EPISODE SUMMARY
In this Audio of the Month minisode Katherine Mcleod features recordings of poet Dorothy Livesay. We hear Livesay read selections of her work including “Bartok and the Geranium,” a poem that is often anthologized and, in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how Livesay wrote it?
EPISODE NOTES
Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) – join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine’s audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to The SpokenWeb Podcast – so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/news/dorothy-livesay-introducing-and-reading-bartok-and-the-geranium/
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Executive Producer: Stacey Copeland
Host: Hannah McGregor
00:00
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
00:10
Hannah McGregor:
Welcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. 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’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.
00:52
Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]
01:03
Katherine McLeod:
In this Audio of the Month, we’ll be listening to Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. We’ll hear a clip of a recording of Livesay reading in Montreal on January 14th, 1971. The Audio of the Month is selected from a series of Audio of the Week posts that I’ve been creating for the spokenweb.ca site [Audio, recording of Livesay introducing “The Unquiet Bed overlapping with Katherine] and a previous Audio of the Week features Livesay reciting one of her most song-like poems “The Unquiet Bed.”
01:31
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “The Unquiet Bed”] The woman I am / is not what you see. / I’m not just bones / and crockery. / The woman I am / knew love and hate / hating the chains / that parents make / longing that love / might set men free / yet hold them fast / in loyalty. / The woman I am / is not what you see / move over love / make room for me.
01:57
Katherine McLeod:
That was Livesay reading “The Unquiet Bed” and this Audio of the Month features another musical poem by Livesay from that same reading in Montreal in 1971. The poem is “Bartok and the Geranium.” This poem is one that is often anthologized and in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how the poem began?
02:24
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing. And I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps a haiku-type poem… When they got home, to look around the house and find two objects utterly different and disparate and just see if they could link these objects in a tension, which would create a poem. Well, the next day I was, had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to CBC Concert and heard music that I hadn’t heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be. And in the window as I was listening, there was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well, I’ve given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert, they announced it was a Béla Bartók violin concerto. So suddenly these two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem, which I think I’ve never revised. I’ll tell you afterwards what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem. [Audience Laughs]
03:49
Katherine McLeod:
This poem, the subject of probably thousands of student analyses by now, all started from an assignment that Livesay had given to her own students, a class full of women. How ironic that Livesay ends up producing a poem that then finds its way into the lecture notes of male professors who claim to reveal the true meaning of it or, as Livesay herself puts it:
04:16
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] He informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it.
04:32
Katherine McLeod:
What I find fascinating about Livesay’s story of writing the poem is not so much that she uncovers its origins. Our own interpretations of the poem are still valid and Livesay remains open to these varied interpretations, too. What I hear in her story is a story of her poetics. By this I mean that Livesay’s story of how she wrote “Bartok and the Geranium” is a story that fuses the imagism of her early poems of the 1920s with the tension of the social that informs her poetry from the mid-1930s onwards. The poem bursts forth from a moment of listening, a private moment of listening to something entirely new, her attention caught by the sound of the Bartók violin concerto and then framed by the space of domesticity in which she listens. It is instantaneous in this moment of listening that Livesay forges a connection between the sound of the music transmitted through the radio and the image of the flower framed by the window.
05:45
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “Bartok and the Geranium”] She lifts her green umbrellas / Towards the pane / Seeking her fill of sunlight / Or of rain; / Whatever falls / She has no commentary / Accepts, extends, / Blows out her furbelows, / Her bustling boughs; / And all the while he whirls / Explodes in space, / Never content with this small room: / Not even can he be / Confined to sky / But must speed high and higher still / From galaxy to galaxy, / Wrench from the stars their momentary notes / Steal music from the moon. / She’s daylight / He is dark / She’s heavenheld breath / He storms and crackles / Spits with hell’s own spark. / Yet in this room, this moment now / These together breathe and be: / She, essence of serenity, / He in a mad intensity / Soars beyond sight / Then hurls, lost Lucifer / From Heaven’s height. / And when he’s done, he’s out: / She leans a lip against the glass / And preens herself in light.
06:53
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
06:59
Katherine McLeod:
Head to spokenweb.ca to find out how to listen to the entire recording of Dorothy Livesay reading in Montreal in 1971. I’m Katherine McLeod and thanks for listening. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sound archives of SpokenWeb.
