SpokenWeb Podcast

S5-Episode 6

Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival

For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.

Until recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary event from the margins.

This episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS

All archival audio played in this episode is from SpokenWeb’s Ultimatum collection—including interviews conducted by Mathieu Aubin and Ella Jando-Saul with Alan Lord, Fortner Anderson, Sheila Urbanoski and Jerome Poynton, as a way of building this archival collection—with the exception of one clip of Alan Lord sourced from here.

WORKS CITED

Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.

FURTHER READING / LISTENING

Aubin, Mathieu. “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.

Lord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.

Stanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.

“What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival.” Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,

https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/

00:00	SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:	[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.
00:18	Hannah McGregor:	What 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. [Music fades]
00:34	Hannah McGregor:	My name is Hannah McGregor–
00:35	Katherine McLeod:	And my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.
00:50	Katherine McLeod:	In this month’s episode, our producer, Frances Grace Fyfe, takes us into the sounds of “Punk Poetry Archives.” The recordings are from the festival called “Ultimatum.” They constitute one collection that Concordia’s SpokenWeb team has been digitizing and cataloging. And at the same time, a SpokenWeb-affiliated and SSHRC-funded research team, led by Mathieu Aubin, has been working through research questions that emerge from these very same recordings.
01:17	Katherine McLeod:	That project, “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides,” decided that a sound-based format would be ideal for sharing their research.
		Enter Frances Grace Fyfe, who joined the team for the production of this episode and, in many ways, becomes a listener to all of the archival work that the “Listening Queerly” team has been doing.
01:37	Katherine McLeod:	As Frances Grace tells us the story of “Ultimatum Through the Archives,” we hear stories of what “Listening Queerly” can do with archival audio. And we start to hear “queer listening” as a practice emerging from within and in relation to the research team members themselves.
01:54	Hannah McGregor:	Let’s get ready to listen to this month’s episode. And yep, it’s our first episode to come with a profanity warning, but it is an episode about a “punk poetry archive,” after all. Here is producer Frances Grace Fyfe with notes from the underground, sex, drugs, and rock and roll at the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”
02:15	SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:	[Instrumental Music Overlapped With Feminine Voice]
02:31	Frances Grace Fyfe:	[Audio Recording Begins] [Electronic Music Plays]
		What comes to mind when you think of a “poetry reading”? For most people, a poetry reading is a boring, stuffy event where you have to sit quietly and clap politely while a poet intones at length. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, it was the poetry reading that was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance.
		At the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival,” which first took place in 1985, literary all-stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while revelling in drunkenness, doing cocaine, and sleeping with one another.
03:11	Frances Grace Fyfe:	The event–which ultimately dissolved into financial difficulty and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors–broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have yet to be paralleled today.
		The question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?
03:31	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Until recently, most recordings from the “Ultimatum Festival” were predominantly kept in personal archives and often considered lost to many people who were part of the events. These recordings weren’t available for research until recently when a team at SpokenWeb began to digitize and archive them. In today’s episode, we’ll listen back to some of these recordings and learn about the unique approaches this team is taking to bring this event back to life.
		You’re listening to: “Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”
04:02	Music:	[Electronic Music]
04:06	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Announcer at the Ultimatum Festival speaking in French] musique de “Boys Du Sévère” qui vont jouer vendredi soir–
04:06	Alan Lord:	[Audio Fades Away]
		It was, you know: “blow our minds. You’ve got 15 minutes and get the fuck off stage.”
04:21	Jerome Poynton:	It was like a huge show, you know, big, big show. But it was completely insane what we were trying to do.
04:28	Fortner Anderso:	[Overlapping] Overt sexual and bodily function of her (referring to Sheila Urbanoski) work, was like, whoah. You know, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
04:38	Sheila Urbanoski:	I remember at the end of it, somebody said, “how would you describe Ultimatum?” And I said two words: chaos, cocaine. [Background noise echoes “love”]
04:47	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Background noise continues echoing “Love”]
04:50	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Alan Lord presenting “The Ultimatum” in French/English] Nous allons faire l’inauguration, alors si je peux, uh, si je peux faire l’inauguration d’Ultimatum 2. Let’s, uh, well, je ne sais pas. Let’s go.
05:09	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Upbeat music plays in the background]
05:21	Frances Grace Fyfe:	OK, so we’re here at Foufounes Électriques. Can you just describe the scene for us?
05:26	Ella Jando-Saul:	Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty spacious kind of place. Over here by the entrance, we have a bar. There’s, you know, an ATM machine. There are a couple of foosball tables sort of speckled around the room.
		As I understand, the bar was smaller and there would’ve been sort of a clear performance stage. There was a lot of performance art happening at the time, and it wouldn’t have been as nicely decorated.
		It was sort of like your typical run-of-the-mill, grimy bar, whereas it’s quite nice right now. Like it feels clean in a way where I don’t imagine that’s how it would’ve been.
06:02	Frances Grace Fyfe	You’re listening to Ella Jando-Saul, one of the researchers on the team who is digitizing and listening back to the tapes from Ultimatum. I asked her to bring me to the site where the festival originally took place. Les Foufounes Électriques–literally, “The Electric Buttocks”–a punk bar on Montreal’s Saint-Catherines Street.
06:20	Frances Grace Fyfe	What I want to know is, how did this grimy punk bar—which only a few years after the festival ended would go on to host “Nirvana” to a sold-out crowd—become the site of one of the most avant-garde, performance events in Canadian literary history? Well, to understand Ultimatum, we have to go back to one man, Alan Lord.
		Legend has it, Alan, then a young engineer, had a vision to put together a festival that would bring together poets as well as artists and musicians from across Canada and the US with one goal: to break boundaries in poetic performance. So who is Alan Lord, exactly?
06:57	Ella Jando-Saul:	He’s just a guy in engineering. And he gets into the punk scene, and then he gets into the poetry scene. And then he uses his funds from engineering to put together a festival, because, like a guy suggests it, one day. And then it sort of snowballs from there. And he starts dedicating basically all of his time and money to creating this series of festivals because punk is what gives him life and [Ella laughs] engineering is what gives him the funds to do this. And, when I say it gives him the funds, like sometimes he’s not paying his rent so that he can fly in some New Yorker for an evening.
		So, that’s Alan Lord. Basically just a guy with motivation. And money.
07:37	Frances Grace Fyfe:	It just seems a bit bizarre to me that somebody would become so obsessed with putting on a poetry event that they would get nearly bankrupt themselves doing it.
		Can you speak to what was going on in his head at the time?
07:53	Ella Jando-Saul:	Well, let me go into the long version, and again, this is mostly pulled from his book. But you know, he’s in classes at McGill, and he sees this guy who has a Ramones badge, and he’s like, “oh my God, someone else in engineering is also into punk.” He starts getting into the Montreal punk scene, which is developing at about exactly this time, mostly in Old Port and mostly in Anglophone scene.
		The Francophone bands that do exist are often singing in English, and punk becomes like the thing that really matters to him and the thing that’s taking up all of his time. And so he loses his full-time job that he had, and he also drops out of school, like right before his final semester. I think around, it’s around this time, he probably like starts a band and stuff. And then he meets Lucien Francoeur. Lucien Francoeur really teaches him about poetry. So he comes to him through the punk scene. But Francoeur is mainly a poet who’s got folded into this punk scene.
		And so he teaches Alan Lord about all of the great poets, Rimbaud and Burroughs [Ella laughs]. And then Alan Lord sort of digs deeper into this whole poetry thing. Meanwhile, he also goes from Rimbaud to learning about William Burroughs to learning about Herbert Hunke and John Giorno and the whole like, Beat scene.
09:09	Alan Lord:	The Toronto Research Group and also the “Antar gang” we used to call them “La Revue Antar” gang. There was the, uh, Pierre-Andre Arcand, he was called. His nickname was (). He did interesting stuff with machines and altering his voice like a vocoder and stuff. So yeah, that contingent from Quebec was really interesting.
		They were this little clique of four or five guys, they were doing avant-garde stuff. Yeah, they were a fun bunch. And also the people from “Sound Poet,” people from Toronto for avant-garde literary stuff.
09:48	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Here’s Alan today, talking about some of the performers he invited to the first “Ultimatum Poetry Festival.”
09:54	Alan Lord:	And there was this one guy talking about sound poetry. This guy, it was actually just sound, Jean-Paul Curté. He was like a professional sound sculptor and artist, and I have no idea how he got there… I have no idea who gave me the idea to invite him? Or maybe he called me up or something. I don’t know. But he was very interesting.
10:21	Frances Grace Fyfe:	One thing you have to understand is that, before the first Ultimatum festival, the poetry scene in Montreal was divided pretty clearly along English and French lines.
10:30	Fortner Anderson:	It was an odd time, you know in the early early 80s and late 70s. I mean you could still find very many people in Montreal, English people who would absolutely refuse to speak French. Lived their entire lives, but couldn’t say “hello.” And were extremely upset that they might now have to start saying “hello” because of the circumstances. And also, at the same, time was the palpably revolutionary feelings or, impetus of Quebec’s society the two communities, there was a big, big gulf between them.
11:12	Frances Grace Fyfe:	You’re listening to Fortner Anderson, who came to Montreal from the United States and became involved in the Anglophone performance poetry scene. He was hired by Alan Lord to handle grant applications and other organizational tasks for the second Ultimatum festival, which took place two years after the first, in 1987.
11:29	Ella Jando-Saul:	Anglophones and francophones were sort of doing different things in say the 60s and 70s. Anglophones had the Vehicle Art Gallery, and there were some francophones involved there, but it was mainly Anglophone space that was a space for like, experimental performance art kimd of stuff. And, on the Francophone side, you had this, like, very heated political moment. A lot of performance of poetry was related to politics at the time, so you have the “Nuit de la poesie,” become a recurring event around the Quebec separatist movement, and it’s a place where you can show that Quebec has an identity, that Quebec has a culture. Here I mean this is Francophone Quebecois people thinking of Quebec as a Francophone nation.
12:21	René Lévesque, Archival Audio	[René Lévesque talking about the separatist movement]
		…un grand parti souverainiste Quebecois.
		Nous pouvons même devenir un peuple qui va s’étonner lui-même de ce dont il est capable…
12:29	Ella Jando-Saul:	And so bringing in, like, Quebec’s own francophone literature and performing it, sort of using poetry to express your political idea to a large audience.
12:39	Alan Lord:	I always found the Anglo crowd of Montreal very insular. And they sort of weren’t interested or whatever in what was happening on the French side. Through thinking about all this, I realized, I was happier and felt more at ease and comfortable and also challenged by the French language people here, seemed to be more open. And also there was the “Joie de Vivre,” and they were a pretty rambunctious bunch. I mean, including fistfights between poets. I mean [Alan laughs] poetry was rough on the French side. It was literally blood on the floor. The “sound des poets,” crazy stuff.
13:27	Ella Jando-Saul:	You know, Toronto had this whole established literary community, all of the big literary magazines. A lot of the stuff that’s happening is in Toronto. So it seems like from the anglophone perspective like Montreal has its place sort of outside of the hub of the main tangents of Canadian poetry.
13:46	Fortner Anderson:	It was a group of close-knit friends and at the time, and there was a number of interesting things about it. One of them was of course, that Alan was mostly engaged within the French community. And the English community, of course, had, by that time, left.
		It was a mass exodus of English reactionaries to Toronto. And so the city for the few English poets who remain was kind of left to ourselves. Their Quebec culture was focused on the independence issue, the English community had lost its relevance within the time, and so it was a remarkable kind of freedom which developed.
14:30	Alan Lord:	We were interested in the exploration of culture and experimentation. It was basically to entertain, to keep the attention of the public because usually, it was like “Don’t drag me to another boring poetry reading. I’m sick of those blah blah blah.”
		I remember boring poetry reading as much on the English side as the French; they’d be going on for half an hour on a poem. On the Anglo side, after every sentence of a poem they take 15 minutes to explain the line. I mean, that’s exactly what I didn’t want and in my little contract of the first festival; “you’ve got 15 minutes. Blow our minds, you’ve got 15 minutes, and get the fuck off the stage.”
		So, I was kind of insisting that they keep everyone’s attention and do something interesting, and not, don’t bore the public and that worked out. I mean anybody who was there was certainly not bored.
15:38	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh”]
15:44	Fortner Anderson:	I mean, Ian Stephens was an extraordinary poet. But then he had a big band, for the time. So there, too, it became apparent that one could take the power of the pop band and, as a poet and literary performer, use it to create something that had a big impact on the stage.
16:17	Sheila Urbanoski:	It was dark, scattered chairs, people stumbling around. Everybody was smoking because you could smoke back then. No one sat there and listened. No one did that. It was very much like constant milling around and talking. A lot of the performances had to be quite captivating in order for people to shut the fuck up and listen.
16:40	Frances Grace Fyfe:	You’re listening to Sheila Urbanoski, who lived in Saskatchewan before moving to Montreal, where she became involved in the art scene and the crowd at the Foufounes Électriques right around the corner from her apartment. Like Fortner, she also worked on “Ultimatum II” staff, as the office manager.
16:55	Fortner Anderson:	With “Ultimatum,” there was work that was exciting, vibrant, and pushing the limits. You know, you would go in, and you would get confronted with images which you could not escape from because the performer was embodying them, incarnating them in such a way that the audience was touched and invigorated by that work.
17:20	Ella Jando-Saul:	I think it really comes down to the idea of an urban poetry festival relevant to a young urban audience in Montreal. Bringing in an experimental technology angle really gives some extra spice to the performances. I mean, Alan Lord himself had been experimenting with computers and what you can do artistically with them.
17:43	Fortner Anderson:	One of the things that he did, which I thought was quite extraordinary, was to arrange for the 3-camera video recording of the festival. That was a lot of money. They didn’t get paid, but [Fortner laughs], beside from that, that took a lot of organization.
		And it was quite intelligent in that not very many people knew that it was only with a 3-camera video recording; that you could make something that could be edited into something usable in the future.
18:23	Ella Jando-Saul:	For some of them, I think this was the first poetry event they had recorded, and they were like “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s cool. It’s interesting. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was the goal. It was like when he says “urban poetry,” he’s really talking about making poetry relevant to a young, urban audience. A lot of that is like, do something they don’t expect.
18:47	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Tape of experimental computer performance at “Ultimatum” festival, followed by cheering and clapping.]
18:58	Frances Grace Fyfe:	An underground culture usually needs distinct places and spaces where people with shared interests can gather. For the avant-garde underground scene that clustered around Alan Lord, that place was the Foufounes Électriques.
19:09	Ella Jando-Saul:	It opened up, I think in ’83. It was a punk bar. It did all sorts of artistic events. They did I think weekly events where artists would paint live, and you could watch them paint live. At the end of the night, you could buy the painting. So that was sort of their thing. They were doing all sorts of different types of performance, and it became a place where Alan Lord and his friends were hanging out, and it seemed like the logical place. I think he knew the owners and the managers and whatnot. So it was sort of obvious that they would do it there because that’s where they were spending time.
19:44	Sheila Urbanoski:	Now, I got involved with that whole mess because I knew all those guys. I was hanging out with [inaudible], [inaudible] were very good friends of mine. And Alan was always around as well. So I kind of just got sucked into the vortex.
20:05	Alan Lord:	The Foufounes Électriques was interesting from ’84 to 1990—a countercultural, interesting, bubbling milieu of the alternate arts.
20:19	Sheila Urbanoski:	Yeah. There was a lack of direction, so we made it up, and that’s fine. But the vibe at the time of having a club-like atmosphere, that was very common in the city. It was probably in the Foufounes Électriques or Poodles or Les Lézards to have this – what they used to call it, literature – it’s was more like a performance or a spoken word thing, and very much, we’re at a club, people may listen, they may not.
20:55	Jerome Poynton:	Montreal probably had more than a Food electric, but that was the main one. Smaller basement venues. They’re not even necessarily venues, but people working on stuff and having fun with stuff because it was about having fun. It’s like playing dress-up. Theatre productions at that time were like a more glamorized version of “Let’s play dress-up.” But it was like, okay, let’s put on a play, let’s do this.
21:19	Frances Grace Fyfe:	You’re hearing from Jerome Poynton, who accompanied the poet Herbert Huncke from New York to Montreal. Huncke was one of the few poets associated with the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno, that Alan Lord invited to participate in the festival. But Alan Lord wasn’t exactly a famous poet himself. How is it that he got all these people to come perform in the first place?
21:41	Ella Jando-Saul:	So he ended up, through a series of events, personally meeting Herbert Huncke, then William Burroughs, and then John Giorno.
		John Giorno, it seems, sort of had a hand in giving him the idea for “Ultimatum I.” From that point on, it seemed only natural to have him perform there, and once you know one beat poet, you can connect yourself to other beat poets through personal connections. Invite these people, who then become big headliner names. It wasn’t like “I had this event; it’s got Montreal people; can I maybe reach out to this more famous person.” It’s like, “I know this really famous person. Maybe I can make an event that fits them inside it.”
22:22	Fortner Anderson:	The the cultural elements of New York City. That’s where Alan and the rest of us looked at for inspiration at the time. And this is where the extraordinary work was taking place. So there was that, but there was also an intermingling of that with the avant-garde Quebec culture. And so that was quite a heady mix at the time.
22:47	Frances Grace Fyfe:	It seems this heady mix of celebrities and laypeople, Montrealers and New Yorkers, and Anglophones and Francophones wasn’t without its tension.
22:56	Sheila Urbanoski:	Well, my favourite anecdotes of all time was I got asked, I can’t remember the guy’s name, Louis, at Foufounes Électrique, because Burroughs didn’t speak any French. He said, “Oh, could you help out because Louis didn’t speak any English? Could you help out with this old guy?” And I went, “That’s William fucking Burroughs.”
23:15	Alan Lord:	Ginsburg and Francoeur were reciting from memory the opening passage of “A Season in Hell,” and that blew me away. Ginsburg was doing it in French, so they probably had an understanding of French. But there’s a difference between France French and Quebecois. Maybe with the Quebecois, I think, they probably understood.
24:07	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Presenter speaking in French]
		J’espère qu’un jour on pourra dire ‘Herbert Huncke’ sans sans avoir faire de reference à la Beat Generation, avec ses rois Ginsberg, Burroughs, tout ça. Maintenant, j’ai fait un dernier vol. À la prochaine fois, c’est Herbert Huncke tout seul.
		[Herbert Huncke performing at “Ultimatum” festival]
		Okay. Well, lemme just say first, Paul, what has happened this evening in the past week? It’s kind of a hard act to follow. Oh, well, alright. In the mic, he says. Okay. Can you hear now? Yes. See, I have a problem with this lighting situation here. Regardless of all that, I lost my place. How do you like that? (“Look into the mic”) I will in just a minute. Some people can already go. Are you satisfied now? Okay. I really wanna start off with one particular story here because I feel that it will fit into the general theme of the so-called gathering or festival, whatever group of creative people doing things, trying to do things, young people, it’s very, very encouraging for an old man like me. You know, I want to think that things have progressed–
25:29	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Poetry, just like the underground scenes that clustered around “Ultimatum” and the Foufounes, also thrives on a tension between exclusion and inclusion. Poets can decide to omit certain words to build drama or generate certain feelings in their readers. People who study poetry have words for these kinds of omissions: “metaphors,” for example, can imply something without saying it outright, while “ellipsis” omits words that the reader is meant to glean from context.
		Similarly, people doing literary audio studies are developing new techniques to “listen” for what is implied, but not necessarily heard, in recordings from poetry events. For the team at Concordia’s Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project, listening back to the tapes from “Ultimatum” also means listening back to what is unsaid.
26:25	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Jean Paul Daoust performing “Numbers” in French]
		[Rough transcription] À côté, sans arbres, jeans, veste en cuir, bouche d’élève bâillée,les mains sur ses cuisses, un dérangement.
26:25	Misha Solomon:	My name is Misha Solomon, I’m a queer listener for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project.
26:31	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Misha is here to demonstrate this particular listening technique in the recording at “Ultimatum” by the poet Jean Paul Daoust.
26:37	Misha Solomon:	“Numbers” is a poem about three men having an anonymous sexual encounter in Parkland Fountain at 4:00 in the morning, and that sexual encounter being essentially broken up by police as dawn comes. I think there would even be an argument that this poem is an aubade, maybe even a dawn poem, in that it’s about lovers being separated by the coming of dawn. I think queer listening could be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I think that my approach to queer listening is just listening to content with my ears perked to the potential of queer content or queer angle. And I think that can, sometimes, be as simple as this poem, where a couple of lines in, it becomes very clear that this is about a gay male cruising in the park being read by a gay man.
27:33	Misha Solomon:	And those are both also relatively explicit instances of queer listening that they’re textual, but I think that one could engage in queer listening in even the non-textual elements. And the nonverbal elements of trying to find the queerness within. Within the sound texture, within the recording, within the audience, even, based on their reaction.
		I think the poem’s approach to sex is somewhat summed up by a line at 10:15 on the tape, the line being “sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it.” I think that is sort of a thesis statement in terms of the poem’s approach to sex.
28:16	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[From Jean-Paul Daoust’s “Numbers” performance: Sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it]
28:24	Misha Solomon:	One thing I’m noticing is that the three characters in the poem are not numero un, numero deux, numero trois. They’re number one, number two, number three; that they’re referred to only in English. And I think there is a sort of distancing that English allows for and that he (Jean-Paul Daoust) also uses English just to express these more poetic concepts, even if they’re sort of expressed in a kind of maybe “campy” or maybe overtly aphoristic way.
		But, like the idea of sex that I talked about earlier is, “sex is throwing your soul into someone else, laughing about it.” To throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it. Or when you’re born, you’re gonna die like it or not, like you and I; these big ideas are presented in English. And I think it is sometimes easier to present those big ideas in a language that doesn’t feel as much your own.
		I mean, I think that we talk…you know, we think about liminality, we think about queerness at the margins, we think about bringing things together, therefore a mix of languages is in some ways queer, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t know that I’m that engaged in the relationship here between bilingualism and queerness in terms of the content of the poem, but I will say that obviously both things are challenging norms of writing and poetry.
29:43	Mathieu Aubin:	So, listening happens in at least three major ways.
29:49	Frances Grace Fyfe:	You’re listening to Mathieu Aubin, who heads up the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides Project and oversees the team of researchers who engage in the practice of queer listening.
29:59	Mathieu Aubin:	One is listening to the audio materials in the collections that we’ve been engaging with. The second is activating that kind of dialogue, that happened at that time through oral literary history, to use, which is a more contemporary but retrospective form of listening. The third is listening within the project’s team. And I think that that’s what I hoped for from the beginning. I imagined and hoped that it could provide an opportunity for hopefully LGBTQ plus identifying students to be part of the dialogue. And get to learn something by listening.
		What led to this project was finding out about a box of tapes that existed tied to a couple of literary festivals that happened in Montreal that were bilingual. There were festivals held in 1985 and 1987. The first one happened at Foufounes Electriques , and as someone who loves hardcore punk metal music, I’ve been to Foufounes a few times well before I ever heard about “Ultimatum.”
31:16	Mathieu Aubin:	In fact, I remember going there the first time and going to a particular room and there was no band actually playing, but the music was really good. And I could see people actually “throwing down,” which is a specific form of dancing that’s part of the post-hardcore scene, and I think, needless to say, I also participated in that dance. So for me, it was really exciting, and I knew that Bill Bissett, who I had studied and also, you know, gone to know a lot over my PhD, was part of it. So I was interested in learning more about what the series of festivals had to offer.
31:58	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Can you just say a little bit about what it was about representations of queerness in this particular poetry series that felt like a useful or important avenue to look at from a scholarly perspective?
32:13	Mathieu Aubin:	I think that when I say listening queerly, I’m saying listening from my queer positionality to events and performances that may or may not be by LGBTQI-plus folks, but with that critical and lived experience lens. I’m listening from that positionality. You’re invited to listen from that positionality, I think that everyone on our team is listening from their positionality, which is why I thought the project would be really interesting to see, is what each member brings to it, and what they hear.
		And that’s more the focus, knowing very well that the two festivals were not identified as queer events but that queerness was still manifesting itself and part of the creative communities. And that’s sort of like bumping up against each other that was happening. And so I think looking for those things rather than just saying, “yeah, we had this reading series without thinking about queerness” is ignoring that aspect of that history. I’m careful to differentiate identity politics from the concept of queerness. Which the term (“queer”) historically, was used in very derogatory terms and was, of course, reclaimed and whatnot. But a queering of something is to push against the boundaries of normativity, and following that thread, I think that what the events of “Ultimatum” were doing was indeed pushing the envelope, like pushing against normativity.
34:09	Frances Grace Fyfe:	I see this emphasis on celebrating what’s marginal in the way some of the participants recall the event. Here’s Jerome poin on his own definition of queerness.
34:19	Jerome Poynton:	Well, just openness, openness to the illusion of normalcy [Jerome laughs], just to use non-judgmental. That’s the direction you strive for anyway.
34:33	Frances Grace Fyfe:	Sheila Urbanovsky also talks about how performers were playing with gender expression at the festival
34:39	Sheila Urbanoski:	With Patrice [inaudible], we were known as the country partners at the time, and we did a lot of performance work together as drag acts. So Patrice is, you know, a male presenting gay man, and I am a cis woman, and so it was a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body. So we did a lot of drag acts together as twins.
35:06	Misha Solomon:	Remember that queerness isn’t new, even if it didn’t used to be called queerness, and obviously, we’re dealing with queerness from a time where it’s not like it’s hard for us to believe that people were gay in 1980, whatever. But to remember that this isn’t new, and also that you have that there are these queer foreparents, I think specifically in a sort of gay male genealogy, that there is this whole missing generation of gay men and queer people, broadly due to their deaths from HIV, AIDS. And so for me as a gay man living in a sort of quote-un-quote post-AIDS world (and I mean that it’s only a post-AIDS world for the very privileged) to sort of be reminded of a gay experience before my time is, I think, essential.
35:58	Mathieu Aubin:	I think that within cultural scenes at the time in which, and now I’m using it in the sense of sexuality and gender here, queer poets were a part of it. I think that those people, you know, had a sort of coolness to them. I don’t think that they were ostracized whatsoever. I think they were very much members of those communities and that, you know, the people didn’t care. But what does that mean at that time outside of those communities or scenes? You have policing; you have fashing, you have surveillance, you have larger media, mainstream media discourse, and vilifying people because of their sexuality during the AIDS crisis. Right, those things are incongruent with each other but coexist.
36:51	Archival Audio from a news report on the AIDS crisis	[Clips from new reports reporting on the AIDS crisis, Ronald Reagan’s response to the AIDS crisis] “Lifestyle of some homosexual men has triggered an epidemic of some sort of rare form of cancer–” [Sound fades]
37:09	Jerome Poynton:	Larry Rosenthal built a tremendous collection of books in San Francisco during these times because so many houses were being emptied. It was so you could see it in New York, you know, and thrift stores. There were just things in them that were just too good, you know? You know too too much. Too much, too fast. Because people were dying, and so their apartments were emptied out. I don’t think I was the only person that was aware of that. Other people saw that, so that changed the performance scene and also, so many of the great performers didn’t make it.
37:56	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh” at Ultimatum festival] “Crying, won’t do any good, crying won’t do any good–”
38:06	Frances Grace Fyfe:	In taking part in queer listening, the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team is drawing attention to something implied but not made explicit in the “Ultimatum” recordings: the way queerness was central to underground scenes at a time when queer people were often oppressed in overt and vulgar ways by larger society.
		“The oppression of queer people,” Sarah Schulman writes, “goes hand in hand with the larger process of cultural homogenization that was occurring around this time.” “Although AIDS,” she writes, “devastated a wealthy subculture of gay white males, many of the gay men who died of AIDS were individuals who are living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice.”
		Their devastation from AIDS in the 1980s occurred alongside gentrification in major cities like New York, where apartments left behind by those who had died of AIDS were often privatized or subject to dramatic rent increases. Schulman argues that a vibrant downtown scene requires diverse, dynamic cities in which queer people can hide, flaunt, learn, or influence. The underground scenes for whom ideas of queerness were so central relied on cheap rents and access to space is no longer guaranteed today.
39:20	Ella Jando-Saul:	I think it was David Sapin or something who said “Oh, I lived in a four-bedroom apartment in the Plateau, and we each paid $20 a month.” I think now they’ve subdivided the apartment into a couple of different apartments, each of which costs $600 a month. You know you do the numbers with inflation, and that doesn’t make sense. Montreal was a really cheap city to live in, and spaces were very cheap. “Ultimatum I” had like a $15,000 budget to put together an event that lasts four or five days with 50 artists, and you want to fly in Herbert Huncke from New York and put them up in a hotel to be able to do that, and then also have all of these marginal poets who are not going to draw a huge audience. So you can’t rely on ticket sales like, yes, you’ve brought in John Giorno and Herbert Huncke, but you’ve also got these nights with almost unknown francophone Montreal poets who are unpublished. To be able to make that happen, you need a cheap city.
40:16	Alan Lord:	The Foufounes Électriques was interesting from 84 to 1990. After that, they sold, the original owners sold it at a certain point in the early nineties, I think.
40:30	Ella Jando-Saul:	And when it was bought by someone else, that person was like, “I wanna make money off of this property I just bought.” And you know, what doesn’t make money, is experimental performance poetry. So goodbye. And then, like two years later, “Nirvana” was playing there.
40:47	Sheila Urbanoski:	As much as I remember, sort of made up as we went, just ’cause we didn’t know any better. And I am a little disappointed. I don’t know what it’s like in Montreal now, but I personally find a lot of literature events now to be quite dull because people just kind of sit there. They don’t assume because there was an element of engaging, even if you weren’t actively listening. I mean, everybody in Foufounes Électriques saw you hit the floor when Karen Finley started putting you up as okay. I mean, that’s just like everybody just went, “What the… [Laughs]?”
41:26	Alan Lord:	And now there’s just nothing special there. There’s no ambiance. There used to be something in the air. You know, when my buddies and I were hanging around there, there was nothing. Not really.
41:49	Archival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985	[Ian Stephens’s “Underflesh” performance continues playing] “Don’t talk anymore. We don’t love anymore. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t fuck anymore. We don’t–”
		[Stephens vocalizes, and instrumental music continues]
		[Audience cheers and someone thanks Alan Lord for organizing the event]
43:17	Hannah McGregor:	The SpokenWeb Podcast 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.
43:30	Katherine McLeod:	This month’s episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Past and present team members include Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and Misha Solomon.
43:48	Katherine McLeod:	A special thanks to the entire team for their appearances on this episode and their help in sourcing audio clips. And finally, a big thanks to Scott Gerard for mastering and for the original sound compositions for this episode. The Spoken Web podcasting team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.
44:13	Katherine McLeod:	[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to 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 at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.

Frances Grace Fyfe

Frances Grace Fyfe is an MA student in English at Concordia University and a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb. Her previous audio work on “Genuine Conversation” was featured on the SpokenWeb podcast in February 2023.

Mathieu Aubin is a Research Affiliate at Concordia University where his SSHRC-funded project Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides explores queer audio history in the 1980s. His work has been previously published in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Canadian Literature, and English Studies in Canada, where his article on queer listening was awarded the F.E.L. Priestley Prize for best publication in 2023.

SpokenWeb Podcast

S5-Episode 6

Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival

May 6, 2024

Produced byFrances Grace Fyfe

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Frances Grace Fyfe

Produced by
Frances Grace Fyfe