| 00:09 |
ShortCuts Theme Music: |
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
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| 00:10 |
Hannah McGregor: |
Welcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.
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| 00:28 |
Hannah McGregor: |
We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? We are delighted to have you with us this season as Katherine brings us more voices from the archives, more conversations, and more thoughtful reactions from her practice of close archival listening.
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| 00:56 |
Hannah McGregor: |
ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] for more.
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| 01:06 |
Hannah McGregor: |
If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Pitch Katherine your ShortCuts minisode idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic].
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| 01:21 |
Hannah McGregor: |
Now, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]
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| 01:34 |
Katherine McLeod: |
Here we are in season three of ShortCuts. We’re ready to take more deep dives into the archives, through listening closely and carefully to short cuts [Sound Effect: Scissors] of audio. My name is Katherine McLeod. And, over these past seasons, I’ve come to understand ShortCuts as an archival and affective place made through sound where we can talk, listen, feel, question, and think together about archival sound and the world it makes and unmakes. Welcome. This season begins with a warm-up. It’s a listening exercise to get us ready and attuned to archival listening. The short cuts will be from past ShortCuts episodes. Yes, we’re getting meta here by diving into the archives of ShortCuts. We’re doing this in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like, what kind of place it has made so far, and to hear what it does creatively and critically with its sound. It’s an exercise in a podcast listening to itself in order to grow. All of the sounds will be clips from the ShortCuts archives, and that includes my voiceover. From now on, all of the sounds that you will hear will be found sounds, sounds, sounds… [Katherine’s voice overlapping] And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.
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| 03:09 |
Musical Interlude: |
ShortCuts Theme Music:
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| 03:10 |
Tanya Davis, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10: |
If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if you weren’t okay with it, just wait.
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| 03:19 |
Ali Barillaro, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10: |
I originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain [Music: Feminine Voice from SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] about life in the midst of a pandemic.
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| 03:30 |
Katherine McLeod: |
How can you hear time?
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| 03:33 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present.
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| 03:35 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
She has never read it like this before she cuts it up.
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| 03:40 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
It’s called “An Elegy in Joy,” and it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. Cut it up.
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| 03:49 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts. Death and explosion and the world un-begun.
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| 03:56 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
[Voice of Muriel Rukeyser overlapping with same words] Death, and explosion, and the world un-begun.
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| 04:03 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
I thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico.
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| 04:08 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.3: |
When listening to a recording, can you be listening for time? Can we hear the spring thaw in an archival recording of poetry?
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| 04:19 |
Margaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
This is one of the very cold days, I guess about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass separating inside from outside, comes into a certain kind of sky that goes with that, which is like glass. Again…
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| 04:43 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9: |
Something I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts is: What kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound…
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| 04:59 |
Stephanie Bolster, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
I guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything and you know, slow it down and take in the details. Just like the density and the abundance of details. I was scribbling things down and couldn’t keep up. And in that sense, it really felt, you know, the same sense I would have had in a live reading.
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| 05:15 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2: |
As you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? Why do people come and listen to poems? And listen to poems?
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| 05:27 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
I listen again, and again.
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| 05:30 |
Mathieu Aubin, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
When I was listening to it, the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately –it’s different with you obviously because we’re actually responding, and we’re both in on it – like this is about to happen – and you could feel it generations later. That awkwardness. And you’d be like, everyone’s like ‘eee’…
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| 05:49 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
It’s also interesting that the whole, sort of, joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then – this – if she does like slam the book down, or – if she, you know – the presence of the weight of the page – [recording of Margaret Avison overlaps] and you read it and you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down and there are so many emotions happening in this moment…
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| 06:13 |
Margaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
Now I’ll read it again.
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| 06:14 |
Barbara Nickel, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6: |
I have from years of reading her I have a certain voice in my mind – the voice of the page – and then to hear her voice for the first time…
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| 06:25 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.4: |
Listen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body. As the poem breaths – in and out – it is breathing…
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| 06:36 |
Dionne Brand, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9: |
[Reading poem] I will not take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds, every day, even those that do not hold a wind’s impression… Okay that’s enough. [Applause]
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| 06:49 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9: |
The recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio. On radiofreerainforest… [Sound of the intro music from the radio program and the words “radio free rain forest” are repeated.] radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s. [“Words and the sound” are words repeated as part of the intro music from the radio program.]
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| 07:09 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
[Audible sound of background noise ongoing.] The recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room. This is the sound of the audience. This is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as they are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event…
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| 07:43 |
Alexei Perry Cox, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8: |
[Reading poem] The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time…
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| 07:59 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8: |
[Alexei’s reading continues in the background.] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at The Words and Music Show online on March 29th, 2020. [Audible sounds of Alexei’s daughter Isla.] She’s reading from Finding Places to Make Places, and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla, her then 18-month old daughter.
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| 08:23 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8: |
When I heard Alexei read at The Words and Music Show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices. What improvisation at a poetry reading.
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| 08:34 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2: |
…What is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up and the involuntary muscles… And you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something, with almost unmediated – that is the poem among us, between us, there.
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| 09:10 |
Phyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
[Reading poem] You brought me clarity, gift after gift, I wear… poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.
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| 09:27 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
In that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with arrows, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series…
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| 10:01 |
Phyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
[Reading poem] While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.
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| 10:06 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
We hear this holding the quietness of each page.
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| 10:11 |
Phyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
[Reading poem]. In the room. We knew.
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| 10:15 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
We hear the turning of the page, the room…
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| 10:19 |
Phyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
[Reading poem] The room that held you… is still here.
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| 10:23 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
We are listening to desire in the making. Every time we press play on this recording as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem…
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| 10:32 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2: |
You get some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?
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| 10:36 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
Let’s hear all of that again.
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| 10:39 |
Muriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5: |
[Reading poem] Who will speak these days. If not, if not you?
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| 10:46 |
Phyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
[Reading poem]. Poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.
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| 10:57 |
Katherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7: |
The room that held you is still here.
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| 11:08 |
Music Interlude: |
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
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| 11:09 |
Katherine McLeod: |
Shortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] |
