Calling Kaie Kellough an ancestral voice is maybe presumptive or even paradoxical, considering the bold aesthetic leaps in his work, and his widening reputation as a necessary innovative voice among a rising generation of writers in Canada. Whether it be in the circuitry between voice, image, and jazz of his collaborative “UBGNLSWRE” with musician and composer Jason Sharp and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, or in the lyrical torrent of his Magnetic Equator, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), Kaie’s poiesis is undeniably futurist. It’s from the futurism of his writing, however, that the ancestral surfaces. He is attuned to the frequencies of many Black histories unfolding all at once. The ‘past’ still reverberates with the same intensity. By weaving memoryscapes across continents in Magnetic Equator and the fiction collection Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule, 2020), Kaie’s work splashes in history’s restlessness. History never knocks politely. It seeps in through the floorboards. Kaie is unafraid to go down with its tide.
Back in the summer of 2020, still in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-ranging social restrictions, MA student Andrew Roberge initiated an interview with Listening, Sound, Agency symposium participant, Andre Furlani, whose recent research explores the poetics and politics of ambulation, or, walking. In this interview, learn more about Furlani’s research into the relationship between walking and sound, and about his interest in particular kinds of soundwalks. The topic seems especially poignant now, so many months into the pandemic, when walking, and simply being outside and listening, have become cherished activities for much needed sensuous experience, and for our sense of connection to our environments, and to others (even if, at a distance).
Jason Wiens’ interest in teaching poetry with sound recordings has led his critical attention back to a tradition of textual analysis that emerged in France in the late 1970s, known as “genetic criticism” (La Critique génétique), with its interest in approaching texts as entities whose emergence is traceable through the study of “avant-texts”. In this interview conducted by Jason Camlot, Wiens talks about recent experiments and assignments he has used in teaching Canadian poetry with sound recordings, and explains his interest in genetic criticism as it relates to the study of audiotexts.
It seems appropriate that Dr. Katharina Fuerholzer would recommend the soundtrack to the hit series ‘The End of the F***ing World’, considering the state of the world, but more too, her work on aphasic poetry in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Sleeping with the Dictionary’. The songs are fitting— romantic and unnerving— in the way that Mullen’s dictionary— “In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language”—is. Listen to the soundtrack while you read the following interview (and, let it spill into your other work), where I talk to Katharina about aphasic poetry, interdisciplinarity, and the femme aphasique. Here, we consider aphasia’s varied metaphoric, medicinal, and literary meanings.
As a video game enthusiast, Ali Barillaro was initially drawn to interview Deanna Fong and Jon Safloske because they had submitted a proposal for the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium about the dark, fantasy-action adventure game, Hellblade. But when Ali sat down to draft some questions for Deanna and Jon, she found herself curious to hear about how their research partnership began and how it has progressed over the past year. So this interview is as much about how research collaborations develop through shared interests in sound and sound studies methodologies, as it is about their recent work on Hellblade.
As a new member of the SpokenWeb team, I was thrilled to connect with Postdoctoral Fellow and SpokenWeb researcher, Mathieu Aubin, and learn about his work in a more specific context than our weekly meetings. Aubin’s research examines queerness in oral histories and audio recordings of literary events, engaging activist and marginalized voices, content, and […]
Ellen Waterman’s creative and research practices are all about listening together across and through distance and difference. When I spoke with her during our socially distanced summer of the pandemic, I was interested to hear how our current situation has influenced her thinking about what it means to create sound and sound-based work together. What follows is an interview that still attempts to be spontaneous and to listen, even in written form.
In 2018 I had the opportunity to visit one of Chris Mustazza’s interdisciplinary literature classes taught at the University of Pennsylvania, a course called Poetry Audio Lab: Modernism & Sound Studies. I was amazed at how seamlessly he had woven questions of poetics, performance, media history, and digital approaches to listening and analysis into his syllabus. As one of the early experimenters in teaching poetry through a major audio poetry archive (PennSound), and as a regular collaborator with Al Filreis, another innovator in this area who draws upon the audio archive in his wide-reaching ModPo MOOC, talking to Chris about teaching proved a unique opportunity to think about rationale, methods and effects of teaching poetry with sound.
In May, I reached out to Leah VanDyk shortly after she was awarded a Killam scholarship for her research in environmental humanities. Having met Leah before and heard her present at the “Text/Sound/Performance” conference in Dublin, Ireland in April 2019, I was excited to catch up with her and hear about her ongoing research. As I quickly found out, while her research focuses on environmental humanities, pedagogy, and accessibility, Leah is also often thinking about serendipitous moments activated through sound.
The transition wasn’t gradual; it happened over night. In March 2020, due to the global COVID19 pandemic, university classes and seminars, research meetings, supervisory chats, scholarly conferences, and more, all moved online. Suddenly the screen became the office, the boardroom, and the classroom. Suddenly the screen became the sole mediator of collective thinking, discussing, and sharing of information. While some might argue for the efficacy of this collective move online, Stephen J. Neville—who would have presented at the SpokenWeb Listening, Sound, Agency symposium this July—published early research on the flip side of online videoconferencing, discovering the racist and misogynist underpinning of many so-called Zoom-bombing attacks (co-authored with Prof. Greg Elmer and Anthony Glyn Burton). Here I ask him a few further questions about his latest, highly relevant research.