SpokenWeb

ShortCuts

Shortcuts 5.5

ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang

This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.

In this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.” The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.

EPISODES NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

AUDIO

Huang, Xiaoxuan. “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”

Sinister Flower, the radio show curated by Lucía Meliá and what Xiaoxuan talks about listening to recently.

RESOURCES

Read “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,

00:00	Kate Moffatt:	Katherine will write a little host, or she has a little host intro that goes in. I don’t know if she writes new ones for each one. Sometimes, she does, but we can also introduce it a little.
00:08	Miranda Eastwood:	She does. No, she will do it, especially for the live Shortcuts. She does. It’s just to be like, “That’s what’s going on,” because they’re special.
		Right.
00:13	Kate Moffatt:	The live ones are the best ones.
00:14	Miranda Eastwood:	They’re very good.
00:16	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Live things tend to be–
00:18	Kate Moffatt:	[Kate and Miranda laugh] Yeah. Yeah. They’re very good. And is it recording right now already?
00:21	Miranda Eastwood:	It is recording right now.
00:22	Kate Moffatt:	I love this little behind-the-scenes, where it’s like [Laughter] “What the heck are we doing?”
		That’s so perfect. Did we decide how we wanted to start the episode?
00:29	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Could I have a […] I mean, I’m just gonna drink some water. [Laughter]
00:31	Kate Moffatt:	Please go for it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34	Miranda Eastwood:	Nope, we can do whatever we want. We can just go for it. Whatever feels right. Okay. [Laughter]
00:39	Kate Moffatt:	Um, I will wait until you’re done with your water bottle.
00:41	Miranda Eastwood:	You can say, “This is Shortcuts with Kate Moffatt.”
00:44	Kate Moffatt:	“Welcome to Shortcuts Live.”
		Do I need to introduce myself? No.
00:46	Miranda Eastwood:	You should. It would–
00:47	Kate Moffatt:	Does Katherine introduce herself?
00:49	Miranda Eastwood:	Well, no, but she’s the producer. We–
00:51	Kate Moffatt:	She’s always the person who does it. Oh my gosh. Okay.
00:54	Miranda Eastwood:	But she does say, “I’m Katherine.”
		She does say, “I am Katherine McLeod.” I think. Now my brain’s just zoning it out ’cause I’m like, “Oh, I know, I know. It’s Katherine McLeod” [Laughs]
01:03	Xiaoxuan Wong:	I think it’s always nice as a listener, [overlap: “to know who you’re listening to.”] even if you’re a long-time listener.
01:07	Kate Moffatt:	Worst case, we can cut it out.
01:11	Katherine McLeod:	[SpokenWeb Shortcuts Theme Song Starts Playing]
		Welcome to Shortcuts. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m the producer for this Shortcut series on the podcast. Yes, they were right, I am introducing myself and telling you about what you’re going to hear.
		This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a shortcut of audio. These Shortcuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. For this conversation, we’re sitting down with Xiaoxuan Wong to talk about sound, language, video, poetry, voice, making room for the indeterminate, and more, like playlist recommendations – listen to the end for that.
02:01	Katherine McLeod:	The conversation is led by Kate Moffatt, and you’ll occasionally hear Miranda Eastwood recording in the background and adding a few comments, including an enthusiastic applause that I have left in at the end. I love that applause because it really emphasizes that this was recorded live. Let’s jump back into that onsite conversation and let the conversation speak for itself.
		[Music fades]
02:30	Kate Moffatt:	Hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. My name is Kate Moffatt. I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and I’m hopping in for Katherine McLeod on this particular episode of Shortcuts. We are so excited to sit down with Xiaoxuan Wong today, and actually, yeah. Xiaoxuan, would you mind introducing yourself?
02:55	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Of course. I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Kate, for sitting down with me. Yeah. My name is Xiaoxuan Wong. I also go by just Xiao and sometimes publish under Sherry as well, Sherry Huang. But yeah, I am a poet, first and foremost. But I feel most at home, kind of playing around with different mediums and voicings and spaces. So, I kind of describe myself as working in “hybrid poetics.”
		The piece that we’re gonna be maybe talking about and hearing a little bit from will sort of be a good example of how my practice converges a few different
		mediums.
03:48	Kate Moffatt:	Wonderful. And I think we are, we’re gonna just start by
		listening to this. Is that right? Okay. Let me pull it up. And here we go.
03:58	Xiaoxuan Wong, Audio of Xiaoxuan Reading “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them”	[Audio From A Video Poem Played. Ambient Music Plays And A Voice Reads The Words As A Poem.]
		I don’t know the names of trees, but I can tell what time it is from the way their shadows lean. It might feel sometimes like we are here just to run out of time. I want you to know, it hurts me, too. One day, we will drive through the mountains. The weather will be unusually hot. Actually, it will be your birthday again. You will pull over on the side of the road and say, “come here. I wanna show you something.” And it will be the tops of trees. I go to a lot of parties, hoping I’ll see you there. Often, what I remember the next day is all the people outside smoking. The air flares up in turns, like a circle of lightning bugs. Someone offers me a drag, I refuse, or no one does. And I ask for one, forgetting I was supposed to be leaving just like in previous years. This summer, too, is likely to leave us with its heat mixed into us. The trees are thinking of what I’m thinking of – your face next to mine in the absenting light due to atmosphere. Due to all the time we don’t have.
06:07	Kate Moffatt:	Okay. Amazing. Xiao, can you please–
06:11	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Thank you–
06:12	Kate Moffatt:	Tell me what we were just listening to.
06:15	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. So, we’re recording this at the SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at U of A. And this piece was sort of, you know, made with existing […] the text was pre-existing, and the ambient guitar that you hear was improvised.
		But this iteration of this project was made in response to the call of this year’s symposium “Reverb Echo.” So yeah, this piece is like around six minutes. It’s an audio-visual piece as well as a poetry collage of, I guess, fragments that I took from a longer project, which was my master’s thesis called “All the Time.”
		But, this iteration of this project, the six-minute audio-visual poetry collage, is called “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them,” which itself is a fragment from “All the Time.” So, I think what I said before about multiple mediums and practices kind of informing me, my mode of practicing “hybrid poetics,” this is one version of how it sometimes shows up. Generally, I think about sound and musical sound and ambient sound or ambient musical sound, I guess, as a part of the voicings of my poem. But, it’s not necessarily the most authoritative one. I love my poems dearly when they’re just on the page as well. And also just, you know, read.
		And so there’s these multiple registers of voicings that I’m really interested in playing with. And kind of sensing through how certain ways of displaying the poem could, on some levels, create a different type of room that we can all enter together and that feels different from the room that is made through just a stanza, which itself also means room.
08:55	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. [Laughter] It’s been one of those concepts that have long haunted me, and I’m sure long haunted many other thinkers and poets, as well. But, it feels really appropriate to me ’cause I think that’s part of what I wanna do with language, is to create an atmosphere as well as tell a story. I know that my relationship to language and poetic language has always been something I am gonna continue to grapple with. But I think I was having a conversation, earlier where I said that these remediations of poetry and poetic text through music and performance and video and image components as well. I’ve done some screen printing, as well, of my poetry.
10:00	Kate Moffatt:	That’s so cool. [Laughs]
10:02	Xiaoxuan Wong:	And, yeah, these are all kind of ways to push back against languages, urge to close in on itself and signify too quickly, or kind of seal itself off from the indeterminate.
10:22	Kate Moffatt:	To be contained–
10:23	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah, yeah.
10:24	Kate Moffatt:	Which has some interesting kind of echoes of the idea of like the room that you were talking about, an atmosphere for, to resist that containment that a word has kind of inherently.
10:34	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Precisely. And I think I wanna give the room – and also language itself like room – to come and go and alter. And I think that’s the kind of, when language is employed like that, it gets me really excited. And it sort of lives in my body differently. It lingers. It has longer staying power when there’s a kernel of indeterminacy to it. Because I find that it sort of becomes more rich with wider application–
11:20	Kate Moffatt:	The possibility that comes with almost like the embodiment of it.
11:24	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Absolutely. Yeah. And, so in this video piece what I guess our listeners can’t see is there are sort of bad subtitles on screen. So
		the visual is just actually like an iPhone footage. One long shot of, I think a blood moon from last year that I took.
		And, the image of the moon has kind of accompanied my short, relatively short career as an artist. I’m only 30, so yeah. And, I’m sure it’ll stay with me. But, on top of the video are these like yellow kind of traditional, like yellow font?
12:21	Kate Moffatt:	I noticed that sometimes, there’s like the square brackets where there’s words missing or bits and pieces, and not everything is subtitled. Right?
12:29	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. And that was kind of a decision that I made on a fly. And I think that aesthetically evoking this, the way I play with space on the page too, when it’s a textual, like a purely textual piece I use a lot, I consider a lot about the space on the page. I don’t really use traditional punctuation. I forgo conventional capitalization and punctuation for spacing. And I think spacing itself is like one of the main ways that I write with.
13:09	Kate Moffatt:	Yeah. Our listeners aren’t gonna know this, and maybe you don’t either, but I absolutely had goosebumps while I was reading the sort of yet partial subtitles unfinished in a way. But, yeah, that very intentional kind of creating of space in the subtitles itself was, yeah. Anyways, I got goosebumps. So that’s kind of fun. [Laughs]
13:29	Xiaoxuan Wong:	That’s beautiful. Thank you for telling me that. Thanks, Kate.
13:34	Kate Moffatt:	No, of course. It was, it was stunning. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing. Actually. I feel like, I wish we could just have played the whole thing. It was so lovely. Those first couple of minutes.
13:45	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Thank you. Yeah. The square brackets felt important to me over parenthetical, like curve brackets. There’s something about the square brackets aesthetically that I feel have less associations with an “aside” or, you know, a kind of “lower register of signification.” I didn’t necessarily want those connotations of like this is an “aside” or what is being redacted, totally being redacted is less important. Or rather, that what is unsaid is less important. I think that with the square brackets, my hope is to kind of invite in room for kind of, again, the indeterminate what is unsaid, what can’t be said, and what even sometimes the square brackets are on screen when the, the voice in the audio is actually completing the line.
		So also, you know, putting those two intentions, like the visual of the square brackets, the text being withheld on screen while the voice is kind of speaking in utterance.
15:10	Kate Moffatt:	Why is it something that can be voiced but not written down?
		[Overlapping: Right. Right.] What makes you kind of question the gap that’s maybe occurring?
15:18	Xiaoxuan Wong:	That’s such an interesting reading of that. Yeah. I love that. And, I think one of the best parts of my conference experience, especially with SpokenWeb, is the conversations that I get to have with everyone else who loves thinking about sound and exalting the unspoken and silence and the fullness and the capability of silence, potentiality of silence.
15:47	Kate Moffatt:	I’d love to, if you don’t mind, just hop back quickly to[…]you were saying that you do get this kind of like multiple registers of voicing in the poem and thinking about different ways of engaging with like the room or the containment. And I’m just[…]you bringing up the conference and kind of what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days. We’ve often brought up, you know, these ideas of echoes, particularly the ways that echoes are created or the way that reverberations sound in rooms, spaces, or architecture. And I just wanted to ask if to bring this around a little bit to listening and the role that maybe thinking about those spaces and how sound is created in those spaces, or how you think about creating sound in things like a room. If there’s a particular role that listening plays, if there are multiple registers of listening because you’ve got multiple registers of voicing, and how the space that this is happening in, or the space that you’re creating for it, how that impacts that.
		I don’t know. That’s a big, long, twisty question. Feel free to take anything from there that feels like it speaks to you.
16:53	Xiaoxuan Wong:	I love it when questions twist, ’cause then that allows my answers to twist.
16:57	Kate Moffatt:	Wonderful. Give us a twisty answer.
16:59	Xiaoxuan Wong:	So one part of this video that we didn’t get to hear later, the voice says, “some ways of listening, turn the whole body into an ear”–
17:15	Kate Moffatt:	Oh, wow.
17:16	Xiaoxuan Wong:	And I –
17:18	Kate Moffatt:	I got more goosebumps. [Laughter]
17:21	Xiaoxuan Wong:	I mean, think in a way that[…]talk about a twisting, right? Like the body itself in turning becomes an apostrophe. Like, apostrophe is, means, to turn. And, I –
17:40	Kate Moffatt:	Stunning. That’s so stunning. Sorry, I need a second. [Laughter]
		That’s so lovely.
17:45	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. I love that question because I think that[…]and I love that we’re recording this in a sound booth, which in a way is attempting to like erase the space or the contours. [Overlap: Oh, yeah.]
		I think with that line, the way I’m feeling it now in conversation with your question is like, I’m thinking about turning’s relationship to listening and like what it does to turn a body to face a certain way. And so, now I’m thinking about orientation, what we choose to focus on. And we all know that listening is as much about attention and focus as it is about volume. So, I think that ultimately, listening is an orientation that we get to choose. I mean, to a certain extent.
18:46	Kate Moffatt:	Right? No, but I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. That there is, that we should not feel like it’s something passive that’s only happening passively. There is so much intentionality, and that intentionality can shape that entirely.
18:57	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. Yes. Yeah. [Laughter]. Yes. Yes. That’s it. [Laughter].
19:02	Kate Moffatt:	Oh, that’s such a wonderful answer. And I feel like even as you were saying that about us being in the booth too that we have kind of prioritized, we are choosing to forgo the space, the larger space that we’re in. For the sake of like a clear voicing. In technical terms, like a clear particular voicing of our conversation.
19:28	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Uhhuh [Affirmative]
19:28	Kate Moffatt:	And like, yeah.
19:30	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. Um, like I love analog technology because of its grit. And it’s like the grain, like Barthes talks about, like the grain of the voice. And I just, um, yeah. Like incredible.
		My friends make fun of me. This is off-topic now, but my friends – I love it – make fun of me for all my playlists. Like, my music taste is like boys who can’t sing and sad indie girls. And, um, [Laughs]–
20:02	Kate Moffatt:	I love it. I love it. You’re really selling your playlist, actually. I love it.
20:07	Xiaoxuan Wong:	And I like, I don’t know, there’s something about hearing flaws
		and, um, hearing texture when things aren’t super smoothed out and polished, that is so compelling to me. And so, when I take that as like a, um, I think that’s informed by like my, the way I grew up in small-town Ontario, music scenes and, um, Kingston, Ontario – shout out to Kingston [Laughs] – um, such a rich music scene for its like per capita in terms of its–
20:47	Kate Moffatt:	I love that–
20:48	Xiaoxuan Wong:	It’s population. I think there are so many wonderful things, like collectives working together to bring and sustain God. We know, we all know how hard it is to sustain a scene; takes all of us. And yeah, like I think my embracing of the grittiness and not erasing certain contours or not blurring, I guess like cleaning up things too much is informed by experimentation and just doing it. Not being interested in being, I don’t know, an apprentice in [Laughs] for too long before actually picking up a guitar or picking up some drumsticks.
21:41	Kate Moffatt:	But that imperfection is actually part of the, it’s part of the magic that’s happening in the first place.
21:46	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. And it allows for you to put on a show then…Like, I don’t know why I love that–
21:53	Kate Moffatt:	That’s more important than making it perfect first, right?
21:56	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Yeah. Yeah.
21:57	Kate Moffatt:	Or making it perfect at all. Amazing.
		Okay. Well, I’d like to finish with one last quick question, which is: What are you listening to lately? Like in your research or at the conference–
22:08	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Oh, gosh.
22:09	Kate Moffatt:	Or even just generally. This is kind of hopping off of that lovely little playlist tangent you sent us on. But we can end with this one, but yeah. What are you listening to?
22:19	Xiaoxuan Wong:	I, okay, so I am listening to…I love radio. I love the intimacy of radio, especially community radio, campus radio, you know, hearing myself being addressed. One-on-one. So it feels like, to me I’ve had, I’ve written about it. I’ve kind of, that’s a relationship to another’s voice that feels really special.
22:57	Kate Moffatt:	That’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.
23:00	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Thanks. So, I guess like radio shows, I don’t know. I workout to like
		NTS’s “Infinite” mixtape, [Laughs] that they have on there, and make some cool discoveries there. And yeah, I think I’ve, the internet has introduced me to a lot of connections too, like Lucía Meliáwho is based out of Mexico City. She is, yeah, she is a radio…she has a radio show called “Sinister Flowers.” That great name, right?
23:42	Kate Moffatt:	Great name. [Laughs]
23:43	Xiaoxuan Wong:	That is a, I think the most ideal. It’s everything I want in a radio show. It has critical theory. It has music and like field recordings. Poetry works its way in there. And Lucía’s taste is just like, right on. So I, yeah. And right now I’m listening to “Sinister Flowers.”
24:13	Kate Moffatt:	I’m gonna have to write that down. Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you so much. It was so lovely. It was so, words are not capturing this properly. It wasn’t lovely. It was so much more than lovely, but it was lovely. So thank you so much, so much for joining us and
24:27	Xiaoxuan Wong:	See you at the conference.
24:28	Kate Moffatt:	See you at the rest of the conference, yeah.
24:29	Xiaoxuan Wong:	There’s a cabaret tonight.
24:31	Kate Moffatt:	There’s a cabaret. We’re gonna go listen together at the cabaret.
24:35	Xiaoxuan Wong:	Thank you so much, Kate.
24:36	Kate Moffatt:	Thank you.
24:36	Miranda Eastwood:	Yay! [Miranda cheers]
24:39	Music:	[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]
24:42	Katherine McLeod:	You’ve been listening to Shortcuts.
24:46	Katherine McLeod:	Thanks to Xiaoxuan Wong for talking with us in this episode. And a big thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for conducting and recording the conversation.
		Shortcuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast.
		The SpokenWeb podcast is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber, Yara Ajeeb, and co-host Hannah McGregor, and myself, Katherine McLeod. Like all of these Shortcuts live
		conversations from last year’s symposium, there really is a sense of being there. And, I thought that this conversation in particular was such a great way of thinking back to the feeling of being there last year and looking ahead to this year’s symposium. In fact, we’ll be rolling out the last of these Shortcuts Live conversations as a full episode in the very same week as this year’s SpokenWeb symposium takes place. Stay tuned for that in the first week of June, right here on the podcast feed. And, for now, thanks for listening.

Katherine McLeod

SPECIAL GUEST

Xiaoxuan Huang (she/they) is a writer, scholar, & educator working in experimental criticism, literary audio, & other forms of hybrid poetics.

Her writing lingers in the doorway like a long goodbye, aiming to be what it claims to need: “A book [that] is always-already a sign of love. A sign for love.”

Her first full-length publication, Love Speech (2019, Metatron Press,) is a book of poetry & auto-theory. She recently completed a manuscript of lyric epistles, All the Time, which was listed as a finalist for the 2023 Fonograf Editions Essay Collection Contest. Her latest manuscript, Venus in its Fall, has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts & BC Arts Council; it is a novel written in verse.

She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus.) She currently teaches English Literature & Creative Writing at Capilano University. She is a 1.5 generation Shanghainese-Canadian who is living on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷmə โ θkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people.

https://xiaoxuanhuang.com/

INTERVIEWER

Kate Moffatt is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.

PRODUCER

Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded IDG project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research.” She has co-edited with Jason Camlot a recent special issue of English Studies in Canada, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” She co-hosts The SpokenWeb Podcast and produces ShortCuts as a series for the podcast feed.

SpokenWeb

ShortCuts

Shortcuts 5.5

ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang

LISTEN

Download

SpokenWeb

ShortCuts

Shortcuts 5.5

ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang

May 20, 2024

Produced byKatherine McLeod

Share

Katherine McLeod

Produced by
Katherine McLeod