The SpokenWeb Podcast

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.

Addendum: Listening Notes

Nancy 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. 

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. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, poet, and writer. A former lecturer at the Obama Institute at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz (2017-18) and international fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, she is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Visual Art and Art History and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University (Toronto) where she studies digital, feminist approaches to interdisciplinary artists’ archives. Her writing has been published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History), English Studies in Canada, DeGruyter Open Cultural Studies, BC Studies, Canadian Literature, and other places.

Citations

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.

Fong, 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. 

Morra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Robertson, 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.

Singh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.

Music Credits:

Clouds at Castor Ridge by Zander on Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/69017

Kothbiro by Real Vocal String Quartet on Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Real_Vocal_String_Quartet#contact-artist

Sunsets and Rockers by Rebecca Foon on Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rebecca_Foon/Live_At_CKUT_on_Montreal_Sessions/03_Sunsets_And_Rockers

ShortCuts is back! 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? 

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Judith Burr

Audio Excerpted

Voices heard in this episode: Katherine McLeod, Tanya Davis, Ali Barillaro, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Avison, Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, Mathieu Aubin, Dionne Brand, Alexei Perry Cox and Isla, and Phyllis Webb.  

All audio has been played on previous ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast. 

Try listening to this episode first without knowing whose voices you are hearing. Afterwards, explore the audio that caught your attention. Use the transcript to find the ShortCuts episode that the audio is clipped from, and there you will find the original audio sources listed in the show notes. For a full transcript of this episode, check out the link above.

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. 

Over 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.

Featured 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).

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. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Producer Bio:

Myra Bloom is Assistant Professor of Canadian literature at York University-Glendon campus. She is currently writing a book called Evasive Maneuvers about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart, and is preparing a SSHRC-funded podcast on the same topic.

Guest Bios

Kim Echlin is a novelist. Her novel, The Disappeared, was short-listed for the Giller Prize. She has written a biography of Elizabeth Smart titled Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity in which she discussed the work and life of Elizabeth Smart in the context of writing, motherhood, and earning a living. Her new novel will appear next year.

Maya Gallus is an award winning documentary filmmaker whose work screens at numerous international film festivals. Most recently, The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution, was the opening night film at the 2017 Hot Docs Film Festival and the 2018 Berlinale Culinary Cinema programme. She is also recognized for her critically acclaimed literary biographies, The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche and Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels. 

Sina Queyras is a Canadian writer, editor, and creative writing professor at Concordia University. They have published seven collections of poetry, a novel and an essay collection. Their third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, received the Pat Lowther Award and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and their fourth, Expressway, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for poetry. They are currently researching Elizabeth Smart for an academic project.

Rosemary Sullivan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life. She has published fourteen books in the multiple genres of biography, memoir, poetry, travelogue, and short fiction. Her biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won numerous prizes including the Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award. Her latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 23 countries, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the BC National Non-Fiction Award, the RBC Charles Taylor prize, the Plutarch Biographers International Award and was a finalist for American PEN /Bograd Weld Prize and the U.S. National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Special thanks to Vineeta Patel for transcription help. Donna Downey at the MUN archives. The Glendon Media Lab. Aisha Jamal, Ali Weinstein, Heather White, Lauren Neefe, Sarah O’Brien, Lynn Bloom, Leonard Bloom, Lana Swartz for feedback.

Credits:

Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.

MUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.

All the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Clips Featured in Introduction:

The voices of Michael O’Driscoll, Annie Murray, and Jason Camlot from Stories of SpokenWeb

A clip of Mavis Gallant from Mavis Gallant Reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU

The voices of Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy from Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU

A clip of Muriel Rukeyser and the voice of Katherine McLeod from ShortCuts minisode You Are Here

Music in the introduction is Lick Stick by Nursery from Blue Dot Sessions.

Tape noise sound effects from FreeSound.org.

We 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.

Trailer Producers:

Judith Burr & Hannah McGregor

Clips Featured:

KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from S2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”

Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from S2E9 “Mavis Gallant Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”

Mathieu Aubin, in S2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”

“Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, and Katherine McLeod in S2E8 “Talking about Talking”

Penn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”

Wisdom Agorde, from S2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1: The Language of Talking Drums”

Klara du Plessis, from S2E1 “Deep Curation: Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice”

Stacey Copeland, from S2E5 “Cylinder Talks - Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”

Treena Chambers, from S2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”

Music: 

“Slapstick” by Moon Juice from Blue Dot Sessions

In this episode from The Podcast Studies Podcast, formerly known as the “New Aural Cultures” Podcast, co-hosts Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead come on the SpokenWeb Podcast to take us back to key moments of their past episodes. They introduce three segments from past episodes that engage with podcasting in relation to media forms and cultural contexts. You will hear a segment from an interview with academic Ella Waldmann on S-Town as a literary form; Galen Beebe from the Bello Collective website discussing ethics, social justice, and podcasting’s media heritage; and Dan Misener on the misunderstood notion of podcast branding. The episode of the Podcast Studies Podcast that we shared with you today was produced by Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead. Visit https://www.podpage.com/podcaststudiespodcast to subscribe and find more details.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland

AUDIO SOURCES

Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Phyllis Webb’s reading in Montreal on November 18, 1966. The entire recording can be accessed here. 

RESOURCES

Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018. 

McGregor, 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/. 

McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.

---. “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.

Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965. 

Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.

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. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . 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 for Season 3 this Fall!

Episode Producer:

Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb Director) is Professor in the Department of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media (2019) and Language Acts (2007). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, What the World Said, and Vlarf.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Judith Burr

AUDIO SOURCES

Ali Barillaro’s recording of reading of her blog post, “Tanya Davis performing ‘How to Be Alone’” on SPOKENWEBLOG, 6 August, 2020. 

Tanya 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/.

Excerpt of Cover of “Digging my own grave” by Thrice performed by Ali Barillaro and Vincent Pigeon here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6H9QuL6q8

RESOURCES

Watch Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s 2010 film of the poem “How to Be Alone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs

Watch 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

Find out more about all of SpokenWeb’s audio collections here.

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.Craig 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.

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. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

Craig Carpenter is an MA student in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). A poet, journalist, sound designer, and former literary editor, Craig brings a diverse set of skills to the SpokenWeb project. His thesis will explore the podcast as public scholarship and engages archival recordings of second wave TISHITES Daphne Marlatt and Robert Hogg. With particular attention to Charles Olson’s 1950 essay PROJECTIVE VERSE, he is investigating the intersection of proprioceptive poetics, the embodiment of voice in performance and sound studies. 

Musical score by Chelsea Edwardson: Chelsea Edwardson uses music as a tool to transform stories and concepts into the sonic realm, creating experiences through sound that heal and inspire. Her background in ethnomusicology brings the depth of tone and expression that transcends culture, taking the listener to worlds beyond a physical place and into a landscape of feelings. To learn more, visit https://www.chelseaedwardson.com.

Featured Guest:

Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, AB, and grew up in Cariboo and Fraser Valley, BC. Hogg graduated from UBC with a BA in English and Creative Writing. During his time at UBC, Hogg became affiliated as a poet and co-editor a part of TISH. In 1964, Hogg hitchhiked to Toronto and visited Buffalo NY, where Charles Olson had been teaching at the time. At SUNY at Buffalo, he completed a Ph.D. on the works of Charles Olson. Shortly after, Hogg taught American and Canadian poetry at Carleton University for the following thirty-eight years. Hogg currently lives at his farm located in Ottawa.

Sound Recordings Featured:

Archival Audio from PennSound.com

Short intro clips of: Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering: all from PennSound digital archives.

Recording of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC/the_red_wheelbarrow_multiple.php

Recording 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

Recording of “I Know a Man” by Robert Creely: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley/i_know_a_man.php

Recording 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

Archival Audio from AMP Lab’s Soundbox Collection

Robert Hogg reads at Black Sheep Books, Vancouver, 1995: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/

Archival Audio from KPFA

Robert Hogg reads at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965: http://www.kpfahistory.info/bpc/readings/Young%20poets.mp3

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Judith Burr

AUDIO SOURCES

Dionne Brand, recording played on radiofreerainforest, 7 August 1988, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.

RESOURCES

“#101 Renee Rodin.” BC Booklook, 28 January 2016,  https://bcbooklook.com/101-renee-rodin/.

“Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto arts publishing.” Art Gallery of York University, https://agyu.art/project/desire-lines/.

“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.

Kinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.

Our 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/.

“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.

“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.