Dorothy Livesay reading “The Unquiet Bed” – Sir George Williams University, January 14, 1971
October 3, 2019
Katherine McLeod
Dorothy Livesay’s poem “The Unquiet Bed” has appeared on the pages of many Canadian poetry anthologies, but what cannot be heard fully on the page is the sound of this poem as a ballad. It is an “unquiet” poem. The refrain – “The woman I am / is not what you see” – suggests that both the speaker and the poem are not what you see, though perhaps they are what you hear.
Listen to the entire recording here.
Resources
Camlot, Jason and Christine Mitchell, eds. “The Poetry Series,” Amodern 4 (2015).
Katherine McLeod
Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. Her recent publications include a chapters in the books Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier UP), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP), which she also co-edited with Jason Camlot. Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she researches CBC Radio recordings and where she is organizing SpokenWeb’s Ghost Reading Series.
Follow the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.