SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 6

SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”

This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a new podcast in the SpokenWeb family – SoundBox Signals – inviting us to listen in close to UBCO’s SoundBox Collection. In this episode, Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin and guests Lauren St. Clair and Nour Sallam invite us into a “close listening” of a previously unpublished poem from Canadian poet bill bissett. You can find the full-length recording of the bill bissett clip and more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.

SoundBox Signals is a podcast that brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode features a conversation with a curator and two special guests. Together they’ll listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history.

SoundBox Signals Artwork by Myron Campbell.

For the shout-outs mentioned at the end of this episode, please visit the links below:

bill bissett’s Breth (Talonbooks):

https://talonbooks.com/books/breth

bill bissett on PennSound:

https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php

Cut and Run Podcast by Brady Marks:

http://furiousgreencloud.com/wordpress/blog/author/furiousgreencloud/

Sarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying (MQUP):

https://www.mqup.ca/art-of-dying–the-products-9780773552715.php

Ian Ferrier at the Inspired Word Cafe:

http://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/

00:06	Theme Music:	[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.
00:06	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. When we listen to recorded poetry, taking the time to attend closely to the recording, to tune into the rhythm, the cadence, the sense of space and place, new connections and intimacies emerge. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we’re excited to share with you the new SoundBox Signals Podcast, inviting us to listen in close to UBC Okanagan’s SoundBox collection. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close reading and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and two special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider what 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, curator Mathieu Aubin, and guests invite us into a close listening of bill bissett’s previously unpublished poem from around 1966. Here is Karis Shearer with “Is That Me?” episode one of SoundBox Signals. [Theme Music]
02:30	Audio Recording:	[Click] [Melodic Instrumentals Overlapping Voices] I see you. [Inaudible] What is the [inaudible] Where is this voice? Coming! [inaudible] How curious you are to me…[Click]
02:45	Karis Shearer:	I’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today at UBC Okanagan [UBCO] by guest curator Mathieu Aubin, who recently finished his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Here and Queer in Vancouver,” which touches on the work of bill bissett. Also joined by Lauren St. Clair, who is a Computer Science major, Data Science minor and is the president of the Quantitative Science Course Union here at UBCO. Also joined by our podcast producer extraordinaire Nour Sallam, who is pursuing her honours English degree here at UBCO. Welcome everybody.
03:20	Various Voices:	[Overlapping] Hello. Hi. Hi.
03:20	Karis Shearer:	We are here today to listen to a clip by bill bissett. So we’re going to rewind to 1966 and listen to that recording, which is part of our SoundBox collection here at UBCO.
03:48	Audio Recording:	[Click] [Audio, bill bissett recording] This. Well. Palpitation jelly gold. Were saying [inaudible] tomato. You got that should be enough. Look like needles and what just fires. Enter greenly splotch us belly holes and ice and stitches and wrestle them water in hay wires. Is that blood on my pillow? Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle in their sitting room? Is that me on the windowsill in worm slice. Oooze. How did she do it at feet radiators. And [inaudible] unslow on my, you know. Keep wishing we were in his 40 cent bed. This is the second we left Istanbul, which is Mediterranean. [Click]
05:00	Karis Shearer:	So what you just heard is a clip from a longer recording made on magnetic tape. It’s on reel-to-reel, probably made by Warren Tallman. It was part of his collection and is by poet bill bissett. Mathieu, do you want to give us a little bit more context of this recording?
05:19	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah, of course. So in this recording, what we have is — if it is in fact from 1966 as the material, the tape, indicates — bill bissett is likely around 26 or 27 years old. It is one of the earliest recordings that we have of bill bissett reading his work and what he’s reading in the, in the recording as a whole beyond this clip is some poems that have been published later on in some format in we sleep inside each othr all, which was published by Ganglia Press in Toronto in 1966. And one of the exciting things about this clip in particular is that this poem was never published. As bill bissett indicates, lines of this poem were published in other poems such as “Veronica,” which have been, or which were previously published, now published in his new [inaudible] books called breth. But otherwise, this is an unpublished poem and what we have access to is a really raw bill bissett and a very youthful bill bissett, which you can tell by his voice. And what’s really exciting about this as well is we don’t really know where it took place necessarily. Based on bill, it possibly was recorded with Warren Tallman, but also perhaps with Doug Geissman who he recorded with a lot. And we don’t have access to any sense of audience, which is a little odd for people who are often used to going to his readings and hearing the audience banter back with him. There’s mostly silence between the poems, which gives it a different feeling.
06:46	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, yeah, it sure does. It’s, it was an exciting recording to discover in the sense that I think the performance is quite different from bill’s typical performances today.
07:00	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
07:00	Karis Shearer:	Lauren, you were one of the early listeners to this recording, you helped digitize it. And it’s a strange and fascinating style of reading to encounter, isn’t it?
07:11	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah.
07:11	Karis Shearer:	Can you talk a little bit about, like, your impressions of it, what it reminds you of in terms of style?
07:17	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah, like it sounds almost robotic and it definitely is not based in sounding robotic because it’s from the ’60s. But, to me, when I first listened to it, it almost sounded like a literal voice translation of like sticking the poem into a machine and having it be played out. Like when he speaks, it sounds almost spliced together and not like he’s speaking in the actual moment. Like it’s kind of like a collage–
07:49	Karis Shearer:	Mhm!
07:49	Lauren St. Clair:	–of words in a way. Like if you took a bunch of words from a magazine and kind of just stuck them together and read it out, that’s kind of the impression it gave me when I first heard it.
07:58	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, it has a kind of very chopped version of it. Nour, you were thinking about some of how the way in which the style is connected to the content of the poem and that kind of fragmentation that we’re hearing both stylistically, but then also within kind of the body of the poem. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that fragmentation’s playing out here?
08:20	Nour Sallam:	Yeah, it’s a lot like what Lauren was saying. It’s very spliced and it does give off the feeling that it’s a little bit like a collage, which I find really interesting because the fragmentation kind of gives you that feeling of isolation that he is experiencing from the body. Like when he says, “Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle? Is it me on the windowsill? Is that my body?”, you really get that sense of fragmentation and isolation, especially in the way he reads it and the way he sounds out the words and pauses between them.
09:02	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
09:02	Karis Shearer:	There’s kind of an alienation almost from the body, isn’t there?
09:06	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
09:06	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
09:06	Nour Sallam:	Yeah, an alienation from the body. I picked up on it specifically through the way he sounds out and pauses between all the words or pieces them together in a way that if you, if he was just saying them and if he was just speaking in a non-performative way, maybe you wouldn’t have picked up on that.
09:28	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, ’cause we’re getting like, we’re getting a lot of like the blood, “Is that blood on my pillow?” Right? That’s part of him. But he’s also seeing it, right? So there’s, you know,–
09:36	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
09:36	Karis Shearer:	–there’s the speaker looking at pieces of himself. He’s a puddle. He’s, you know, there’s blood on the pillow.
09:44	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
09:44	Karis Shearer:	So that contributing–
09:45	Nour Sallam:	And the form of questioning, too. He, it’s, it almost gives you the sense that he’s unsure. Is it me? Is it someone else? Like what, what am I looking at?
09:56	Karis Shearer:	That’s a great observation. That’s, that kind of like uncertainty around–
10:00	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
10:00	Karis Shearer:	–what he’s perceiving.
10:01	Nour Sallam:	Yes, exactly.
10:03	Karis Shearer:	Sounds wonderful. Matt, I’m going to come over to you and ask you a little bit about this, you know, continuing on this question of style–
10:10	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
10:10	Karis Shearer:	–of reading. Can you talk a little bit about how this style that we’re hearing here–
10:14	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
10:14	Karis Shearer:	–that Nour and Lauren just talked about in terms of its fragmentation, the kind of almost computerized voice, which is so curious, you know, 1966. It’s not modeled after anything that we would necessarily, that we’re familiar with now.
10:33	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
10:33	Karis Shearer:	How does the style that we’re hearing here differ from bissett’s contemporary performance style?
10:40	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah. There’s so many great threads that you’ve been bringing up so far. I mean, the sense of the technology perhaps or technological voice in some sense and bill is, bill bissett’s very much interested in that idea of like, well he’s using the typewriter to write most of his poems and like that idea of like what is a tape recorder, perhaps, to bring to it too, what does it mean to become maybe like a robot in that sense? But the question of collage too is essential to his art practice. He’s often thinking about intersplicing different lines of poems in his oral performance of the poetry. And even on the page he’s really thinking about putting things together and collaging them literally, so I really liked that observation, that in sense of like what you’re hearing, which also carries over to the page.
11:22	Mathieu Aubin:	What we have here in this recording is a really young bill bissett. And what surprised me when I first heard this last spring was that youthfulness. And having been to many of his readings in past few years, what surprised me was some of the elements that were perhaps different or maybe missing that I was expecting. And perhaps it’s because of it being maybe an early recording or the fact that it’s in a private context, but there’s something to be said about the private versus the public. When he’s reading in the public context, there’s an audience very much knowing his work and are able to respond to him and he’s very humourous in his performance. You still hear that a bit in this recording. However, the humour depends on obviously an audience responding to it and that’s not as present in this recording.
12:09	Mathieu Aubin:	The other thing, too, that I’m surprised is there is no instrument that’s being played in this and he’s known for having maracas on stage very often, and chanting with it. And there’s no “hummina hummina”, you know, the ways of bringing different lines together. And what doesn’t surprise me though is when I found out that this is a poem that was of course never published, but has lines that have been published in other poems, is this improvisational aspect of it. And part of his performance today is still that idea of improvising and working with things. And I was rewatching some of his performances on YouTube the other day and I thought it was really interesting that he’d often start with philosophical questions, those kinds of questions that Nour is bringing up are in this poem, but of course are being asked differently. So I think there are a lot of similarities, but there’s of course a development around that idea of the public audience listening that isn’t in here.
13:00	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, I like that. So you’re seeing a kind of, or hearing a through line from this early work through to his performance now–
13:08	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
13:08	Karis Shearer:	–but also seeing some of the differences, particularly around the live audience, right?
13:11	Mathieu Aubin:	Yes.
13:11	Karis Shearer:	The improvisation, the responding to the audience. We hear that a lot in his contemporary work.
13:16	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
13:18	Karis Shearer:	I’m gonna come back to Nour and I want to ask you about, again, the question of listening. We’re hearing a lot of onomatopoeia and like real sound play here around words. We hear words like, “Oooze”–
13:31	Nour Sallam:	Mhm.
13:31	Karis Shearer:	–that are really, that really play out in a way that point to or signify the concept that they represent. Can you point to a couple other moments where we’re hearing that sound play?
13:44	Nour Sallam:	Yeah. Specifically in the beginning of the recording that we heard, there’s a theme of liquids–
13:52	Karis Shearer:	Mhm!
13:52	Nour Sallam:	–going on and you can hear that a lot in the specific words like “oooze” and like “palpitation jelly” that he splices or stresses and so on. And “splurged” and words like that where he is really emphasizing that the idea of liquids, but also like the theme of fluidity, which is really interesting to me because of the fragmentation of the poem.
14:20	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. It’s kind of a tension between like the chopping up of words, right? “Palpitation.”
14:24	Nour Sallam:	Yeah!
14:24	Karis Shearer:	Which is about poking, right?
14:25	Nour Sallam:	Yeah. And the “oooze”-ing.
14:27	Karis Shearer:	Yeah, the elongation of those sounds to signify liquid or fluidity.
14:33	Nour Sallam:	Yeah. It truly is, it’s a very masterful reading, I think, of what he’s, he’s trying to portray.
14:40	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Matt, do you wanna say, I mean we’re hearing there’s so many, there’s so much sound play–
14:47	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
14:47	Karis Shearer:	–in this particular performance, particular poem. Can you comment a little bit about what we’re not hearing in this particular recording?
14:56	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah, so again, I think the, of course we have those sounds and like the vocalization and the polyvocality and then we were talking about hearing the playing with that. But again, to return to my earlier point about what I don’t hear in the recording, is one, an audience, which surprises me because I know that based on what he shared with me, bill is not reading alone in this room. What would the person be responding to? Were they responding at all? Are they maybe having a cigarette, let’s say, or what were they doing? Were they just casually listening? If not, if there is no audience or no response from the audience because they’re likely is an audience, what does it mean for him to just be reading it this way? And it is a work in process or progress or whatever you want to call it. But he’s reciting this and I am thinking back to this close listening that we did last summer at Congress and Jason Camlot, talked about the idea of, it sounds like almost like a recitation of the poem. And knowing a bit more context about the poem, it sounds about right in that it is just him working through the poem that never ended up being published.
16:05	Mathieu Aubin:	But the other part that I’m surprised that I don’t hear is, you know, the musicality and almost like a sense of, a lack of banter, which is so essential to his practice today. There’s just banter and he’ll stop and say something hilarious in the middle of the poem and then go on to read the poem. Here what you have is someone who is just reading the poem and of course emphasizing certain words like “splurge!”, but he’s also like very much going through the poem. And something that we might not hear, too, is what is the context? Are we in a living room? We kind of hear the hum in the background of the digital, not the digital, the analog technology and in the recording, but we have zero idea of where this takes place. We’re assuming that this is in Vancouver if it is in fact with Warren Tallman, but we don’t hear that. And then the other thing, too, is often when you see him on stage, he’s opening up a water bottle or all those other kinds of sounds. But this is such a crisp recording that makes you think, “Okay, what, is he just sitting here at a table reading his poem?” And in other parts of the recording, though, you hear him turn a page and that poem is from we sleep inside of each othr all and what’s interesting is the poem has even been changed.
17:23	Mathieu Aubin:	So looking at the archival material, my partner Emma Middleton was thinking about like, “Okay, well, is that exactly how it sounds in the recording?” And it’s not. So what are the pages? How is he, how is he going through this? So we know at least that we can hear the page, so he has that, but we have very limited context about that.
17:41	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. So in the body of recordings that we have of bill bissett or that are available online for listening, PennSound, for example–
17:48	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
17:48	Karis Shearer:	–this becomes quite an unusual–
17:49	Mathieu Aubin:	Yes.
17:50	Karis Shearer:	–example because of that kind of studio quality, if you will. Quite uncharacteristic of bill bissett. So it strikes me that one of the research questions that a person could pursue would be to map the arc of the recordings. And so maybe to kind of point out where we start to see some of the contemporary style that we have. Lauren, I’m going to go over to you and I want to ask you this kind of question around the difference between the studio recording and the live recording. You are a real music fan, I know. And so my question for you is, like, what is for you the difference between the studio recording and listening to, I mean, not necessarily experiencing the live show but hearing the live recording–
18:32	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah.
18:32	Karis Shearer:	–of something. Do you have a preference and what are you listening for in those contexts and what makes those different for you?
18:39	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah, I guess it really depends on what you’re listening for and more of like the technical way you might be listening for the studio recording, for like how the sound is balanced or whatnot between the live version. But if you’re listening to it for more of, like, the piece itself, you might be listening to the live because it feels more intimate. You might be hearing like banter that you wouldn’t be hearing otherwise.
19:05	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
19:05	Lauren St. Clair:	You hear those intimate moments shared between the musician or the performer having with the audience that you wouldn’t have captured otherwise or is only shared in that specific recorded moment.
19:17	Karis Shearer:	Exactly, yeah. They’re event-based, aren’t they?
19:19	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah!
19:19	Karis Shearer:	So you have that, you know, unique interaction–
19:22	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah.
19:22	Karis Shearer:	–of that particular concert or that particular event.
19:26	Lauren St. Clair:	Yeah.
19:26	Karis Shearer:	Which we don’t have here in this recording because of that lack of play with the audience or even as, you know, someone who recorded a lot of material, Warren Tallman doesn’t on this recording introduce it or tell us, you know, exactly what date it’s recorded or where, which was fairly typical that he, he often did do that. So even in our collection, it becomes an unusual example. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]
19:53	Karis Shearer:	I’m gonna fast forward now to contemporary, we’re gonna take us out of 1966 to the contemporary moment. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] I wanna ask you about any shout-outs that you have to poetry sound events that are happening, any digital archives you want to mention that are maybe inspired by or related to this archive. I’m going to start with Matt.
20:18	Mathieu Aubin:	Yeah, so as I mentioned, the book breth recently published by Talon Books is a collection from basically the whole of bill bissett, including works that have never been published. So if you pick up that book, what will be great to see, too, is parts of this clip that we just listened to, some lines will be found in different poems in that book. And he’s also been celebrating his 80th birthday and tons of events in the whole greater Toronto area, including St. Catharines, Ontario, and that are just really, I guess, commemorating his career and the amount of publications that he has done. So it’s really exciting. So really make sure to check out that book.
20:56	Mathieu Aubin:	And one thing I want to mention, too, is that idea of PennSound and another recording just 13 years later, is making sure that like there are other places that you can also access this and compare that if you’re really interested in doing that.
21:07	Karis Shearer:	Yeah. Thanks so much. Lauren, I’m gonna go over to you, a kind of event or thing you want to mention.
21:14	Lauren St. Clair:	Cool. Yeah, I wanna give a shout-out to the podcast Cut & Run, which is run by Brady Marks, who is a computational sound artist based in Vancouver. And she also has the handle furiousgreencloud if you’re interested in following her on social media or checking out her website where you can go check out her computational art that’s usually based in sound. It’s very cool. And the Cut & Run podcast is a focus on music and specifically like experimental music usually.
21:45	Karis Shearer:	Cool.
21:45	Mathieu Aubin:	Mhm.
21:45	Karis Shearer:	That is very cool. Nour, I’m gonna go over to you, wanna give a shout-out?
21:51	Nour Sallam:	Yeah. I’d like to give a shout-out to the Canadian poet in the contemporary setting, her name’s Sarah Tolmie. I recently came across her poetry because I picked up a copy of the Griffin 2019 Poetry Prize and she was one of the shortlisted winners. And her poetry is really, is really beautiful to the contemporary settings specifically in like contemporary issues. And yeah, she’s super cool.
22:18	Karis Shearer:	Awesome. Sarah Tolmie.
22:20	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
22:20	Karis Shearer:	Great.
22:20	Nour Sallam:	Her book is The Art of Dying.
22:21	Karis Shearer:	The Art of Dying.
22:23	Nour Sallam:	Yeah.
22:23	Karis Shearer:	Fantastic. Thank you–
22:24	Mathieu Aubin:	Sounds optimistic.
22:24	Karis Shearer:	–so much. And I’m gonna give a shout-out to close. Ian Ferrier of SpokenWeb and much other fame is going to be here in Kelowna on January 23rd. He’s reading with Samuel Archibald at 7:00 PM at Cool Arts studio on Cawston as part of the Inspired Word Cafe series. So that should be a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to welcoming Ian to Kelowna.
22:52	Karis Shearer:	I want to thank all of you for being here today and giving some really great insights into this particular recording, doing your curated close-listening and listening and talking. That’s what this is all about. I also want to thank bill bissett for giving us permission to use this particular clip and host it on our website and to the estate of Warren Tallman for their permission as well. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]
23:23	Karis Shearer:	That was episode one of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by bill bissett from our archive called the SoundBox Collection, which is housed in the UBCO AMP Lab. You can find full-length versions of our recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I’ll see you next time.
23:54	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 Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab, that’s A M P L A B, .ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Nour Sallam, and Lauren St. Clair for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the 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.

Nour Sallam & Karis Shearer

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.

Mathieu Aubin successfully defended his dissertation on Vancouver’s small presses, queer poetry, and lesbian and gay liberation movements at The University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) in Summer 2019. A former AMP Lab Fellow and Instructor at UBC Okanagan, Mathieu is now a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University within the “Oral Literary History” research component of the SpokenWeb project.

Lauren St. Clair is a third-year undergraduate student studying Computer Science and Data Science at UBCO. She is interested in data science and its intersections within the digital humanities. She works as an RA on the SpokenWeb project in digitization and website design. Lauren is passionate about sound and enjoys field recording in her free time.

SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 6

SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”

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SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 6

SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”

March 2, 2020

Produced byNour Sallam & Karis Shearer

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Nour Sallam & Karis Shearer

Produced by
Nour Sallam & Karis Shearer