| 00:03 |
Theme Music: |
[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here. |
| 00:21 |
Hannah McGregor: |
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. |
| 00:35 |
Hannah McGregor: |
[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitch Voice Ends] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Picture yourself at your local arts cafe for a poetry reading with some of your favourite artists and writers. You settle into a nearby seat and the hum of idle chatter around you begins to fade as the poet’s ready to take the stage. Now ask yourself: who chooses which artist reads first? Who chooses what words will be heard at the poetry reading and in what order and why? Since 2018 Montreal based poet and researcher, Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation. This podcast episode chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form with excerpted and intertwined works, creating a thematic cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong. Here is Klara du Plessis with season two episode one of the SpokenWeb Podcast “Deep Curation: Experiments with the Poetry Reading as Practice.” [Theme Music]. |
| 02:18 |
Klara du Plessis: |
I’m Klara du Plessis. A poet and PhD student in English at Concordia University. I’m doing research on the history and practice of the curation of poetry and performance. [Instrumental Strings] About three years ago, I saw a friend in Toronto and we sat on a terrace with our drinks. Our conversation felt energetic and I shared a new idea that I was excited about. So excited about that I continued not only thinking about it, but doing it. I call this doing Deep Curation. |
| 03:00 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Deep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I developed and theorized over the past few years. Through it, I deliberately heightened the curator’s role while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are. |
| 03:29 |
Audio Recording: |
[overlapping voices as sample of Deep Curation performance] |
| 03:29 |
Klara du Plessis: |
During the initial phase of experimentation and in my role as a Deep Curation curator, I would choose the poems read by the authors and the order of the presentation. |
| 03:41 |
Audio Recording: |
[overlapping voices] |
| 03:41 |
Klara du Plessis: |
During the later phases and in Deep Curation’s more robust form, I worked to create a thematic arc, to re-contextualize the poet’s work, to place poems in conversation with each other through proximity, but also excerpting and formal experimentation. |
| 04:05 |
Audio Recording: |
[Overlapping Voices] |
| 04:06 |
Klara du Plessis: |
[Begin Music: Strings] The idea for Deep Curation hit me after almost six years of field work organizing the monthly Montreal-based Résonance Reading Series. [Music: Strings increases volume, includes overlapping audio of background event chatter] While this series precedes Deep Curation, it forms the foundation of my experience in thinking about curation. It was a big deal for me to wrap up that series. [End Music: Strings] It was such an ongoing, almost durational part of my curational life. I’ll never forget the final closing event of the series, held on 7, August 2018. [Audio Recording: Background Chatter] |
| 04:42 |
Audio Recording: |
[Klara du Plessis] Can everyone hear me? Amazing. It’s a really huge turnout, which is amazing and I’m so, so happy to see all of you. There are some extra fold up chairs kind of by the front door, on the right-hand side, opposite the counter. So, if anyone wants one, they’re there. Please help yourself. Or ask me to help you. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, welcome to the final Résonance reading! [Cheering and Clapping] Yeah, it’s been six years of plus minus 10 readings per year, which makes that give or take 60 meetings right here on this stage. So, I’m gonna allow myself to be nostalgic for a moment because Résonance kind of started by accident in a way, like I just finished my Master’s and decided that I was going to take some time to do my own writing. And that led to me actually working here at Résonance Cafe in different capacities. But then of course I noticed the stage. I was like, okay, well it’s a perfect venue, let’s organize one reading. And so, I invited some friends to read and it was a huge success. It was super fun. And it kind of, then we decided that, “Oh, well, we can just as well start doing it again and again.” And I started organizing events on a monthly basis, but like one month by one month. And if I can give any aspiring curator advice, never organize month to month because it’s incredibly stressful. Like every couple of weeks, “Oh my gosh, I still need three readers, where am I going to find them.” And it just feels like you’re constantly organizing. [Mechanical Sound]. So, there was a point that I realized I needed to step up. And I started organizing the readings way in advance, like up to a year in advance. And this shift in attitude also kind of became a shift in who it was booking. So, I started inviting people who I thought wouldn’t say yes, you know, so I can be like, “who do I want to see on stage?” “Who do I really, really admire?” And then I’ll just reach out. And like the amazing thing was that pretty much everyone I’ve ever invited has said yes. With a few exceptions, with very legitimate reasons that they can’t come. And yeah, so I just realized that people [Metal Clanging] need a platform, people want to share their work. And yeah, that felt like a major kind of shift in what Résonance became. [Mechanical Sound] And then people started asking me to read people —agents and publicists started contacting me — and Résonance became larger, kind of like national in scope. It felt more serious and it felt like way more responsibility. This is maybe like three, four years in. And then I very slowly started thinking that Résonance had become a form of authority in the sense of being able to offer or withhold opportunity. Those high standards are one of the reasons that I ended up deciding after six years that this kind of like the end of an era, in a sense that if Résonance were to continue, I would want to keep doing better and doing more. And as like one woman doing this, I don’t have the time or the resources to do that. But I do want to say that curating Résonance has been an absolute joy. It has been fun. It has been fulfilling. It has been challenging, energizing, and I’ve learned so much and I’ve met such great people [Audience Member: Woo!] So, thank you. [Clapping] That’s like the longest speech I’ve ever given here. [Instrumental Strings] |
| 09:01 |
Klara du Plessis: |
I had heaps of experience organizing and hosting literary events, but Deep Curation was somehow different. I wanted to curate a poetry reading. I wanted to really curate a poetry reading. I wanted to invite poets whose work I love to read. And then I wanted to tell those poets which poems to read and in what order. “Oh”, my friend said, “yes”, my friend said. “That is a good idea.” [Instrumental Strings with Percussion] |
| 09:33 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Whenever I chat with art historians or exhibition curators about the research that I’m doing, they always have one of two reactions. They either insist that curation in the visual arts is grossly under theorized and not thought about critically at all, or that the word curatorial has been overused and they couldn’t stand hearing it one more time. Coming from a literary perspective, though, it seems to me that the visual arts has done a tremendous job of sussing out critical vocabulary surrounding the presentation, dissemination, and structures of collaboration inherent to curating. For starters, practitioners of the visual arts and museum studies have theorized a very useful division between the terms of curating and curatorial. I’d like to quote scholar and curator Irit Rogoff on this rift. Rogoff suggests quote: [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “the distinction is of curating as professional practice, which involves a whole set of skills and practices, materials, and institutional and infrastructural conditions. Developing the concept of the curatorial has been about getting away from representation and trying to see within this activity, a set of possibilities for much larger agendas in the art world. The curatorial then defines the larger frame” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumental] When I think of most poetry readings that I have been involved in, and especially those that precede Deep Curation, I interpret curating versus the curatorial as a division of labour. Often the poetry reading organizer takes on the work of curating. I mean that the organizer invites the poets, they book a venue, promote the event on social media, they check the microphone and adopt a responsibility of care towards presenters and audience. They ensure that everyone is having a good time. In contrast the poets themselves enact the curatorial role. The poets choose which poems they will share, how these poems will be framed by anecdote and preamble, and in which order they will be performed. As critic Peter Middleton says, choosing which poems to read is quote, [Click] [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “a fiercely held prerogative of the poet.” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] [Click] All of this implies that the organizer of the event has little to no input into the work performed at the poetry reading. They don’t know whether they will like the specific works chosen by the poet. They also don’t know whether the works by different poets will enter into relevant dialogue with each other, [Audio Recording: Echoes of chatter at an event] or whether there will be a thematic or conceptual arc to the event as a whole. Differently put the literary curator has little agency to shape or mediate the event as a cohesive relational platform for the presentation of art. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this division of curating and curatorial and how it impacts the organization of literary events. I became obsessed with trying to shift this dynamic, to play with it, and to get material answers to theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s pivotal question: [Begin Music: Intermittent Strings] what does a form become when it is plunged into a dimension of dialogue? This isn’t a new question. As Bourriaud historicizes in terms of the visual arts, a paradigm shift occurred after cubism resulting in a radical turn away from human deity and human object dialectics and a turn towards human to human relationality. Starting mid-century and swelling through the ‘70s, into the ‘90s, happenings, gatherings and participation-focused art, place sociability and the relationships between human experience center stage. [End Music: Intermittent Strings] At the same time, collaboration and interactivity became a source for exploration in the literary world. |
| 13:19 |
Audio Recording, Jackson Mac Low: |
[Inaudible/Multiple voices reciting poetry over one another] Opening quotations number. Open quotations. [Inaudible] Closed quotations. Semi-colon. [Inaudible] |
| 13:30 |
Klara du Plessis: |
A good example [Audio Recording from above continues faintly] is Jackson Mac Low’s communal readings using volunteers from the audience to perform elaborate scriptings of his poems. |
| 13:37 |
Audio Recording, Jackson Mac Low: |
Semi-colon. Evan. [Inaudible] |
| 13:43 |
Klara du Plessis: |
[Audio Recording continues faintly] These readings often resulted in cacophonous chaos. This audio clip is from Mac Low’s appearance at the Sir George Williams reading series on 26, March 1971. |
| 13:54 |
Audio Recording, Jackson Mac Low: |
X [inaudible] capital E. A. V [Inaudible] R.Q. comma. semi-colon. period. K. N. Apostrophe. P. 6. D. [Inaudible] Dash. Dash. Dash. Dash. Semi-colon. |
| 14:14 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Another relevant example is the so called Four Horseman: BP Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. [Begin: Audio recording, inaudible] These four poets exploded the potential of sound in their polyvocall joint compositions. This audio clip is taken from the 1988 record, Two Nights. |
| 14:51 |
Audio Recording, Four Hourseman |
[Various Vocal Sounds, inaudible] |
| 14:58 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Deep Curation clearly stems from a rich tradition of experimental collaborative poetry performance. It is also engaging though with contemporary vocabulary from the visual arts and importing it to explore literary potentials. I want to listen to some audio clips from three Deep Curation poetry readings curated between late 2018 and early 2020. But I also want to linger on the shift that is activated when some of these theoretical questions come into play. The division of labor between curating and curatorial with poets themselves often deciding how to present their work upholds the familiar concept that poets perform their own roles as authors on stage. Contemporary authors voice their own work as a display of authority and authenticity. [Sound Effect: Box Opening] As scholar Leslie Wheeler suggests [Sound Effect: Box Closing] poetry readings are manifestations [Begin Music: Instrumental] of authentic authorial presence. There is of course also the opposite danger of tipping the scale of authority away from the author to the curator. This is something that curator Anton Vidokle relevantly critiques in terms of the visual arts. He says, curators have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics. Vidokle warns that curators can easily usurp credit from the artists or poets and rob the voice of their creative work. [End Music: Instrumental] One of Deep Curation’s key points of investigation is to trouble the notion of static authorial authority by distributing curatorial agency between author and curator alike. The curator of a Deep Curation poetry reading aims to direct the presentation of poetry by facilitating polyvocal dialogues between poets and between the works of those poets. Yet poets always retain authorship over the poetic output. Poems and excerpts of poems are placed deliberately alongside each other to create thematic narrative and conceptual arcs and arguments. The poetry reading is no longer a series of random poems placed side by side. Rather, the poetry reading presents a cohesive entity of combined poems that collaborate towards a larger sonic event. By directing, scripting, but also working together to design the poetry reading in this way, agency circulates from the poets to the curator, and back to the poets. Poets and curator constantly navigate a dynamic balance between control and freedom, individual authorship and collaboration. |
| 17:07 |
Klara du Plessis: |
I’m going to share audio clips from three phases of my Deep Curation experiments, narrating the project’s development, and illustrating shifting approaches in my practice. [Begin Music: Instrumental] The audio clips will further inspire a discussion on this relationship between control and freedom. [Music Intensifies] Deep Curation: Phase One: Resonance. [Music Continues] One of the first Deep Curation experiments I curated, I invited poets Aaron Boothby, Canisia Lubrin, and Erin Robinsong to participate. I knew that their poetry would form a relevant conversation and I could imagine a reading that centered ecology, language, and loss. In hindsight, my tentative curatorial strategy was just a buffed-up version of a normal poetry reading. And of course, I realized how fraught the word ‘normal’ sounds. For the most part, I scripted the order and interlay of poems by the different authors, but I rarely excerpted or initiated any kind of material intervention into the structure of the poems and their coexistence. I also included some of my own writing. And so, the four of us read together at the vegan jazz bar Résonance Café during the Mile End Poets Festival on 24, November 2018. Here is a short audio clip from this reading. Erin’s poem “Cortes” is deliberately positioned beside a section from an early version of my long poem, “Santa Cova Muscles”. |
| 18:49 |
Audio Recording, Erin Robinsong |
The mountain told my eye / its sparkling name / and in return, I answered / from the ashes/ and green /gathered round/ and echoed /along the windy heights/ O my friends/ if you are alone / stretch out both brains / and lash together a middle one/ thus three-way / we waited for the dawn/ fresh and rosy fingered / as the backs of animals/ when evening falls / nobody / yet saved his skin/ so we ourselves untie / the ship took places at the oars/ and seek again / an island where /with burning clouds / and loyal dark / we soon rouse |
| 19:48 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis |
Despite density a kind of stupidity crushing words/ into a pulp of intelligence /no /air /allowance/ Instead, a breakage into sight /breakwater from words, hieroglyphic impotence / gathering light through the eyes, tearing it out/ salt, water, ocean writing, / organic prismatic/ I stumble over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains/ I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants of headstones/ The soft jagged edge of the mountain range / where I walk daily for three weeks, then leave/ encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder/ This mountain intelligence, reasoning beyond the usual kind. I reject truth, but fixate on beauty/This might imply a material privilege, visual impulse, / but this banal state of mind is reversed to a vibration, the vibratory / relation exceeds the eye, yet enters everything through the surface of the eye/ to inoculate everything/ Heading towards the garden, which is the museum, / this ontological greenness… |
| 21:13 |
Klara du Plessis: |
I love how green and eyes weave a connecting thread. When Erin says [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Stretch out both brains and lash together a middle one] I respond [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder, this mountain intelligence reasoning beyond the usual kind] thematic coherence and a similar affective register bind these independent poems together. They become perceived as a unit, or at least as a conversation. Despite Erin and myself each composing our poem separately at different times and with different intents. They merge here in this reading through adjacency to create a temporarily shared authorship. In this case, I am both an author sharing my writing beside other authors, and I am the curator of the event as a whole. This implies that my authorship oscillates between a kind of directive stance towards the event as a combined performative entity and the embodiment of intimate listening in proximity to other poets while collectively sharing our poetry. I returned to Résonance Café, the venue for this Deep Curation event in order to jog my memory about the reading, but also to record myself in a less formal, more journal-like way. One could say that I’m [Begin: Echo Effect] Deep Curating my voice through time [End: Echo Effect] as I collage archival material from 2018, formal narration for this podcast, and soundscape audio from the field. |
| 22:36 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
[Background Noise] So here I am in Résonance Café, the venue of many, a poetry reading over the course of six years. All kinds of background noises: [Microwave Beep] cleaning the fridge, pots [Coffee Grinder] the coffee machine. Many readings were ambiently disrupted by the coffee grinder. [Background Noise] With me is Isis Giraldo. She’s one of the co-owners of Résonance Café. |
| 23:27 |
Audio Recording, Isis Giraldo: |
Hello! |
| 23:27 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
Do you want to say hi? |
| 23:27 |
Audio Recording, Isis Giraldo: |
Hi! |
| 23:27 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
As already mentioned the second Deep Curation event with Canisia, Erin, and Aaron, also happened here in Résonance Café. And, this is really one of the spaces where I’ve listened the most deeply I’ve ever listened on the stage being in such close proximity to the people around me on stage. Because we hadn’t rehearsed very much and because we had such minimal scripting for the reading we were very attuned to what the other readers were doing to make sure that we didn’t miss a cue or forget where and when to start reading. And so just the degree of listening between the four of us on stage was very acute. I remember in particular that Canisia was reading a lot slower than me and that as the event progressed I kind of matched my pace to hers — it was an element of kind of like empathetic performance where we really tried to listen and adapt to what was happening sonically and collaboratively. |
| 24:41 |
Klara du Plessis: |
The four of us were in this together. We were on the stage together. But perhaps counter-intuitively, our togetherness came at the cost of remaining separate. Each poet’s reading is extremely clear and articulated in solitude. Each poet’s words remain their own words and as fellow performers we each respect the sonic space needed for another poet to project their work into the room. The images of Erin’s poem make eye contact with the images in my poem, but they don’t overlap or resolve into chaos. |
| 25:15 |
Audio Recording, Erin Robinsong: |
[Inaudible]…and seek again an island where with burning clouds and loyal dark, we soon rouse |
| 25:22 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Poems touch, but don’t merge. |
| 25:31 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
Despite density, a kind of stupidity/ Crushing words into a pulp of intelligence /No air allowance. |
| 25:36 |
Klara du Plessis: |
As the curator of this event, my intention was to create a dialogue between the different poetries presented, but I was also clearly hesitant to overstep my own adopted authority. I felt strange to excerpt poems that I had not authored or to demand borders between poems to be blurred. This is of course symptomatic of the fact that this reading was only the second experiment in a series of Deep Curation poetry readings. I was still figuring out my own project of taking control of the poetry reading’s form. I was trying to strike a balance between directing the reading and maintaining the authorial integrity of the authors and of their works. Here is another excerpt from my audio journal, now seated on Resonance’s patio. |
| 26:17 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
I’m sitting on the patio outside now. And I’m still thinking about this Deep Curation event that I did with Aaron, Erin, and Canisia. And I’m thinking back and reflecting on the extreme release of energy that happened directly after we performed together that night. And just this like real recognition of the potential of what the project held and what we could feel it, the project could still develop into. And I remember kind of talking to Aaron, Erin and Canisia and, you know, asking how that felt about the very small instances of excerpting, you know, whether they felt comfortable with that after the fact. And they really made it clear to me that while I was being very tentative about excerpting and intertwining, those are really the moments that were the most valuable. And that going, moving forward with the project what I really needed to do was to be less careful, be less tentative and be more dramatic with the process of putting poems in conversation with each other and that this approach would really define, should really define what Deep Curation was and how it made it different from other poetry reading events. |
| 27:35 |
Klara du Plessis: |
[Begin Music: Instrumental] Our conversation excited me and I felt inspired to design stranger, more exploratory Deep Curation scripts. Deep Curation: Phase Two: Fourth Space. [End Music: Instrumental] With a green light go ahead from Erin Robinsong, Aaron Boothby, and Canisia Lubrin, I started formally experimenting with what I now call refrains. These are longer, highly excerpted sections that combine lines and a theme from different poets and different poems into a new whole. Conversations with friends occasionally introduce the words, remix, or cento in relation to these refrains. Borrowed, poetic language repurposed as a new creative body of work. I often fantasize about creating an entire Deep Curation poetry reading using this technique. The following audio clip illustrates this refrain style. It is taken from a Deep Curation poetry reading featuring poets, Kaie Kellough [Audio Recording, Kai Kellough: The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.], Margaret Christakos [Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: Listen, they’re not listening], and Deanna Radford [Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: Voices everywhere, talk talk]. Most of the text is from Kaie’s book Magnetic Equator, Margaret’s Charger, and Deanna’s still unpublished work. The event took place on 7, November 2019 at Concordia University’s Fourth Space, a venue dedicated to the sharing of new scholarly research. |
| 29:05 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough: |
The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum. |
| 29:08 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Listen, you’’re not listening. |
| 29:12 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Tongu, words. Sibilant chorus. |
| 29:19 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
The author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft. |
| 29:26 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
A room holds sounds unfolding. |
| 29:29 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum. |
| 29:44 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
P- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced |
| 29:50 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
The author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft. |
| 29:53 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Words as traces. |
| 29:57 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
I am listening |
| 30:02 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
Turning back, is this a beginning? Is it preferable to be erased, to have a voice that does not know the chorus |
| 30:10 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
voices mime rooms |
| 30:24 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
A room holds sounds unfolding. |
| 30:24 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Try to listen. |
| 30:24 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Voices airborne. Talk talk. |
| 30:24 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
All of us, ears |
| 30:27 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
This entire country and ear facing upward and listening, listening, receiving signals from the world. |
| 30:37 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
We whisper. Lip to ear. Through glass. Walls. Plastic. Light scope. |
| 30:44 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum. |
| 31:03 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
P- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced |
| 31:03 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
The author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft. |
| 31:10 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Words as traces. |
| 31:12 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
I am. Listening. |
| 31:14 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
Turning back. Is this a listening? Is it preferable to be beginning? To have a voice that does not know the chorus? |
| 31:22 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Rooms mime voices. |
| 31:28 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
A room holds sounds unfolding. |
| 31:28 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Try. To listen. |
| 31:34 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Voices airborne. Talk talk. |
| 31:34 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
All of us. Ears. |
| 31:35 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
This entire country an ear, facing upward and listening/ listening, receiving signals from the world. |
| 31:47 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
A speech act for ears / speech acts for ears. |
| 31:50 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Ears would be like metal or dreams of hallucinatoria. |
| 31:58 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
We whispered lip to ear through glass, walls, plastic, light scope. |
| 32:04 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Varicose, inner ear exorcism. |
| 32:09 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
This entire country an ear facing upward and listening/ Listening, receiving signals from the world. |
| 32:16 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Signal whistling for us chorally / come into my arms, darlings / come soft into this cloud. |
| 32:28 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Composing these excerpted refrains on shared topics of listening and poetic articulation clearly took a high degree of familiarity with the author’s work. I needed to recall relevant lines in order to place them in thematic conversations. At first, my process was to mark up hard copies of authors’ books, but in time I realized that searchable PDFs hugely facilitated the process. A PDF allows quicker access to lines and the ability to copy paste excerpts into the refrain. Creating these refrains took a poet’s mind and an eye for composition. Lines were extracted from the original works. They were recombined into a new context and new conversation with lines from other poems and from the minds of other poets. This is a good example of the curator adopting the role of the author. As a curator, I was doing more than mediating the creative performance. I was also molding, creating and literally authoring a new script. Although I always worked with the consent of the invited poets, I was possibly also overstepping my role. My role as directive curator was productively challenged working with [Begin: Background Chatter] Kaie, Margaret, and Deanna, skilled performers and formal experimenters themselves. Kaie had graciously welcomed us into his home serving coffee and warm croissants as we settled into work on the script of our design. We discussed the arc of the event, performance cues and logistics. My memory of our discussion has Margaret questioning the possibility [End: Background Chatter] of opening up the script. She was curious about more organic instances of interjecting into another poet’s words, supporting them with echoes, or drowning them out with overlay. Margaret, Kaie, Deanna and I were all excited about this possibility of opening up the script and worked to integrate new strategies into the performance outline. Some poems needed to be read solo, to maintain the impact of the words’ meaning. But some sections were begging to be choral, to maximize the potential of three voices in performance. In the following audio clip, the three poets’ voices are organically interspersed. The poets borrow each other’s words and insert them into their own poems to create a dynamic and playful conversation. |
| 34:34 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
I never cared to be a pastoral poet wrote poetry, a small flatland longings, a poet of evangelical strictures |
| 34:43 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
No memory errors. |
| 34:45 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
Revolutions, oceanic futures written in the veins of the vegetal/ Tenements of Babel dense with voices/ Languages spilling out the summer windows. |
| 34:56 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
No memory errors, nor errs/ Nor ers /Nor ors. But ore |
| 35:08 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough |
Earthen oar. Earthen tongue. [inaudible] speechless under death. Oar. Air. Weightless volume of big sky. |
| 35:12 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
No memory errors /nor errors, not ers, nor ors but ore /for roses, for eros in decision making/ if edgewise among tongue that propriety. |
| 35:27 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
Errors, airs, URS, oars, or roses/ name or summon arrows/ muse or crave savour moan or receive conceive arise or arouse. |
| 35:41 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Like her name was inland/ a corpus yours/ Tongue yours and corp yours. |
| 35:51 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough: |
Earthen tongues ripple speechless under yours/ Air weightless volume of big sky. |
| 35:57 |
Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: |
Laps and licks and skirmishes. |
| 36:00 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough: |
Writers circumnavigate the question with smiles and gestures that dismiss/They write from everywhere at once. |
| 36:07 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
The a-ha of poetic inspiration. |
| 36:12 |
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough: |
The only places the a-ha/ The immediate port at which the next letter a-ha. |
| 36:18 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
— a-ha!. |
| 36:19 |
Audio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret: |
— is detained, arrives, or vanishes. [Overlapping Voices] Thank God it exists. A-ha! The ah-a exists either here nor there/ Is every weather, where? / Which is here, which is nowhere. |
| 36:32 |
Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: |
A-ha. A-ha. The a-ha a poetic inspiration, shifted to an a-ha reflex of thank God it exists a-ha more is a-ha now I can have this and this to this a-ha this works. |
| 36:50 |
Klara du Plessis: |
A-ha! The poets are taking a-ha! authorship directing the a-ha! performance, developing it and initiating exchange. They’re also leaving audile space for the semantic soundscape of different voices to be heard alongside each other. This is not always the case. |
| 37:11 |
Audio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret: |
[inaudible, voices reciting poetry overlapping one another] Press down to form home print that scattered over future service, entrusted. disclosed. incidental behavioural derived body unsettled my reaches organic my past and now my scaped spread evenly over my spaces my means of speech my body my body my personal info invisible presence a proxy my body my body is measured is measured is filled with water scattered future interested disclosed incidental my reach is organic my past image spread evenly over my face [inaudible] stretch. [inaudible] |
| 38:32 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Harmony transgresses into cacophony. Deanna and Kaie read briskly over each other, while Margaret doubles words standing out to her and adds a third layer to the mashup. This is a true merging of voices. Separate strands are no longer clearly audible. Rather, an assembly of voices, tones, and timbres swell chaotically into a shared ownership of poetry. |
| 38:57 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis: |
Here I am, again, reminiscing on my audio journal almost a year after the Deep Curation event. I traveled down to Fourth Space, the venue of this Deep Curation event and imagined that I could see the event replaying itself through the glass walls almost photographically. So, today has been quite an odyssey. I’m now down by Concordia University’s Fourth Space, which, is of course closed. And I can — the most I can do is peer through the big glass windows and try and imagine again how this Deep Curation event happened with Kaie, Margaret and Deanna. And so, I’m kind of envisioning again the large screen that had a PowerPoint presentation projected onto it and the chairs that I had reconfigured into a circle so that the three poets and I kind of sat at the four cardinal points of the circle with the audience members interspersed in between. This really created the sense that audience was part of the performance, that they were inside the sound and you know that the sound was emanating from three different directions. Also, that the three poets could really make eye contact with each other. They weren’t standing in a line on a stage. |
| 40:15 |
Klara du Plessis: |
[Begin: Instrumental Strings] There was strength in collaboration. Working with Margaret, Kaie, and Deanna on the design of this Deep Curation poetry reading developed it into an expansive, dynamic, and engaged performance. It also generated methods that I continue to use for Deep Curation as an ongoing project. [Instrumental Strings increase]. |
| 40:39 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Deep Curation: Phase Three: Boston University. [End: Instrumental String] Preparing for my first PhD field exam I stress-dreamed that I had to create a Deep Curation script in 10 minutes. “Oh no!”, I thought. “This is an impossible task.” “I haven’t spent months reading. In fact, I’m not familiar with the poetry at all!” Luckily in a happy turn of the nightmare variety, I solved the conundrum. In my dream, I created a set of performative cues for improvisation. In my dream, the poets had to choose their own poems, but they had to read them according to my design. The real life, non-dream Deep Curation event that took place at Boston University on 30 January 2020, definitely wasn’t limited to 10 minutes of preparation. But it did function as a broad structure with signals for the authors to move more freely. In other words, my authorship of the outline demanded reauthorship from the poets as they played and reworked their words collectively on stage. This reading included prerecorded audio of Fanny Howe’s poetry and the following audio clip features live performance by Sawako Nakayasu — |
| 42:22 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
So, where’s my werewolf pillow. |
| 42:24 |
Klara du Plessis: |
— and Lee Ann Brown. |
| 42:27 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
Blockade. |
| 42:27 |
Klara du Plessis: |
This clip extracts poetry from Sawako’s book, Texture Notes, and Lee Ann’s In the Laurels Caught. |
| 42:36 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown |
[Overlapping Voices] Blockade is pink lemonade made from strawberry library books. The Totoro house hums a deep song in yonder glen. You’re a fragment of my imagination. Experience wafts its checkered travelers in with a thumbprint. Vexed then fixed. Seeing signs shaped like huge shoes Fox church road sprang up on her left. Bright blue-green beetle vale under a rock. Keats’ favourite letter was V. She spins it like a tiny DJ on her alphabet box. Wendy Mandy over the wall straggles in with beeping shoes, lit up like a kite. The leaves are out of pollen or soon will be. Who are you calling a verdant lush. Here, mommy, hold this moss. Hold this mess. Don’t say to me. I don’t like to. Blap is my friend. He’s a boy. He’s a ghost who lives in New York. He painted with me. His hair is yellow. |
| 43:46 |
Klara du Plessis: |
This section of the Deep Curation script is constructed as a series of wave formations. Lee Ann begins by reading a poem up until the word yellow. Yellow serves as a cue for Sawako to begin reading her poem, “Texture of Needing Yellow”, in the background. |
| 44:09 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown |
[Overlapping Voices] Yellow! He painted. He painted pink hair. His hair is red. I am blap. Here are some pieces of puzzles for you. I will make some more for you. Are you a cat bus? We’re getting married. I married this train. We’re getting married. Cheeky Dickie married a Chickadee. You’re dead, Chuck with yourself. Scraping together, scraping away at a bleeding book and you should be too. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. Where is my werewolf pillow? Sawako. |
| 44:39 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Lee Ann improvises. She fixates on the weirdness of the werewolf pillow and transforms this poetic image into a direct question, addressing Sawako head on. |
| 44:51 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
Sawako. Where is it? |
| 44:53 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
Where is your werewolf pillow? |
| 45:02 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
Where’s my Totoro house that I want on the hill so I can go up there and see all those little puffballs. |
| 45:06 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
It’s down the old [inaudible] stomping in the Ramsey cemetery? |
| 45:06 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
[inaudible]. |
| 45:06 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
That’s where you’re gonna find your werewolf pillow. |
| 45:22 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
It’s up in the house. I love my pillow. That deep pillow song. That deep pillow collaboration and curation. |
| 45:22 |
Klara du Plessis: |
That deep pillow collaboration and curation? Ha! Reality is ousting any kind of script. |
| 45:28 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown |
[Overlapping Voices, Improvisation] That deep pillow collaboration and curation. [Inaudible]. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies. Where are we now. 5 million years old. What happens to the yellow you had here? Appalachians. 500 million. The texture of yellow. [Inaudible]. Which are plentiful here, like overgrown version of some families, private [Inaudible]. And the position. |
| 45:59 |
Klara du Plessis: |
The positions have reversed. The poets have exchanged words so that Sawako performs Lee Ann’s words, and vice versa. |
| 46:06 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown |
[Voices Overlapping] The positions reverse. Raised from [inaudible]. Yellow is a light that contains a friendly sort of heat. I am drawn to a newer [inaudible]. Maybe yellow is light which massages. [Inaudible] Carved. Straight path. Thus transmitting. Bumpy road to heaven. And then at a later moment. Existence for a straight arrow. Transposed. It’s an altogether different, similar. The way your friends are different, similar. That way. Here. The point of meeting yellow and it’s specific geography. Down on the bypass where someone wept. Maybe yellow as a geography that grows and shifts. Otherwise, known as now. The now of needing yellow. I need more yellow. That comes lower forth like an angel, the angel needing yellow. Needing yellow without needing yellow. Missing without being missed. Being close to needing yellow is close to not needing yellow. Needing yellow is all —it shows up becomes less being yellow becomes more needing yellow. Near being yellow from the distance or after or close at hand. More, more needing yellow. And more and more and more and more and more needing yellow in result of an explosion, which is yellow and is not needed. That’s enough. |
| 47:43 |
Klara du Plessis: |
That’s enough. |
| 47:44 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
That’s enough. |
| 47:44 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Sawako interjects. Self-reflectivity of both Sawako and Lee Ann’s performance amplifies their authority over the poetry reading at hand. By commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it, they showcase their awareness of their words. They actively take authorship of their poetic presentation by manipulating and reworking the words at their disposal. This is no passive replay of a script, but an engaged and playful [Audio Recording, Overlapping Voices] public display of fluid and fun authorial control. |
| 48:28 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown |
[Overlapping Voices] [Inaudible] Five. Million. Years. Old. Yellow that you had here. The texture of being yellow. The permutation of being yellow. |
| 48:28 |
Klara du Plessis: |
During the Q&A discussion after the Deep Curation performance, Kate Lilley, poet and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney queried the relationship between improvisation and script. |
| 48:40 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
The script [inaudible] opened some doors and then we opened some more doors in the moment. |
| 48:50 |
Klara du Plessis: |
That was Sawako. |
| 48:53 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
Yeah, we just read through it a little bit yesterday. We had the script before, but we didn’t really do any of this yesterday at all. |
| 48:58 |
Klara du Plessis: |
That was Lee Ann. |
| 49:04 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
Yeah it was very — but I think we were just interested in listening to each other and — |
| 49:11 |
Audio Recording, Lee Ann Brown: |
— Playing. |
| 49:11 |
Audio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu: |
— Playing. Yeah. And Lee Ann and I have known each other for many, many years, which I don’t think Klara knew when she curated us. But there is a feeling of friendship that also contributed to the way it felt to be in conversation through our poetry in this particular moment. That was like a gift that Klara gave us. |
| 49:27 |
Audio Recording, Kate Lilley: |
That certainly came across. |
| 49:35 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Sawako’s metaphor of the door is apt. As the curator, I initiated gestures that opened doors between the writing of Sawako, Lee Ann, and Fanny Howe. But gestures are never static. The doors kept swinging open and shut as the poets themselves move through doorways and opened other entries and exits that I didn’t even know existed. I’d like the sense of play and improvisation as impetus for the poets to author their own work again, recurrently. I want to extend Charles Bernstein’s claim that each performance of a poem adds to its “fundamentally plural existence”. Not only is the poem multiplying into variant forms, but each performance allows the author to rewrite that poem in performance. By restructuring the conditions in which a poem was being presented and by placing that poem in new proximities to other poems, Deep Curation instigates a radical potential for dynamic and organic re-authorship. [Begin: Instrumental Strings] As the curator of a Deep Curation poetry event, I author the possibility for the poets to re-author their own poetry. [Instrumental Strings continues] |
| 50:56 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Different curators have different approaches to curating and to the curatorial. Whether they’re working in visual arts or literary fields. Critic, Sarah Longair’s notion of curatorial authority, [End: Instrumental Strings] for example, imagines the curator’s role as that of resident scholar. The curator is someone who dedicates her life to the preservation and dissemination of a body of work. For her, the curator embodies expertise about a certain collection and thereby gains authority to define and control its public representation. Thinking along very different lines, celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist supports an organic model, providing a space in which experiences are generated according to the individuals displaying or interacting with artworks. Obrist is more interested in connections that may form when a curator comes temporarily into contact with a set of art or literary works. The curator never defines the work, never becomes a spokesperson for the work, but rather supports the audience in creating their own experience and understanding of the work. I want to quote Obrist on his curatorial practice. He says, quote, [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumental] “curating is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other. The task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements, to touch.” End quote. Deep Curation allows different elements to touch. I like that. Thinking back to the performative work of Jackson Mac Low, and the Four Horsemen, their experiments also allowed elements to touch, even to merge. But I wonder if they would have liked the term curation. [End: Upbeat Instrumental] I doubt it. Thinking of Deep Curation in terms of curation, as the name, obviously underscores, initiates a methodology at odds with past modes of collaborative poetry performance. Curation has a hipness to it, which some find off-putting. Curation also derives its concepts of collectivity, proximity, and relationality from the exhibition, the gallery space, rather than from performance practice. Curation projects the visual onto the literary, and then waits to see what kind of performance will erupt. Yet, Deep Curation is still in flux [Begin: Instrumental Strings] as a curatorial practice it keeps developing and transforming as my own interests as a curator change. But also as the work comes into contact with various poets and audiences and the world of expertise these individuals bring to the project. |
| 53:23 |
Klara du Plessis: |
Due to COVID-19 Deep Curation has been on a break for six months and once life reconfigures itself, who knows how the project will have changed. I can see Deep Curation taking on gentler forms that are less labour intensive while still embodying the core tenet of creating conversations between poets and poems. I’ve also fantasized about ways of expanding the project, having more time and resources to work with poets for more extended periods of time to progress past the first draft of a performance and to create a truly integrated and rehearsed experimental poetry reading experience. In contrast, I’ve considered ways of creating a solo show. This might be limited to my own poetry, or it might be a way to include other poet’s work, but without their physical presence and performance. It might also be a re-curation of archival audio material from past Deep Curation poetry readings. Hang on to that thought. [Echo effect] Hang on to that thought. [Theme Music] |
| 54:54 |
Hannah McGregor: |
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. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. For more work from Klara du Plessis check out their freshly released second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh from Palimpsest Press, available now. A special thank you to Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin: Overlapping Choral Voices] 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 to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand-new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, bringing us mini-stories about how literature sounds. [End Overlapping Choral Voices] |
