SpokenWeb Podcast

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My name is Katherine McLeod, 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. For each episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, the producers and production team are always thinking about recording; the microphones, zoom recorders, sound quality, from voiceover to interview to archival audio clips. And this month’s episode is all about recording and how recording shapes the way we encounter sound, particularly poetry.

The poet at the center of it all, Fred Wah, is known for both his poetry and also for his recording. Did you know that the sound recordings of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference were thanks to Fred Wah being the guy who carried the tape recorder around? And let’s remember that tape recorders were not easy to carry around back then. And because he had the tape recorder, he was able to have it running during so many of the sessions, and there ends up being an audio archive of that now famous event in Canadian poetry.

So keeping that in mind, let’s jump to another event in 2022, when Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted an event called Mountain Many Voices: the archival sounds of Fred Wah. That event was a round table discussion with Fred Wah himself, student researchers working on Wah archival materials, both from SFU and from Concordia, and moderated by Dr. Deanna Fong.

By the way, Fong leads the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project, which you can hear more about by listening to the episode “Night of the Living Archive” produced by Liza Makarova and aired on the SpokenWeb Podcast in November, 2022. And yes, Liza is also part of this round table discussion Mountain Many Voices. In this month’s episode, Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, two of SFU’s research assistants, who also contributed to that round table revisit the event and they revisit its many voices along with recordings of Wah speaking about what he calls “the materialism of the voice”.

You’ll also hear recordings of other poets referenced during the event, such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn. When making this episode, Teddie and Don were inspired by live radio, and this episode has our producers becoming hosts themselves, curating, introducing, and sharing a rich selection of archival audio. Here’s the sixth episode of season four, Revisiting Mountain Mini Voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah.

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In June of 2022, Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted a round table event titled Mountain Many Voices, which centered on the audio archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah.

But in terms of, you know, just having a quick discussion about recording, I just wanted to start by asking you, so when did recording come into your life and when was the first time you saw a portable recording device? [Don laughs] And when was the first experience of hearing your own recorded voice?

Wow, what’s that? You know, it’s a machine and it was a kind of stainless steel machine. It’s a Wollensak Reel-to-Reel. And he had tapes that he had made of radio interviews he had done for a radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lived and worked. And so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky and Ritter Binner, Ed Dorn.

[Low electronic string music begins to play]

I was fascinated by Ed Dorn’s poetry and I heard Ed Dorn’s voice. In those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading on the, off the page. [Low electronic string music ends] So I traded in my Marimba vibes and my trumpet for a Wollensak tape recorder [All laugh]. The first time I heard my own voice, I think, was a reading I did with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews at UBC, a Noon Hour Reading.

And I must have taped it cuz I have the tape.

[All laugh] I can’t remember doing it. And then, so I heard my voice that way, but we weren’t interested in necessarily recording everything. Like I don’t, I have no tapes of the Tish Poets reading or George or Frank or any one of those people reading. And then in 1963 we had the Vancouver Poetry, so-called Vancouver Poetry Conference, which was in the summer of 1963 out at UBC. And Warren Tallman, his father-in-law, gave him this beautiful big console tape recorder. And so he wanted to record the whole conference and he was really interested in recordings.

And he asked me, because I knew a little bit about, was learning about tape recordings. He said, could you learn to run this and do that? So I did. But one of the very first sessions we had in the 63 conference, the take up reel broke.

[Sound effect of tape breaking and falling on the floor] It broke down. So I sat there through the whole meeting winding, [All laugh] taking up, taking up the tape, and then I ended up using my own recorder, the Wollensak, to record the rest of the conference.

So I got into recording and I really enjoyed the notion of not so much documenting, but having the voices of these poets who, you know, a lot of us were interested in, sort of around and available. And they became kind of, it’s a kind of a precious thing and it, and it kind of melded with the whole notion, the whole technology that was going on there. Cuz Reel-to-Reel tape recording was relatively new in the late fifties, early sixties in North America. And eventually it led to other tape recorders and other forms and, and it’s gone on ever since. And I’ve always used tape recording as a, or audio recording as a way of registering more accurately the oral nature of how poetry is being made. [Light piano music begins to play]

And I studied linguistics. I was really interested in the kind of nitty gritty of how language is its rhythm and stress is, is there. [Piano music fades and ends]

That was just so, it was so different and so new. So poetry was made new in us, at least for myself and, I think, made others because of the voice. [Piano music ends]

And he sat there for a week doing all these transcripts, not transcriptions, but transferring into, into digital format. And luckily the tapes, because they had just been put away in a basement, were still okay. And in fact, I listened to some before I gave them to Karis, that they still seemed to be okay.

So pedagogically, they were useful. I didn’t have any other sense of where they might, [Fred laughs] what might happen to them or I, there was a kind of, they were valuable, they were precious things, these tapes. And when I put together these boxes of cassettes to give to Tony that, you know, to deposit up here in the archives there’re just hundreds of, I don’t know how many of there are, but there are a lot of cassette tapes of readings of, you know, particularly Canadian poets that came to Selkirk College or the University of Calgary area, or at least 300, I think.

And, you know, so a lot of them probably aren’t of great quality. Just sticking a, I remember the ‘63 conference, we had one microphone. So we have a panel of, you know, six people and this one little Wollensack microphone and the cord wouldn’t reach that long [ All laugh], so people like Robert Dun would grab the whole machine and bring it so he could speak. [All laugh] But distant people sitting at the table, you know, like Phil Win, sitting at the table, you can’t even quite hear him.Things like that.

I think it grounds them a little bit more. It makes them, the materiality of them, brings them sort of closer to a different understanding of the event of the poem.

We’re gonna play Charles Olson reading “Maximus from Dogtown 2,” recorded at the so-called 1963 poetry conference. But before we do that, let’s begin with that UBC noon hour reading that Fred Wah gave with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews. The recording he cited as the first time he heard his own voice.

You are listening to “Revisiting Mountain Many Voices”, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. [Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player and beginning to play]

The cold and brisk breeze whipped today the cold and brisk breeze whipped today. But no snow comes such ardor, pure and freeze the muddy water on the streets. Me and my love, seraphic pride walked windward, smiling faces. A quiet morning, early morning and fog my darling, you are sleeping warm with sleep. Cold floor stretches in the dark boulevard and headlights past the glass, the start of day, eggs, coffee, cigarette. I walked before you already in the tired morning, no beginning, but our sleep and love, deep rhythms in our breathings. [Electronic music plays and fades]

The sea. Turn your back on the sea, go inland to Dogtown, the harbor, the shore, the city, are now shitty as the nation is, the world tomorrow. Unless the princes of the husting, the sons who refuse to be denied the demon. If Madea kills herself, Madea is a Phoenician wench, also daughter of the terror as Jason Johnson Hines son, hindsight. Charles John Hines, whole son, the Atlantic Mediterranean Black Sea. Time is done in Dun for gone. Jack Hammond put a stop to surface underwater galaxy, time. There is no sky, space or sea left. Earth is interesting. Ice is interesting, stone is interesting. Flowers are carbon. Carbon is Carboniferous, Pennsylvania age under Dogtown, the stone, the watered rock, carbon flowers, rills Aquarium time after fish, fish was Christ. Oh Christ picked the seeds out of your teeth. How handsome the dead dog lies horror X the migma is where the seeds Christ was supposed to pick out.

W sh wunk grapevine Hok, the Dutch and the Norse. And Algonquins. He with a house in his head. She who lusted after the snake in the pond, Dogtown berry smell as the grub beaten fish. Take the smell out of the air. A you’re the tar of Dogtown, the tar matas. Here is the angel matter not to come until R 3000. We will carry water up the hill, the water, the water to make the flower hot. Jack and Jill will up Dogtown Hill on top. One day the vertical American thing will show from heaven. The latter come down to the earth of us all the many who know there is one, one mother, one son, one daughter, and each the father of him self. The genetic is ma the morphic is pa, the city is Mother Polish. The child made man, woman is Mary’s son Elizabeth Mangen the mangen in collagen in collagen time leap onto the leap onto the lamb.

The aquarium time. The greater the water you add, the greater the decomposition. So long as the agent is protein, the carbon of four is the corners in stately motion to sing in high voice the fables of wood and stone and man and woman love and loving in the snow and sun. The weather on Dogtown is protonic, but the other side of heaven is ocean filled in the flower, the weather on Dogtown. The other side of heaven is ocean Dogtown. The under vault heaven is carbon ocean Quam Dogtown. The under vault, the mother rock, the diamond coal, the Pennsylvanian age, the soft coal love age, the soft coal love hung up burning under the city. Thet is heart to be turned. Black stone, the black cri is the throne of creation. Ocean is the black gold flower.

You know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. That was just so, it was so different and so and so new. So poetry was made new in that sense.