SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 10

SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?”

This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor and Emily Murphy to question what we can uncover about the dynamics of a space through listening. Together they invite us into a ‘close listening’ of Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church (Vancouver) March 14, 1970. Recorded on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Listen to find out if “Robin” is here.

Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/

Resources:

The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/

Amy Thiessen’s Honours Project / Digitial Exhibition on Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net

The Real Vancouver Writers’ Series: https://realvancouver.org/

Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast featuring Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/

Secret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/

Christine Mitchell’s “Can You Hear Me?”: https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/

Due to COVID-19, both the Tech Talk Series and the Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent mentioned at the end of this episode were unfortunately cancelled or postponed.

00:18	Theme Music:	[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.
00:26	Hannah McGregor:	What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast SoundBox Signals. We’ll hear some new voices to the podcast, as well as some that might sound a little bit more familiar, like mine. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close-listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together, they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor—that’s me—and Emily Murphy. Together, we discuss Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “‘Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church in Vancouver on March 14th, 1970 on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Here is Karis Shearer and SoundBox Signals asking: “Is Robin Here?” [Theme Music]
02:36	Audio Recording:	[Click] [Begin Music: Gentle Ambient Instrumentals] [Various Recorded Voices] I see you face to face. What is the voice? Certainty of others for life, love, sight, hearing of others. Where is this voice…coming from? I see you also face to face.
02:45	Karis Shearer:	I’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today in the studio at UBC Okanagan by guest curator Amy Thiessen, who is the SpokenWeb RA and our very own project manager and she’s also completing a honour’s thesis on the work of Sharon Thesen. I’m also joined by Emily Murphy, who is a professor of digital humanities and assistant director of the AMP Lab. And today we have from Vancouver Hannah McGregor, who’s assistant professor in publishing at Simon Fraser University and host of the Secret Feminist Agenda. Welcome everybody, thanks for joining us.
03:22	Hannah McGregor:	Thank you, I’m delighted to be here.
03:23	Emily Murphy:	Oh, I too am delighted.
03:26	Hannah McGregor:	Amy, are you also delighted?
03:28	Amy Thiessen:	Super.
03:31	Karis Shearer:	Fantastic. We’re here to talk about a really special recording, a weird recording. So we’re gonna rewind to March 14th, 1970 and have a listen to Warren Tallman introducing an event that is called the Charles Olson Memorial. So here we go.
03:51	Audio Recording:	[Click] [Audio, Warren Tallman] Some people who were planning this, that we would have all the poets lined up in front on a sheet of paper so that it could be read off one, two, three, four, five. It didn’t work out. So all you poets are in the audience. And so it’s going to have to be when it gets around to that point at which you would like to read for this reading, it is, it’s going to have to be kind of Quaker, you know, or what I assume is Quaker that you stand up on your feet and walk forward in some calm or pause that has taken place. And…yes? [Someone Asks A Question] Yeah. You can’t hear? [Person Speaks More, Inaudible] Oh, I– yeah. I’m supposed to make an announcement about how long to read. It’s always impressed me as rather ridiculous to tell a poet how long to read, but I will tell all of you poets this, that if there’s a rhythm that’s going, which makes for three or four or five minutes, if you break it by reading for 40 minutes, everybody in the audience will hate you. [Laughs] So I would say three or four or five minutes, although you understand that’s not an instruction to impede on the freedom of any poet to read. [Crashing Sound] [Laughter] I– I am, I am, I’m being deliberately rather facetious and frivolous, so that we can have that to work on, to move into an actually more serious occasion. And since we do not have any listing of the poets, you must choose your own occasion as it occurs to you. But first, I would like to have Robin. Is Robin here? Okay. Well, Robin Blaser is going to start this with a reading. It is going to be interrupted with a tape and there’ll be an interruption after the tape of about three or two minutes or so. And then the poets will read whatever has occurred to them to read on the occasion of this memorial for Charles Olson. [Click]
06:43	Karis Shearer:	Amy, you chose this recording. Can you tell us a little bit about what we know about it?
06:48	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah. So this recording, as Karis said earlier, was recorded on March 14th, 1970. We know that they are gathered at St. Anslem’s church on the UBC Vancouver campus and that it was recorded on reel-to-reel.
07:04	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. And it’s about, it’s an excerpt, it’s the very beginning of a whole recording. It’s about an hour long. It also features a number of different poets. Robin Blaser, obviously, is mentioned. Judith Copithorne, Peter Quartermain, Lionel Kearns, Richard Sommer from Montreal, Maxine Gadd, and quite a few other poets. It’s a weird introduction to a poetry reading. Hannah, I’m going to turn that over to you. You’ve been to a lot of record–, poetry readings. What, what’s weird about this?
07:38	Hannah McGregor:	I mean, so one of the, one of the major jobs when I think about what hosts at poetry readings are trying to do, one of the major things that they are doing, is sort of set tone and norms for what’s about to proceed. And a lot of that, a lot of the work at literary readings has to do with establishing how long people are allowed to read for. Because in my experience, without that, people will read for a wild amount of time. And even with the norms, people will read for a wild amount of time. And so what really… The first listen through to this, what really struck me was that invitation to a Quaker-like sort of self-electing process in which poets will get up, “you poets” will just get up, and read when they feel moved to do so and are sort of given this like, you know, read for four to five minutes or whatever feels right. Probably not 40. Which is… There’s a lot of lateral movement in that four to 40 minutes.
08:37	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, you bet. It’s, I mean, there’s a sort of sense of spontaneity, but Emily, it’s kind of, it’s, it is controlled, right? I mean, he is setting up some boundaries. What are the boundaries that you’re hearing in this?
08:48	Emily Murphy:	Super controlled. I mean, I think that one of the major boundaries is this idea that social pressure will help keep boundaries around the poets, which many of us know probably wouldn’t work. But one of the things that I did find really interesting about this is that buried in this desire for spontaneity is kind of like a series of conventions about what’s going to count as it. Like, even down to instructions for movement, right? Like some kind of Quaker ceremony where you, like you stand up in a moment of silence and walk towards the front of the room. There’s already like a really embodied physical dimension being made explicit in his instructions, which indicates to me then that there are actually like quite clear boundaries for what counts as spontaneity and probably what counts as improvisation of a sort in this room that, I mean, we often think of improvisation as a thing that just kind of springs from you internally. But there are, there’s plenty of research that is calling for a kind of richer understanding of what the conventions of improvisation are or kind of conventions that signal this sort of authentic, spontaneous contribution.
09:59	Hannah McGregor:	I was just thinking even in that “be totally spontaneous, but four to five minutes” suggests that this really interesting tension between the desire to establish an environment of spontaneity and sort of free responsiveness to what’s happening alongside the need to state and establish norms. And that tension is really interesting and also leads me to wonder, you know, historically, at what point do we start establishing norms of five-minute readings of 10-minute readings? Like, when you hear about readings that last 45 minutes, how and when and why are we starting to arrive at a sense of what is supposed to be, apparently, kind of innate or kind of intuitive or kind of felt the sense of how long is an appropriate length to read?
10:53	Emily Murphy:	My– I mean, my hunch is that that history is probably a religious one, right? That we probably start seeing shorter readings while, when more people are literate, essentially. I mean, my own, any of my knowledge, which is limited, about how people would read in public is about kind of belletristic traditions, right? Where you would read letters because you weren’t reading to a literate population and you would read verses and sermons that were timed to like the bells that would go off in a public square. And so that’s like, that’s a really religious background to public readings. And here we have an extensively secular event that’s held in a church and that—can I give a spoiler about the first reading?
11:42	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, you sure can.
11:42	Emily Murphy:	The first reading is from Revelations. So it’s like shot through with these religious contexts.
11:50	Karis Shearer:	In addition to the invocation of the Quaker-ness, right? There’s actually—
11:53	Emily Murphy:	Yeah.
11:53	Karis Shearer:	–quite a lot of religiosity evoked in this. One of the questions we ask on the podcast is like, what does listening allow us to know about cultural history? And I’m going to turn this over to Amy to ask you what kind of information do we hear in this podcast, do we gather through listening in terms of like space or numbers of people? I mean, we have a list of poets, but what kind of sense do we get of the setting here?
12:21	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah. Quite a few times, and even just this short bit of the recording, we can hear the audience like laughing or talking, or there’s that point at the beginning when Warren’s not sure what the, I think woman at the back is saying, and there’s a moment that doesn’t turn out to be the technical difficulty that “Oh, you can’t hear?” But that’s something that… You can tell that technology is present in that room and it’s, we can hear it through the tape and we can tell that Warren is miked and that there’s sort of that… He’s in front of people and there’s a crowd there. And yeah.
12:57	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, I mean, there’s also one more point, at least one more point, in the tape too where we get a sense of like how many people are… Like Warren’s perception of how many people are in the audience. What is, it’s actually one of your favourite parts if I remember. What is that moment?
13:14	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah, we get the moment when Warren, isn’t sure if Robin is there. You can sort of sense that he’s looking around and maybe doesn’t see him right away. Yeah, is unsure. It’s not like there’s a crowd of 15 people and you can see him, right?
13:28	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. Yeah, “Is Robin here?” And he’s looking in the crowd. Somebody has also suggested that this recording that it’s possible that the lights are turned down and he’s not able to actually see into the audience. And I’m not sure. You know, obviously there’s limits to what we can know through listening.
13:47	Hannah McGregor:	There is that feeling though, right? Like, including the way that he addresses the audience as “you poets.” And sort of doesn’t like, “Oh, sorry, you can’t–” Like he, you know, he doesn’t call people by name. And if you’re sort of thinking, like you’re familiar with the people who are here, then you would say somebody’s name when they are talking to you. So there’s certainly the sense that he can’t necessarily see them. And that question of is it because there’s a huge crowd or is it because it’s dark or is it because I’ve never been in this space? Like, what is this venue like? Is it full of weird pillars that hide people? I don’t know.
14:21	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. And I guess one, I mean, certainly one of the research questions are the things that we’ll do when we’re pursuing research on this type is actually go to St. Anselm’s Church and have a sense, have a look at its architecture. I want to pick up on something that you’ve kind of moved us towards, which is that relationship between Warren Tallman and the audience. He’s an English professor. He’s not himself a poet. But he certainly had a good relationship with poets and was, through the facilitation of events like this, through his teaching of poetry. What do we hear in terms of his relationship with the audience? And I’m gonna go to you Hannah first and then I’m gonna go over to Emily.
15:00	Hannah McGregor:	Well, like, I keep mentioning it, Karis, because you pointed it out to me and now I really hear it whenever I listen, is his addressing the audience as “you poets.”
15:09	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, I can’t get over that.
15:09	Hannah McGregor:	Which is very funny. It has this kind of… This familiarity and also this sort of joking disdain. Like, “You know what you poets are like, just gives a vibe of the sort of… When you are familiar enough with a group to make fun of them. Which suggests a sort of an intimacy of environment, right? That you don’t make fun of an audience unless they are your friends. Which sets up this sort of warmth. Like you don’t get the feeling that this is a random public reading. The audience are the speakers, it’s a community gathering, and you can feel that in the way that he is addressing an audience that is at once the sort of participants and the listeners for the event.
15:53	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. Emily, what about you? What do you hear in terms of that relationship between Tallman and the audience and maybe that kind of question of authority?
16:02	Emily Murphy:	Oh, question of authority. I mean, I don’t want to be the person who keeps bringing it back to religion, but I guess—
16:10	Karis Shearer:	Go for it.
16:10	Emily Murphy:	–that’s my role. I just, like, I always hear this tape in terms of like the situation of mourning. And it always sounds to me like a wake. And as a bit of background to that, I’m born in Ireland and my entire family is Irish. We are not the kind of Irish people who have wakes. That’s actually like quite specific. But it’s still this sort of community gathering among friends where you’ll tell jokes and sing songs and maybe read from Revelations. But there is a sort of bondedness and a kind of joy in the mourning. And so I think like, I mean, what’s an authority figure in Irish culture if not a priest, right? And he is sort of like in a way, like literally speaking to a flock, right?
17:01	Karis Shearer:	Mhm.
17:01	Emily Murphy:	And that’s also interesting in terms of the relationship of the professor to students, professor to poets who he is actively engaged in making the, like the canonical poetic community of his age. Yeah.
17:23	Hannah McGregor:	Yeah. We were talking a little bit about that professorial feel, right? Like, it does not surprise me to hear that this person is a professor because I hear in the way that he is addressing the audience, the gathering, something that sounds a lot to me like how I talk to my students, that sort of facetious and sort of like self-undermining, like making fun of yourself a little bit, which sets a very particular tone of like, “Okay, I’m in charge here, but like, not that in charge. So, you know, here’s some structure, but also I really want you to feel free to take over and for this to be your space to do with as you want. But you also…” Like Emily was saying, you know, total freedom, total improvisation is sort of impossible without structure. So you need somebody taking that role and saying like, “I am going to be the guiding hand here,” but how do I guide people into a feeling of openness and spontaneity and participation and sort of some level of safety, ’cause what you’re asking people to do, step forward and just begin to read, does require some level of comfort. So, you know, how you establish that tone. I hear in that humour some of that work happening.
18:35	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, definitely. Amy, what, like, what are you hear in terms of like picking up on what Hannah was saying about shared authority and sort of self-deprecating humour? He’s getting prompts from the audience and I guess maybe that’s what I’m asking about. Like those moments where the audience is prompting him around certain things that he’s meant to say up at the front.
18:56	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah, there’s the moment in the tape when you can’t hear the person speaking, but he’s like, “Oh, I’ve been, I’m supposed to tell you that you can only read for this amount of time.” And there’s other points of interaction, I guess. And one thing that I sort of notice is that it seems to me that he’s not necessarily taking cues from the audience as to like his tone or like his approach to what he’s saying. Like he’s being sort of like goofy and funny in the first bit, but in a way that I would imagine someone else, they say something funny, the audience laughs, “Oh, I’m going to say something else funny now.” But I think he’s just genuinely being… It sounds like he’s just genuinely being himself and speaking sorta without that intent to get a laugh.
19:45	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. I mean, and you’ve listened to a lot of recordings with Warren, you know, where Warren Tallman is, he’s giving a lecture to a class or I think you’ve got a really good feel for him as a person and this is very much very Warren Tallman-esque, if you will. I think a little bit more about mourning, right? He changes register partway through this tape from being what he calls deliberately facetious and he’s being a little self-reflexive about that. And the register changes from being funny to serious. Emily, I wanna come over to you and ask you about a little bit more about mourning. What kind of space is being created for mourning here and what is the role of humour, seriousness, the kind of gravity?
20:32	Emily Murphy:	Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. One of the things that I love about this tape is I feel like there’s this kind of subvocal like landscape of the emotion in the room in a way. Like probably the most explicit way that you can hear it is something that Hannah has pointed out to me, which is the sort of the murmur that goes through the crowd when Warren Tallman says, “We’re not going to have five people! Instead, you’ll just do whatever!”
21:03	Hannah McGregor:	He counts them, like, “Oh, he’s going to have you numbered up at the front, like one, two, three, four, five.” It’s like, thanks, Warren, I forgot how numbers work.
21:15	Karis Shearer:	Well, and then as you pointed out, like everyone starts going like, excuse me, what?
21:19	Hannah McGregor:	Yeah, yeah. You hear it. Like, it kind of sounds like this is the first they’re hearing of it. Right?
21:23	Karis Shearer:	Oh, for sure.
21:23	Hannah McGregor:	That they also were led to believe that they would have an order and that they are now finding out that no, in fact, Quaker-style, you will be self-electing.
21:34	Karis Shearer:	And it’s kind of like this weird, this rejection of like the pedagogical, right? Like that one, two, three, four, five, right? Like he’s counting, he’s physically counting them, but that’s, that’s not what’s gonna happen, right? So he performs the thing that’s not going to happen in this really kind of, you know, it becomes almost, it is almost humourous, right? It’s like very… There’s a kind of physicality to it, of an establishing of space on the stage. And it is like making the, you know, creating for us the thing that will not happen, which is like overly pedagogical, overly constructed. And it is the thing to be rejected in favour of this more spontaneous… Yeah, spontaneous form that is more appropriate for mourning? To when we make a connection, Emily, between–?
22:20	Emily Murphy:	Yeah. I mean, he makes this rhetorical move, right, where he says, like, “I’m being deliberately facetious and frivolous” on what is actually like quite a, that you say, solemn occasion, maybe? And so there’s sort of like, there’s more than one switch, right? Like there’s the like… Or maybe not more than one switch, but the switch does, has two roles, right? That we have the like humour as the lead-in, as a setup for a solemn occasion that will entail reading verses from the Bible. But humour as also a kind of, a kind of marking of occasion, right.? And a kind of framing of the mourning and of the solemnness. And I still, like, I feel like so much of the, like the evidence that I gather from this tape is just like a feeling in the room, like a kind of warmth that’s, it’s difficult to point to like any one thing that you might be able to hear from the audience, but it feels like maybe the, like maybe the echoes in the room are like are letting you know that people might be like kind of chatting to their neighbour while he’s making jokes at the front of the room or that they’re like laughing and chuckling to themselves, right? So there is a kind of like a… It’s not like, it’s not quite joy, but it is sort of fellow feeling and warmth. Which indicates to me that like there is a really nice acknowledgement of the social role of mourning, right. And the social embeddedness of that kind of loss.
23:57	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. ‘Cause I mean, they’ve gathered on the occasion of the death of a major American poet.
24:02	Emily Murphy:	Yeah.
24:02	Karis Shearer:	And the way that they’re gonna celebrate that or mark that occasion is through the act of reading. And I think, you know, again, like make–, you know, making space for different types of… Like, that mourning is individual and therefore the space needed to read or mark that occasion is also individual, whether it’s short, three to four minutes or, well, not, not 40 minutes.
24:30	Emily Murphy:	Well, like it’s so individual, but it’s so communal as well, right? Because I mean, if mourning is so individual, stay in your own house and read for 40 minutes to yourself. Right? But instead there’s this nice tension between not infringing on the freedom of any poet to read. Um, and don’t read for 40 minutes, everyone will think you’re a jerk.
24:51	Hannah McGregor:	And the expectation, right? So feeling the pause in which—
24:55	Emily Murphy:	Yep.
24:55	Hannah McGregor:	–you stand up and read means attentive listening, right? That you’re not just sitting there like checked out, waiting for your turn. You have to be listening and engaging. So it is this sort of interesting tension between the individual and the communal, which we can think of as being a characteristic of religious experience and a characteristics—
25:16	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, absolutely.
25:16	Hannah McGregor:	–of collective mourning.
25:18	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the guiding principle of this whole event seems to be attentiveness to the audience, right? And attentiveness to each other. You know, you know when you’re going to, when it’s your turn to read, when there’s a kind of a space and you arise and it’s very… He describes it in a very physical way, right? You arise, you get up on your own on your feet. Right? As though there would be any other, I mean, I suppose there would be maybe other ways of getting up, but in this case, it is you get up on your feet and you walk toward… There’s a real physicality of the description. I’m gonna bring it over to Amy again and I want to ask you about technology and how technology features in this tape. What moments do you hear technology making itself present? Yeah.
26:06	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah, so there’s this moment when Warren’s saying that there’s gonna be a tape and then there’s gonna be a reading and then there’s gonna be another interruption. And it’s very like sort of vague what that’s going to be. And by saying that it’s going to be an interruption it’s not really interrupting. And what we know also is that from our perspective there, the tape doesn’t actually surface at all on our version on the reel, which is interesting.
26:41	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is in some ways very characteristic of Tallman in general. He, you know, we have the tape, the event that’s being recorded, but then there’s also the indication that there’s going to be a recording within the recording or they, the playback of a recording within the recording. And then we also hear, we also hear the mic, right? Where someone isn’t able to hear from the audience. Technology makes itself present, yeah, I think throughout the tape.
27:11	Emily Murphy:	Well, I wonder… So you’re right that we can, like, we sort of, we get an indication of the presence of the mic, but I feel like that is Tallman interpreting the reaction of the audience that way, not necessarily the audience actually experiencing those aspects of the technology or like he… Instead of “I’ve just thrown you a curve ball” it’s “Oh, you must not be able to hear what I’m saying.”
27:35	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, yeah.
27:37	Emily Murphy:	Yeah.
27:37	Karis Shearer:	Absolutely.
27:38	Emily Murphy:	But I think, I mean, this is something that happens with newer technologies all the time, is that once the newer technology is present, it gets to have the role of being technological. And then all of the other technologies that people are engaging with all the time are perceived as naturalized and non-technological. So even though he’s… Like, they’re reading from books in a room that has like probably quite specific acoustics in a language that is already an extension of human capacity, but it’s the tape that dominates the sort of technological landscape, whether or not it is in fact present. It’s the idea of taping us, in a way.
28:18	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, taping us.
28:19	Emily Murphy:	Yeah, taping us^TM.
28:22	Hannah McGregor:	Good thing you TM’ed that—
28:23	Emily Murphy:	I’m writing that down.
28:23	Hannah McGregor:	–’cause that was gonna be the title of my new book.
28:24	Emily Murphy:	Taping us… I mean, I’ll take royalties.
28:29	Karis Shearer:	And in fact that distrust of the microphone, that distrust of technology is actually something so common across recordings that Christine Mitchell, I think when she was a postdoc at Concordia, created a whole compilation—I think it’s about two minutes long—and it’s all the excerpts of that exact moment of distrust of the microphone. Can you, and it’s called “Can You Hear Me? And it’s a compilation of all, you know, readers across the Sir George Williams Reading Series saying things like, “Is this thing on? Can you hear me at the back? Can you hear me?” And so Warren, again, that particular distrust of the technology in the room, it’s both, you know, the microphone is both facilitating his connection with the audience, but it’s also the thing to be distrusted.
29:17	Emily Murphy:	Yeah, you’re so right about that distrust, but I wonder then if we can put that in conversation with how we’ve been talking about authority. Because at the same time that it is expected to fail, right, expected to be the reason that people can’t hear him, it’s also like being… It’s a recording for posterity and I think you and I have talked in other ways about how Tallman is doing all of this recording at the same time as like law enforcement is using tapes—
29:44	Karis Shearer:	Yeah.
29:44	Emily Murphy:	–as like the new technology of catching criminals, right? They’re becoming this sort of incontrovertible version of evidence quite quickly.
29:57	Karis Shearer:	Surveillance.
29:57	Emily Murphy:	Yeah. And so, yeah, I don’t think that I have a “so what” about that relationship, then, between mistrust and authority. And I don’t think it’s as radical as I’m making it sound. Like it’s…
30:08	Hannah McGregor:	I mean, I think that there is something there about the way that technology’s become, are turned into via social processes are turned into forms of witness, forms of evidence, forms of authority that you get a really clear sense of the work that is being done around generating understandings of new technologies when you get these archival moments in which people, events for example, distrust. So like, it is helpful in terms of thinking about the very deliberate work that’s being done around transforming audio recording into evidence when you hear the context in which it is not.
30:52	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, that’s nice. I’m going to go around with the group and just ask you, finally, what is your favourite part of this recording? And maybe it’s something we’ve already talked about, but favourite moment or favourite aspect of this? Emily, I’m going to start with you.
31:10	Emily Murphy:	Yeah, it’s the murmurs in the room that you can kind of like, you can hear the walls almost, like the echoes off the walls. I love that.
31:17	Karis Shearer:	Hannah?
31:18	Hannah McGregor:	It’s gotta be like, it’s probably a tie for me between when he counts out loud and when he tells people to get up on their feet. Like it is these moments in which there is… I like the way you refer to it as being like overtly almost over-the-top pedagogical, like, “Get up, on your feet, and step forward.” Like, yeah, okay, I get it. Warren, we know how to get up.
31:41	Karis Shearer:	Amy, what about you?
31:43	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah and I have said this already, but my favourite part is when Warren says, “Is Robin here?” And it’s just, just unsure.
31:50	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s also, you know, kind of quite a moment of anxiety, if that’s like… You’re, you know, you’re counting on Robin to open the more serious part of the occasion, like, it’d be really great if he were there. And you can hear this, you know, you can almost hear him scanning, right? Like where he’s, he’s looking around.
32:10	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah. At least if Robin didn’t show up, you’d still have the text of his reading.
32:16	Karis Shearer:	But that is true. That is… He reads from Revelations. John… I forget which is it.
32:23	Amy Thiessen:	And I also like wonder if Robin knows he’s about to be called on first and like importantly out by name first and then nobody else is called by their name to come up and read.
32:34	Karis Shearer:	That’s right.
32:35	Amy Thiessen:	Yeah.
32:36	Karis Shearer:	Yeah.
32:36	Hannah McGregor:	Karis, what’s your favourite part?
32:39	Karis Shearer:	Oh. [Exasperated Sigh] I love it when they turn it back on me. It’s the “you poets.” It just really… I was like, I realized at that moment, like I could imagine doing all the things, you know, that he does in terms of facilitation, but the moment where he says “you poets,” I was like trying to imagine myself doing that in a room of like my poet colleagues who I totally enjoy. I can’t imagine just being like, “All you poets!” and like what their reaction would be to that. It’s so, it’s so weird, but also I think really speaks to that relationship, like a very particular relationship that he has with them and probably nobody else does. And he’s emphatically not a poet, right? In that, in hailing them as “you poets” it’s also marking him as “not poet,” but he gets to do that because he has this special relationship and I think because of the work he’s done, because of the work he’s done over the past decade and more in really cultivating a literary community. Yeah.
33:47	Emily Murphy:	I mean, we talked briefly about the sort of modernist landscape in this recording, especially because we have sort of like super traditional, like, readings from the Bible and then immediately the thing that follows that on the tape, which is not in the explicit recording, is like experimental sound poetry and how for a lot of the 20th century, like that mix of like deep investment in western canon and formal experimentation is actually a hallmark of poetic communities. And I think the other hallmark of the poetic, of poetic communities is the increasing role of the critic.
34:24	Karis Shearer:	Yeah.
34:24	Emily Murphy:	Right? And then that’s bringing us back to authority in a way as well. Like it is not being the producer or the artist that is the most authoritative position, but in being like a kind of critic or curator or even in other, like other artistic fields, like, people like Diaghilev who was like a ballet producer of a kind, but was not himself a dancer and not even a choreographer. Well, sometimes he was. Yeah. Anyway. That’s just, that’s up for debate. But.
34:54	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, I think, I mean, this recording in a lot of ways and Tallman’s presence across the recordings, invites us to look back at literary communities and think about the roles of folks who weren’t themselves writers, but the role that they played in establishing those communities and the labour that they performed to facilitate events, et cetera. Often gendered, often gendered.
35:19	Emily Murphy:	Oh, very gendered.
35:22	Karis Shearer:	Yep. Yep. This is around the time that we normally do a shout-out to an event, a book, a reading, something that you’d like to recognize. And so I’m going to start with Amy and ask you what would you like to shout-out?
35:38	Amy Thiessen:	Am I allowed to shout-out myself?
35:38	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, you can! Go for it.
35:38	Amy Thiessen:	By the time this podcast comes out, you listeners could go view my honour’s project online if you’re interested in Canadian poetry or environmental writing or forest fires. We’ll put a link in the show notes to my digital exhibition.
35:59	Karis Shearer:	And as your supervisor, I’m going to say it’s a very excellent project. Super cool. Hannah, what about you? Shout-out.
36:08	Hannah McGregor:	I’m gonna shout-out my favourite reading series in Vancouver, which is called the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, which was started during the Vancouver Olympics in response to the sort of Olympic-committee-sanctioned cultural programming. It was a series of readings that were meant to sort of… It was the literary community in Vancouver saying like, “No, actually, here’s what Vancouver literary community looks like.” It’s now been running for a decade, I believe, and it’s remarkable. I think it happens quarterly. And it’s a really remarkable reading series, both for the level of thoughtful curation that goes into the kinds of stuff that you get to see there, but also for the hosts Sean Cranberry and Dina Del Bucchia just do this amazing job of creating this environment where, like, there is more catcalling at this reading series than I have ever experienced at another literary event. And it has so much to do with the tone they create through hosting. And I was really thinking about the sort of work they do around the series when I was listening. So shout-out to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.
37:13	Karis Shearer:	Awesome. Thank you. Emily, what about you? Shout-out?
37:17	Emily Murphy:	My shout-out is a bit of a cheat as well because I want a shout-out for Amy.
37:23	Karis Shearer:	Amy is well-deserving of many shout-outs.
37:26	Emily Murphy:	Definitely, definitely. Amy is presenting on her honour’s thesis in the Tech Talk series at the AMP Lab here at UBCO campus on the 26th of March at 12:30 PM.
37:38	Karis Shearer:	I don’t usually do a shout-out, but I’ll, I will do one. And actually I’m going to do one that we had from last time, but it’s coming up really soon. It’s the Sharon Thesen, Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent and it’s coming up on Thursday, March 19th, which is also gonna be passed by the time this comes out! I’m like just dropping it left and right here.
38:03	Hannah McGregor:	Love these weird audio archives.
38:03	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. It’s like, “Wait a minute, time…passing…okay.” Well, I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you so much, Hannah McGregor here from Vancouver. Hannah, do you want to say what you’re here for giving a workshop?
38:19	Hannah McGregor:	Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s definitely gonna be in the past by the time people listen to this.
38:21	Karis Shearer:	It is definitely gonna be in the past. But—
38:24	Hannah McGregor:	Yeah.
38:24	Karis Shearer:	–I feel like it deserves a…
38:26	Hannah McGregor:	Yeah. Yeah, shout-out to podcasting, that’s what I’m giving a workshop about. You know what, in general, shout-out to maybe the other podcast that I host, which is the SpokenWeb Podcast.
38:37	Karis Shearer:	Yeah!
38:37	Hannah McGregor:	Which this has been an episode of, SoundBox Signals has been an episode of, but more other things. I am actually the April episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is me. [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] Is me? So listen to that.
38:50	Karis Shearer:	See, ’cause we haven’t had one from you yet.
38:51	Hannah McGregor:	No, you haven’t, so you’re gonna—
38:53	Karis Shearer:	Oh.
38:53	Hannah McGregor:	–get to hear what I do, which is…just complain about male poets.
39:04	Karis Shearer:	My name is Karis Shearer and I was joined in the studio [End Music: Ambient Instrumental] by Hannah McGregor, Amy Thiessen, and Emily Murphy. We recorded the episode back in early March when we were still able to get together in person. And I’m recording the outro right now in my new studio at home, which is a blanket fort. I can assure you that we will continue to bring you new episodes of SoundBox Signals over the summer. I want to thank the estate of Warren Tallman [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] for allowing us to use the recording, which you can find online on our website soundboxsignals.ok.ubc.ca. Please stay safe. [End Music: Ambient Instrumental].
39:36	Music:	[Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals]
39:52	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 Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab. [End Music: Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Emily Murphy for her contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.

Karis Shearer & Nour Sallam (SoundBox Signals)

Nour Sallam is an Honours English and Political Science major with a passion for literature and art. She is interested in journalism, digital reporting, and the impacts that language and discourse have on perceptions of the world. Nour is also the Copy Editor of The Phoenix News. She is excited to practice attentive listening and explore literary sound through her work as the SpokenWeb UBCO Podcast Producer.

Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, is an associate professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She sits on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and is the lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant, contributing expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture.

Episode Guests:

Amy Thiessen is an Honours English student at UBCO where she is working on a digital edition of Sharon Thesen’s poem “The Fire.” She is a writer, an RA and project manager for the UBCO SpokenWeb project and an aspiring teacher.

Emily Murphy is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at UBCO’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. She is also Assistant Director of UBCO’s AMP Lab. She researches technology and cultural memory.

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing at SFU where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. She also hosts a number of podcasts including Secret Feminist Agenda and the SpokenWeb Podcast.

SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 10

SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?”

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SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 10

SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?”

July 6, 2020

Produced byKaris Shearer & Nour Sallam (SoundBox Signals)

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Karis Shearer & Nour Sallam (SoundBox Signals)

Produced by
Karis Shearer & Nour Sallam (SoundBox Signals)