books when I lived in Vancouver and I didn’t realize that it had such a history of holding so many readings as R2B2 Books. What else do we know about the recording? Well, it was a long one. It spans two cassettes, not because it was recorded on those two tapes, but because it was transferred onto them. What I’m getting at here is this: imagine pressing play on a tape labeled “radiofreerainforest, 3rd and 28th of July and 7th August, 1988.” The Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading starts part way through one side and then on a completely different tape labeled “radiofreerainforest 7th, 25th, August, 1988 and 30th, October, 1988”.\n04:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThere is the rest of the recording. On that second tape, the Brand reading starts right in the middle when you press play. And that’s where I found myself in it’s sound without knowing the context in which she was speaking from or where that reading was taking place. It was after finding the other tape that I could piece together, that it was on August 6th, 1988, and then aired on August 7th, 1988. And that it was at R2B2 Bookstore. It was in the middle of this that I consulted SpokenWeb’s metadata system to see a photograph of the tape itself. And that’s how I found the date of the reading. But before that, I was going by the fact that Brand mentions an event in solidarity with South African women against apartheid, that would have happened the next day, August 7th. From doing a bit of searching in print archives, I found out from the feminist newspaper Kinesis that as part of the March, the next day Maracle had given a speech in solidarity against apartheid speaking as an Indigenous woman of the Stó:lō nation.\n05:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unraveling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n06:56\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tI won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n07:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n07:58\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it humour. So –[Start of reading]  Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor\n09:12\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\told woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ against this clamour [Background noise of voices inaudible] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars?\n10:29\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tDrop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor [tape recording skips] Old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face.\n11:24\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tWhen you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./\n12:30\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tInstead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression.\n14:06\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\n \n\nOk. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections.\n \n\n \n\n14:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this mini-series and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. End Music: Theme Music] [Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9663","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.10, Alone Together, 19 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/12152e0c-52d7-49a7-9eea-0dccee09b096/audio/ff0bcf56-e9fc-44bf-aa09-abfd557fce3f/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:19:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,903,084 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-07-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAli Barillaro’s recording of reading of her blog post, “Tanya Davis performing ‘How to Be Alone’” on SPOKENWEBLOG, 6 August, 2020. \\n\\nTanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone,” recorded at The Words & Music Show at Casa del Popolo, Montreal on 12 December 2012. Listen to the entire audio here: https://spokenweb.ca/tanya-davis-performing-how-to-be-alone/.\\n\\nExcerpt of Cover of “Digging my own grave” by Thrice performed by Ali Barillaro and Vincent Pigeon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6H9QuL6q8\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nWatch Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s 2010 film of the poem “How to Be Alone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs\\n\\nWatch the 2020 film made by Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman in which they revisit the poem as “How to Be at Home”: https://www.nfb.ca/film/how-to-be-at-home\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549805334528,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For our last minisode of season two, ShortCuts dives into the archives of The Words & Music Show, a monthly series of poetry, spoken word, music, and dance performances that has been happening in Montreal for over twenty years. Last year, SpokenWeb RA Ali Barillaro was digitizing that collection when she heard a recording that caught her attention. It was a recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone.” As Ali listened, she felt a dissonance between Davis’s version of aloneness as freedom and the imposed and necessary aloneness of the pandemic. Along with being an academic, Ali is a singer – and this ShortCuts takes us into Ali’s story of navigating her artistic practice through the pandemic. We embark on this sonic journey by starting with one recording – the recording of Davis – which shows what you can make when you pause to notice what catches your attention.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listen to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, pitch an episode to ShortCuts season three. You can start with a blog post on SPOKENWEBLOG, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights, that’s every second week, following the monthly [[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts, on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine MacLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:45\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts where we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Sound Effect: Scissor Snip] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. This is the last episode of our second season. It’s a chance to think back to our sonic journeys into the archives and the questions that have emerged from them. How does archival listening listen to liveness and sociality? How do we hear time? How do we hear the marking of time in a recording? How can a podcast episode hold sound with care? This season of ShortCuts was a practice in feminist listening with recordings of poets Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Allison, Phyllis Webb, Alexei Perry, Cox, Dionne Brand, and now in this final ShortCuts for season two, Tanya Davis. We’ll start with the clip of Davis from the archives. Usually on ShortCuts, we build towards hearing the clip. But this time we’ll be starting with it because this ShortCuts is as much about the clip as it is about the conversation afterwards, with a special guest. Let’s dive in. Here is spoken word and musician, Tanya Davis, performing “How To Be Alone” at the Words & Music Show in Montreal. It was performed on the stage of Casa del Popolo on December 16th, 2012.\n03:14\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient./ If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you weren’t okay with it, just wait./ You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it./ Start with the acceptable places./ The bathroom, the coffee, shop the library, /where you can stall and read the paper where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there/ where you can browse the stacks and smell the books/ you’re not supposed to talk much anyways, so it’s safe there./ There’s also the gym./ If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you could put headphones in./ And there’s public transportation because we all gotta go places/ and there’s prayer and meditation./ No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath, seeking peace and salvation./ Start simple./ Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.\n04:06\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tThe lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow downers/ employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they like you will be alone./ Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone./ When you were comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner./ A restaurant with linen and silverware./ You’re no less intriguing a person if you’re eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger./ In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were./ Go to the movies, where does dark and soothing,/ alone in your seat to midst of fleeting community./ And then take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you./ Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you.\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tDance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not./ And if they are assume it is with best and human intentions,/ the way bodies move genuinely to beats is after all gorgeous and affecting/ Dance until you’re sweating and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things/ Down your back like a brook of blessings./ Go to the woods alone./ Trees and squirrels will watch for you./ Roam an unfamiliar city,/ there are always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting./ Give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute./ And those conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches may have never happened had you not been there by yourself./ Society is afraid of alone though./ Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements./ Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them./ But alone is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it/ You could stand…\n \n\n05:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat archival audio was selected by SpokenWeb researcher, Ali Barillaro. Ali selected it for a ShortCuts blog post, or what was then called Audio of the Week. Ali is a SpokenWeb researcher who recently completed her MA at Concordia. You may have heard her present her research on audience applause in archival collections, and you very likely have heard her voice. She sings the vocals [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] in the SpokenWeb Podcast theme song. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] And so, it is very fitting that my conversation with her here veers into talking about singing and performing and the challenges of doing that through times in which our access to spaces that might otherwise have been used for artistic practices have changed. I invited her to revisit what she had said about Tanya Davis’ recording.\n \n\n06:51\tAli Barillaro:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How To Be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n07:00\tAli Barillaro:\tI’m someone who under normal circumstances would gladly endorse and espouse Davis’s hopeful, poetic guide to finding freedom in solitude and learning to be comfortable inside your own head. But what struck me about this performance was that it made me realize just how far removed I now felt from Davis’s concept of being alone. The public locations listed as ideal spots to practice being by yourself, the coffee shops, libraries, movie theaters, and even the bus and Metro were no longer available to me. The version of alone evoked in the poem is not the alone most of us have come to know since March, 2020. And it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss while listening. The echo trailing each of Tanya’s words, fittingly conjures up an image in my mind of the poet reciting her work alone at the center of a vast empty room. Even though I know she’s speaking to a crowd from the small stage at Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Though, the recording left me longing for what felt like a lost form of solitude, I have also come to hear it as a calming and quiet reminder to try to find peace amongst the chaos, to reach out to community and loved ones however we can, and to be patient with yourself, as you learn to adapt to a new normal.\n \n\n08:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou wrote that about a year ago, was it?\n \n\n08:24\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah it’s been a while.\n \n\n08:24\tKatherine McLeod:\t– Yeah, July, 2020. What does it feel like for you to hear yourself reflect on Tanya Davis’s recording in that way?\n \n\n08:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt was kind of an interesting experience actually, because I think I do feel differently now. Like I’m not at that same point that I was when I wrote that and when I was experiencing those emotions. With vaccines coming out, getting my first dose, having an appointment for my second dose, having seen quite a lot more people outdoors… I do still have some lingering sense of that strangeness of this new concept of alone and what that means to be alone while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, even though circumstances have changed.\n \n\n09:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt struck me with listening to it, how they’re actually very public ways of being alone, like the sitting on the bus. And he says the phrase like “alone is a freedom” and just that very statement is much more complicated when alone –that doesn’t feel like a freedom. [Laughs] So, yeah.\n \n\n09:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt’s actually made me reflect back on something – I used to not really like the phrase “alone together”, but I think that has been –anyone who’s been living through this pandemic and lockdowns and isolation but that lives with a partner, a roommate, someone else that has really [Laughs] – that sentiment, that phrase has really become a reality for a lot of people, and how to navigate that differently when you might have lived together beforehand, but things are different because it’s really most of the time just going to be you and maybe this one other person and how that changes the dynamic of your own relationship, but also of your own personal activities, whether that be work, or hobbies, or just relaxing. Things are now different. So at first, around the time, especially when I was writing this piece for the blog, I think I was feeling a little bit boxed in and in my own apartment. Because, my partner works from home.\n10:39\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd we do have an office space, which we do use as well. He’s also a musician and we use that space normally for music, for recording things or just working on things. But that has had to change during the day, the regular nine to five. I don’t have access to that space. So that is one limitation that I had to deal with. But then in addition to that, what was really frustrating as well on top of that is yes, I have access to the rest of my apartment, but it’s not– I don’t live in a giant apartment. And if I was going to be making a lot of noise that comes with either just practicing or wanting to write or record something, I can’t do that either during those time periods. So that was a block that I felt that I had.\n11:28\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd it was a little bit de-motivating for quite a long time. I’ll also say additionally that even though my partner and I both do music, we really do things or we did tend to do things quite separately where he has his endeavors and I have mine. And I’m also someone who’s very private about music, even though I like to share things when they’re like – when I’m happy with them when they’re finalized. But there is a huge amount of vulnerability that comes with even if it’s not your own original music and even if you’re just working on a cover song, like I’m very –I get very nervous even around this person who is so close to me. So finding times when this person is around to just like practice and maybe make mistakes and things like that was a little hard for me at first.\n12:26\tAli Barillaro:\tBut more recently, just in maybe like the last couple of months even, I have started to say like, “Hey, you know, well, we can try to, we both like this song why don’t we try to work on this together on the weekends when you’re not having to work and be in that space.” And it’s actually been really great. So I’ve tried to [Laughs] – I guess also with this change in mindset that I’ve had in terms of the pandemic in general and aloneness in general, how things have sort of changed that relation to music and performance with this particular person who I’ve been alone together with has also transformed, which has been really lovely. And we did a acoustic cover of a song called “Digging My Own Grave” which is quite an emotional song actually. [Laughs] [Start Music: “Digging My Own Grave”]\n13:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Music Continues in the Background: “Digging My Own Grave”] It really interesting experience as well, because I was doing primarily the lead vocals on it. And he’s done quite a few covers of their songs prior, just on his own. So it was kind of a nice change as well – and dynamic of that he would be there to be playing the music, but also to be doing the backup vocals and that I would be taking the lead on it. And we had to do some transposing to get that to work for both of us to get that range to be okay on both ends and that we both sound good [Laughs] making this. So yeah, we recorded that in the office slash music space, filmed it just a very basic video and put that together and up on my YouTube channel [Music Continues as Full Interlude: “Digging My Own Grave”].\n14:15\tAli Barillaro:\t[End Music: “Digging My Own Grave”] And people –friends and family were really enjoying it, they were like, “Oh, it’s really nice finally, that we get to hear the two of you together. And not just one of you, like it’s, it’s nice. It’s a nice change.”\n \n\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is beautiful. And thinking that it’s yeah, the collaboration, the coming together also is that –it almost is representative of the energy that like, okay, we’re slowly being able to see people that we hadn’t seen in a long time. So it feels like it’s part of that energy and part of that slow coming back to being together. One thing I wanted to ask you was about, if you could tell us how you found the Tanya Davis recording in your work for SpokenWeb and the Words & Music archive.\n \n\n15:28\tAli Barillaro:\tSure! One thing I’ll say is it’s been actually probably the best part of my SpokenWeb experience is getting to listen to these collections that we have access to. Because even though I’ve lived in Montreal my whole life, and that I think that I’m involved in the entertainment and the arts scenes and things like that, I didn’t know about the Words & Music Show, even though it’s been around for 20 years. So getting introduced to that and then fully diving into, I was responsible for about half of that. So about 10 years worth of recordings of these shows was really amazing. And essentially with that work, beyond just researching things, I did have to sit and listen. We weren’t creating full transcripts of things, but to an extent we were doing some transcription work which required full listen throughs, if you will.\n16:26\tAli Barillaro:\tSo I became familiar with quite a few different people who I didn’t know about and became very quickly interested in. So sometimes something would catch you, for whatever reason for maybe the types of work they’re doing with sound, especially some of the poets that are more invested in sound poetry, which again is something I wasn’t familiar with. Some of the music that I had never heard from people, either from Montreal, from other parts of Canada, and this particular recording, I don’t know if it was the– I think it was honestly the quality of the sound that really brought my attention to it and made me remember it. It was that echo to everything and how still it was, because often on those recordings, you can hear quite a bit of shuffling around in the audience. You can hear some noise from the bar of people, their glasses moving around or hushed sort of conversations. There’s a lot of extra sort of background noise in many of those recordings. And this was really as if everybody was like holding their breath and just listening. So I think that’s really what made it stand out beyond obviously the content and me being like, oh, wow, this is [Laughs] relatable, but also not quite relatable right now. But yeah, it was that particular sound of her voice and the way it was amplified that really got my attention, I think, when I was doing this kind of work every day.\n \n\n18:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I talked with Allie, I started thinking about how she is an archival listener who has actually attended, in her own way, almost all of the Words & Music shows. No, she wasn’t standing in a crowd at Casa del Popolo, but she was listening to them and she was hearing the communities forming through performances. She was hearing how artists were invited back often, artists were trying out new work, artists perhaps performing the same piece, but many years later and with a different introduction and in a different context of other performers. Her listening was showing how an archive can document communities forming through sound. [Music Interlude: Strings]\n18:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of this episode. Check the show notes for this one to find bonus content, or rather Tanya Davis also revisiting “How To Be Alone” over this past year. Plus find links to more of Ali Barillaro’s music. ShortCuts is a monthly series as part of the SpokenWeb Podcast. It is hosted by Hannah McGregor, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thank you for listening. 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Season Three of ShortCuts begins with a listening exercise. We attune our ears to what it sounds like and feels like to hear archival clips ‘cut’ out of context. Join ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod in this exploration of the sonic and affective place-making of ShortCuts as podcast. What kind of creative and critical work can these archival sounds do? On their own, or together as an archival remix? \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? We are delighted to have you with us this season as Katherine brings us more voices from the archives, more conversations, and more thoughtful reactions from her practice of close archival listening.\n \n\n00:56\tHannah McGregor:\tShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] for more.\n \n\n01:06\tHannah McGregor:\tIf you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Pitch Katherine your ShortCuts minisode idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic].\n \n\n01:21\tHannah McGregor:\tNow, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are in season three of ShortCuts. We’re ready to take more deep dives into the archives, through listening closely and carefully to short cuts [Sound Effect: Scissors] of audio. My name is Katherine McLeod. And, over these past seasons, I’ve come to understand ShortCuts as an archival and affective place made through sound where we can talk, listen, feel, question, and think together about archival sound and the world it makes and unmakes. Welcome. This season begins with a warm-up. It’s a listening exercise to get us ready and attuned to archival listening. The short cuts will be from past ShortCuts episodes. Yes, we’re getting meta here by diving into the archives of ShortCuts. We’re doing this in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like, what kind of place it has made so far, and to hear what it does creatively and critically with its sound. It’s an exercise in a podcast listening to itself in order to grow. All of the sounds will be clips from the ShortCuts archives, and that includes my voiceover. From now on, all of the sounds that you will hear will be found sounds, sounds, sounds… [Katherine’s voice overlapping] And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n \n\n03:09\tMusical Interlude:\tShortCuts Theme Music:\n \n\n03:10\tTanya Davis, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if you weren’t okay with it, just wait.\n \n\n03:19\tAli Barillaro, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain [Music: Feminine Voice from SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n \n\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tHow can you hear time?\n \n\n03:33\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present.\n \n\n03:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tShe has never read it like this before she cuts it up.\n \n\n03:40\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tIt’s called “An Elegy in Joy,” and it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. Cut it up.\n \n\n03:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts. Death and explosion and the world un-begun.\n \n\n03:56\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Voice of Muriel Rukeyser overlapping with same words] Death, and explosion, and the world un-begun.\n \n\n04:03\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico.\n \n\n04:08\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.3:\tWhen listening to a recording, can you be listening for time? Can we hear the spring thaw in an archival recording of poetry?\n \n\n04:19\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass separating inside from outside, comes into a certain kind of sky that goes with that, which is like glass. Again…\n \n\n04:43\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tSomething I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts is: What kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound…\n \n\n04:59\tStephanie Bolster, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything and you know, slow it down and take in the details. Just like the density and the abundance of details. I was scribbling things down and couldn’t keep up. And in that sense, it really felt, you know, the same sense I would have had in a live reading.\n \n\n05:15\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tAs you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? Why do people come and listen to poems? And listen to poems?\n \n\n05:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI listen again, and again.\n \n\n05:30\tMathieu Aubin, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tWhen I was listening to it, the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately –it’s different with you obviously because we’re actually responding, and we’re both in on it – like this is about to happen – and you could feel it generations later. That awkwardness. And you’d be like, everyone’s like ‘eee’…\n \n\n05:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tIt’s also interesting that the whole, sort of, joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then – this – if she does like slam the book down, or – if she, you know – the presence of the weight of the page – [recording of Margaret Avison overlaps] and you read it and you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down and there are so many emotions happening in this moment…\n \n\n06:13\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tNow I’ll read it again.\n \n\n06:14\tBarbara Nickel, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI have from years of reading her I have a certain voice in my mind – the voice of the page – and then to hear her voice for the first time…\n \n\n06:25\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.4:\tListen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body. As the poem breaths – in and out – it is breathing…\n \n\n06:36\tDionne Brand, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\t[Reading poem] I will not take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds, every day, even those that do not hold a wind’s impression… Okay that’s enough. [Applause]\n \n\n06:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tThe recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio. On radiofreerainforest… [Sound of the intro music from the radio program and the words “radio free rain forest” are repeated.] radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s. [“Words and the sound” are words repeated as part of the intro music from the radio program.]\n \n\n07:09\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Audible sound of background noise ongoing.] The recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room. This is the sound of the audience. This is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as they are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event…\n \n\n07:43\tAlexei Perry Cox, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Reading poem] The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time…\n \n\n07:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Alexei’s reading continues in the background.] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at The Words and Music Show online on March 29th, 2020. [Audible sounds of Alexei’s daughter Isla.] She’s reading from Finding Places to Make Places, and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla, her then 18-month old daughter.\n \n\n08:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\tWhen I heard Alexei read at The Words and Music Show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices. What improvisation at a poetry reading.\n \n\n08:34\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\t…What is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up and the involuntary muscles… And you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something, with almost unmediated – that is the poem among us, between us, there.\n \n\n09:10\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] You brought me clarity, gift after gift, I wear… poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n09:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with arrows, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series…\n \n\n10:01\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n \n\n10:06\tKatherine McLeod,  Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear this holding the quietness of each page.\n \n\n10:11\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. In the room. We knew.\n \n\n10:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear the turning of the page, the room…\n \n\n10:19\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] The room that held you… is still here.\n \n\n10:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe are listening to desire in the making. Every time we press play on this recording as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem…\n \n\n10:32\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tYou get some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n \n\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tLet’s hear all of that again.\n \n\n10:39\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Who will speak these days. If not, if not you?\n \n\n10:46\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. Poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n11:08\tMusic Interlude:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. 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Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 122-123 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 294-297.\\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020.\\n\\nPolyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast. 1 November 2021.\\n\\nPound, Scott. “Sounding out the Difference: Orality and Repetition in bpNichol.” Open Letter: bp + 10 (Fall 1998) 50-58.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum Books, 2018.\\n\\nAUDIO CLIPS\\n\\nAudio for this ShortCuts is clipped from a recording of Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1966-1980 available on PennSound, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, and from a recording of bpNichol and Lionel Kearns from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series audio collection.\\n\\nNichol, bp. “Pome Poem.” PennSound. A link to the same recording is also available on the official bpNichol archive. \\n\\n“I wanted to forget you.” bpNichol reading with Lionel Kearns. Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Montreal, 22 November 1968. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/bpnichol-and-lionel-kearns-at-sgwu-1968/#1\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549808480257,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts explores one of the methods of listening from the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode, produced by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, listens to the emotional weight of archives. Julia’s conversations with poet Lisa Robertson uncover the ways in which archives record the relationships between memory, affect, and mortality. In this ShortCuts, producer Katherine McLeod listens to the emotional weight of archives through a recording of bpNichol, reading with Lionel Kearns in Montreal on November 22, 1968. How does the archive record loss? What can the archive never record? And what do we remember as listeners?\n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] a place where we listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. In this episode, we’ll be using the last full episode of The Spoken Web Podcast to inspire our listening. The last episode was “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”. The recordings that we’ll be listening to in this ShortCuts are of the poet bpNichol. We’ll mostly be listening to a recording of a reading that bpNichol gave on November 22nd, 1968, as part of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Now you might be wondering what does bpNichol have to do with “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”; well, I’m not here to make a case for what they have in common though, if I wanted to start somewhere, I’d start with Coach House Books. What I do want to draw upon from that episode on Robertson and the feminist archive is how producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill talks about archives as having an emotional weight. That emotional weight in the case of that episode was rooted in hearing a recording of someone’s voice, who is no longer here. Yes, this episode touches upon themes of loss, and please do what you need to do to take care while listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]. BpNichol was a poet whose poetry was always aware of presence and absence through its linguistic play, concrete forms and embodied sound. Let’s hear how recordings of his voice invite us to think through and to feel the emotional weight of archives.\n \n\n03:16\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading and singing a poem] What is a poem is inside of your body, body, body, body. What is a poem is inside of your head, inside your head, inside your head, inside your head. Oh…\n \n\n03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was bpNichol reading, reciting, performing “Pome Poem.” It is a poem that I played years ago, over 10 years ago, in fact, as a graduate student, while presenting on a panel and a grand room at the University of Toronto. I had been discussing a dance adaptation of bpNichol’s poetry, and indeed a dance adaptation of his group, The Four Horsemen’s poetry and well, the performance is a story in and of itself. But to get to the point here, I was talking about how they had ended the performance with “Pome Poem,” and the sounds of the words breathing faded out as the theatre lights went down. I let the recording fade out at the end of my presentation.\n \n\n04:20\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading/singing a poem] Inside of your, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing [Fades out]…\n \n\n04:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfterwards, one of my co-panelists told me that he was very moved. He hadn’t expected to suddenly hear Nichol’s voice. It was as though he was there. This was years after the passing of Nichol and, with many recordings existing of Nichol’s voice, it didn’t seem strange for me to hear it. But here was someone who was not a Nichol scholar, he wasn’t listening to the audio recordings in the archives, but rather here, he was someone in the midst of a very public event who had just heard the voice of a dear friend. We can have such visceral reactions to hearing a voice in the archives, even if we don’t know that voice personally. I think of the reactions to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice – here’s Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee reacting to MacEwen’s voice on a previous episode of The Spoken Web Podcast.\n \n\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n \n\n05:30\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tNo. I’ve never heard her voice.\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tDo you want to?\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n \n\n05:32\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t[Reading a poem] A fugitive from all those truths, which are two true, the great clawing ones and the fire breathers –\n \n\n05:40\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\t[Audible Gasp]\n \n\n05:41\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– the ones that rake the flesh like piranhas and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bare their red teeth in the night –\n \n\n05:51\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\t[Overlaps with MacEwen’s reading] So melodious her voice! I’ve never used the word melodious.\n \n\n05:55\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– My mind, emulates dragon, fish and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night\n \n\n06:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tMelodious. Yes. So melodious her voice. And to be in awe of her voice has been a common response ever since MacEwen started reading poems in the 1960s.\n06:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing MacEwen’s voice in the archives is somewhat similar to hearing bpNichol’s in that we’re hearing a poet who has been remembered as one who died too soon. BpNichol in 1988 at age 44 and Gwendolyn MacEwen one year earlier in 1987 at age 47. I think of George Bowering’s memorial for bpNichol in which he writes, quote: “as the years go by, scores of young and other writers and editors will develop the gifts bpNichol passed freely to them, and in that way, his life will go on. We will still bitterly resent the absence of his late life poems.”\n06:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tI think of that too, for MacEwen. Her last book was called Afterworlds, but who is mourning the archival afterlife of MacEwen that we will never know – that we will never hear. There are many unheard archival afterlives that probably will come to mind as I say this. At the same time, Nichol and MacEwen were relatively well-known as poets in Canada, which makes you think about the voices that were never archived. And what about the voices who are recorded in the archives? But those recordings only capture certain periods of their lives and their work? Which versions of themselves are remembered in sound?\n \n\n07:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name. I wanted to erase you, I forgot you, your name. I wanted you, I forgot you, I erased your name. You forgot me, I wanted you, you erased my name. I tried you, I forgot you, I erased your name. Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n \n\n08:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the last poem that bpNichol read in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series on November 22nd, 1968, or at least we think that it was the last poem that he read. Nichol’s reading cuts in and out before we can hear the applause or any final remarks. And so we can only assume that it is the end. Plus the poem, as far as I can tell, is one that Nicol read out loud, but never published in print. And so we don’t know if this was “the end” of the poem. Though, if we listen closely, it does seem like it resolves and is even a bit reminiscent of his poem “Evening Ritual”, which evolves through a similar cycle of actions relating to writing. When the poem ends, at least as it ends on the tape, we don’t hear applause, but we can hear sound on the tape. The recording overlaps with a recording of the same recording. The recording somehow gets recorded over itself. And so there are times like this at the end, when you are listening to Nichol and then you hear the faint sound of Nichol in the background at a different point in the same reading.\n \n\n09:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name. [Static]\n \n\n09:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s another example of what I mean about the recording over itself, and this time we hear the tape rewind and then repeat something that we’d heard before.\n \n\n10:06\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Voice sounds sped up] I’m going to read a poem I wrote last night. That’s waking [Tape noise of rewinding]…\n \n\n10:14\tArchival Recording, Lionel Kearns, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] The imagination explodes. They grow old, quick and die. What’s left. Sometimes there’s something left. [Gentle laughter from audience]\n \n\n10:35\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\tI’m going to do that dangerous thing and read a poem I wrote last night, thus waking Lionel up at 7:30 this morning, which he didn’t quite forgive me for. It starts off with a quote from a poem by Bobby Hogg. And well, yesterday we were up in Carlton doing a reading there…\n \n\n10:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is being released right around the time when this reading took place. We can try to re-enact what it would have been like to gather on this November day in downtown Montreal for this reading with bpNichol and Lionel Kearns. What would it have been like to be in that room? What is the archive unable to record? By staging this ShortCuts in November with a November recording, we are participating in a kind of reenactment. To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n \n\n11:43\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n \n\n11:49\tKatherine McLeod:\t–And yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n \n\n11:58\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n"],"score":1.0},{"id":"9979","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.3, Communal Memories, 20 December 2021, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4fbf6de0-126c-4630-8919-4d8fac60e816/audio/088e183d-1d3a-421d-ade5-5e1c94090fcf/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-3-communal-listening.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"11,851,695 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.3 Communal Listening\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-12-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO CLIPS\\n\\nAll audio in this episode is from the Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection, held at Simon Fraser University and part of SFU’s Digitized Collections.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nMaracle, Lee.\\nI Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism\\n. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996.\\n\\nMaracle, Lee.\\nMemory Serves: Oratories\\n. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2015.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.”\\nGerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.\\nSFU Digitized Collections.\\nhttps://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 21 June 2020.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\\n\\nTaylor, Diana.\\nThe Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas\\n. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 2003.\\n\\nWilson, Michelle. “Forced Migration.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 6 December 2021.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528832,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As part two of ShortCuts 2.9 Situating Sound—and as one of the many remembrances of Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle—this ShortCuts explores how the archive remembers and who these memories serve. The audio recording for this episode is a 1988 recording of Lee Maracle and Dionne Brand, recorded for broadcast on Gerry Gilbert’s radio program “radiofreerainforest” (Vancouver Coop Radio; SFU Digitized Collections). Building towards Maracle’s reading of the poem “Perseverance,” producer Katherine McLeod selects audio clips from this recording in which we can hear feminist placemaking in action. \n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last time on ShortCuts, we were listening to recordings that made us think about and feel the emotional weight of archives. We were thinking about how archival recordings produce memories that can almost stand in for the lived memory itself. How does the archive remember? Is the archive, the archive as in the colonial archive, or is the archive something more attuned to embodied practice? And that understanding very much resonates with the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Forced Migration.” That episode asks how stories are passed along in the case of bison migration. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines colonial archives in order to create alternative stories of the human relations with the bison of Turtle Island. What do we call the collection of these stories, an archive, a community, and who do these memories serve? That is the question that will take us into the sounds of this ShortCuts, who do these memories serve.\n \n\n02:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd here I’m thinking about Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle’s book Memory Serves. On November 11th, 2021 Lee Maracle passed away… And I heard the news after finishing up the last ShortCuts and thinking about archival afterlives. I listened to all the tributes pouring in for Maracle across various media outlets and media platforms. We’re still listening to those tributes and remembrances. Recordings of Maracle’s voice are in SpokenWeb audio collections. For example, if you recall the episode in season two of ShortCuts on Dionne Brand’s reading from 1988, you’ll recall that Lee Maracle had read with her that night. I had planned on a part two of that ShortCuts to listen to Maracle in that recording. And now is the time to listen. At the same time, like in the last episode, I encourage you to take care while listening…\n \n\n03:35\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tTomorrow there’s a celebration of South Africa Women’s Day. And I was asked almost a year ago now, I think to do a poem for the boycott the shipments of sulphur from Vancouver harbour to South Africa. And I’m gonna read that one first.\n \n\n03:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a reading that was broadcast on the radio program, radiofreerainforest. And that’s how we end up with this recording. That is the archive. But the experience of being there is archived in the sound in the cadence of voice, in the noise, in the background, in the laughter in knowing that the recording cannot remember it all. We won’t listen to the entire recording, but we will listen to enough clips that you get a sense of it. And if you’d like to return to it, you’ll know that it is there. The audio clips that we will hear are ones that convey the sound of the room, what it would’ve felt like to be there, how we can hear kinship, how we can hear the relation between bodies in the room. Like in this moment, when Maracle explains that she is going to read an epigram for Dionne Brand…\n \n\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne. [Laughter] She wrote this book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance [Laughter], it’s a great book of poems. But as you know, about 95% of Canada in the winter is covered in snow. So I answered her epigrams about the cold in this fashion. At that time, I hadn’t met Dionne, but I was supposed to read with her and, it never came to pass [Laughter]. Tonight is the first— [inaudible comment from Brand] [Laughter from Brand and Maracle] — and I wouldn’t these, but [Inaudible] [Shared Laughter]… This one’s called “Flowers for Dionne.” I hope I get it right!\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt feels as though we’re listening to a private moment that has found its way into a more formal archive. There are jokes about how they had planned to read together didn’t and now here they are — and that continues later, when in her reading Brand replies to Maracle with an unfinished epigram in response.\n \n\n06:08\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading:\tLee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n \n\n07:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tBrand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself. Knowing the exchange that unfolds between Brand and Maracle about the epigrams, it becomes even more meaningful to hear what precedes it. And this is why I’ve taken all of that out of context, to build up to hearing this poem, a poem that Maracle introduces by saying that she wrote it for herself. Let’s now listen to Lee Maracle reading “Perseverance”…\n \n\n08:16\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tI once said that poetry is never a self-portrait, you know, poets are famous for writing for so and so and for so and so and for so and so… Well, I was feeling very narcissistic one day, and I decided this was for me. It’s called “Perseverance.”\n \n\n08:34\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t[Reading poem] There’s a dandelion on the roadside in Toronto, it’s leaves a dishevelled mix of green and brown. A dandelion straggling and limping along. There’s a flower beside a concrete stump on Bay Street in Toronto, perpetually rebelling against spiked heels and blue surge suits. The monetary March passed by five o’clock Bay Street, deaf to the cries of this thin ageing lion’s sneer. Chicken, yellow flower. My leaves, my face, my skin. I feel like my skin is being ripped off of me. There is a flower in Toronto on the roadside. It takes jack hammers and brutish machines to rip the concrete from the sidewalks in Toronto to beautify the city of blue suede suits. But for this dandy lion, it takes, but a seed, a little acid rain, a whole lot of fight, and a black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:41\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne.\n \n\n09:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat poem ends with the words, “There is a flower.” We can hear that those words are almost covered by the response from the audience — and, well, no, they’re not covered. It’s more that they’re supported by the sound. The sound holds them up. And that’s the moment that Maracle says, “This is for Dionne.” Listening again, I rushed to check a published version of the poem in I Am Woman to see that it ends with “There is a flower” because it really sounds like she says, “Here is a flower.” On the page, it says “There is a flower,” but I listen to it again. And it does sound like “here.” And thinking about it more, I thought, well, how beautiful would it have been? If she had said, “Here is a flower,” because she had said that this poem is for herself. To say, “here is a flower” is like saying a version of: “Here I am.” And that would make even more sense with how her audience responds. It’s as though she’s reached out her arms while saying it, and as though we can hear the warmth of the smiles and nods around her saying, yes, here she is. Let’s listen to that ending again…\n \n\n10:52\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t“…black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter] This is for Dionne. [Lee Laughs] She wrote this called book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance. It’s a great book…\n \n\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Lee Maracle reading with Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording is part of the radiofreerainforest collection, which is part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held at Simon Fraser University. If you are a SpokenWeb researcher with an audio clip for shortcuts, do get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. If you are listening and you were at one of the readings played here on ShortCuts, please do get in touch at the same email spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n \n\n11:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n \n"],"score":1.0}]