In this micro-edition of recordings drawn from the SpokenWeb Collections, poets roar their verse in “beast language,” provocatively tease their hecklers, recite in the present alongside their past selves, and use intentional silence to shape sonic meanings distinct from those on the written page. If the previous list of performance techniques does not make sense now, it is because these avant-garde performances by writers Michael McClure, Kathy Acker, Muriel Rukeyser, and Daphne Marlatt cannot be fully understood apart from the experience of listening to and viewing the recordings themselves. The authors in this collection–Matthew Kilbane, Nadège Paquette, Trent Wintermeier, Karis Sheerer, Emily Christina Murphy, and Rowan Pickard–do exactly that by bringing contemporary ears and attunement to literary performance recordings from 1969 to 2019. Their annotations combine observations of past literary events with present day analysis and contextualization through brief introductory essays.As cultural heritage collections become increasingly digitized, it is notable that the digitization of textual artifacts far outpaces audiovisual artifacts.[^1] These essays stake claims for the significance of audiovisual recordings in the archive and, as such, vary in the aspects of performance to which they attend. But a unifying thread across all of these essays is their insistence that close-listening to digitized literary performance recordings offers new meanings that would otherwise be unheard or seen on the written page.[^2] [^1]:As cultural heritage collections become increasingly digitized, it is notable that the digitization of textual artifacts far outpaces audiovisual artifacts. Digital AV collections are still not well-represented in our national and international digital platforms such as Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America(DPLA), and the Internet Archive. As of April 2023, Europeana comprises 55% images and 43% text objects, but only 1% sound and 0.6% video objects. DPLA includes 27% images and 50% text, with fewer than 1% sound objects and moving image objects combined. The Internet Archive, which allows the community to upload artifacts, reports that its collection—still mostlycomprising text—has 37% books and texts, 13% audio, 8% video, and 4% images. [^2]:This argument is not new, but builds on a history of recent scholarship in sound studies including Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford UP, 1998), Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP, 2003), and publications by scholars working in the SpokenWeb consortium. Jason Camlot’s Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford UP, 2019), Tanya Clement’s article “Anne Sexton Listening to Anne Sexton,” PMLA vol. 135, no. 2, March 2020, pp. 387–392 (6) and forthcoming book Dissonant Records (MIT Press, 2024).

As editors, we have done our best to cohere a unifying lexicon for many, but not all of the annotations our contributors have created. In these annotated recordings, you will notice that all annotations are categorized. Some of these categories are more straightforward and run across all of the recordings. “Author Reading,” “Author Speaking,” “Environment,” and “Audience” compose these stable categories around which our contributors build their own interpretive frameworks. “Author Reading” consists of the author reading directly from their published work. In this category, we have: Muriel Rukeyser reading from her 1968 collection of poetry The Speed of Darkness (Random House, New York) for an audience at Sir George Williams University;[^3] Michael McClure reading from his 1964 collection of poetry Ghost Tantras (City Lights, San Francisco) at Naropa University in 1976;[^4] Kathy Acker performing excerpts from her 1988 experimental novel Empire of the Senseless (Grove Atlantic, New York City) at an underground rock club Les Foufounes Électriques in Montreal;[^5] Daphne Marlatt reading from her 1969 collection of poetry leaf/leafs (Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles) in both the year of its publication 1969 at her mentor Warren Tallman’s home in Vancouver and in 2019 for an audience at UBC Okanagan’s Amp Lab.[^6]“Author Speaking” simply categorizes every other speech act by the author outside of reading from their published work, such as a poet setting up the publication context for a poem or joking with the audience. “Environment” refers to all annotations that mark ambient sounds captured on the recording like “squeaking” or “shuffling,” but not sourced to either the audience or the author. These sounds may be distortion in the recording itself or from the environment where the event took place, but oftentimes these “environmental” sounds are unsourceable. “Audience,” likely the most straightforward category, is usually composed of “laughing” or “applause.” But sometimes these scholars note less expected audience reactions and use them to consider audience engagement with poetic performance. One audience member yells “You have a nice diction!” at Kathy Acker during her performance at Les Foufounes and she responds with a teasing curtsy. Scholar Nagedge Paquette annotates this audience interaction as demonstrative of Acker’s performance of femininity as it juxtaposes against Acker’s androgynous appearance and the male viewpoints she adopts in Empire of the Senseless. In her project “Formulating Affinities and Defiances through Discomfort” Paquette uses these insights to practice what Michel Chion terms, “causal listening,” the ability to negotiate sound on a recording between the addressee (in this case Acker captured on video) and the “acousmatic” sounds of the audience and environment. [^3]:This collection is one of the largest digitized collections of recordings accessible through SpokenWeb: The Sir George Williams reading series. Sir. George Williams University became Concordia University in Montreal in August 1974. [^4]:The 1976 Michael McClure recording is held at both Naropa University Archives and at Simon Frasier University’s Bennet Library Michael McClure Fonds. The latter is affiliated with SpokenWeb. [^5]:This recording is part of the Alan Lord Collection in the Special Collections at Concordia University, another SpokenWeb Partner. [^6]:The Marlatt recording is housed in UBC Okanagan’s Soundbox Box Collection, affiliated with SpokenWeb.

Outside of the shared lexicon, which the editors have developed above, individual contributors often create their own categories for organizing annotations based on the content of their recordings and their scholarly interests. In Matthew Kilbane’s project “Out of the Cage: Michael McClure and the Digital Lyric Archive” that annotates a recording of Michael McClure–the San Francisco Renaissance poet famous for reading poets in his experimental “Grah!” language to lions at the zoo–Kilbane considers the broader “digital lyric archive.” He explains that this “digital lyric archive” is composed of projects to digitize and make accessible audio recorded poetry, like SpokenWeb and PennSound, but also new tools for curating and contextualizing these artifacts like AudiAnnotate, allowing us to puncture the “isolation tank of history. In a nuanced understanding of recorded voice, Kilbane annotates three modes of voice in these recordings: “reading voice,” which “strives to restore the difference made by the dynamic relationship between the performative voice and the printed page,” the “situated voice,” which “attunes us to the institutionally mediated relation between the performer and the audience,” and the “social voice,” which is always addressed and attuned to reception. While Kilbane invents news modes of annotating poetic voice in the McClure recording, Trent Wintermeier, in his project “Annotating a Duality of Spaces in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness” annotates a more overlooked aspect of recorded poetry performances: the poet’s use of silence. As Wintermeier annotates the “Spaces” in Rukeyser’s 1969, he contextualizes these silences in terms of Rukeyser’s visual poetics and her particular stanza breaks and caesuras in The Speed of Darkness. Wintermeier uses these silences or “Spaces” as an opportunity to employ what Steph Ceraso terms “multimodal listening.” Through annotation and close listening, the caesuras of “Speed of Darkness” are not only seen in the text, but deeply felt and heard in the recording, which Wintermeier uses to explore how this dualism parallels the two kinds of poetry that Rukeyser describes: one based on “material evidence” and the other of “unverifiable facts.” A final distinct approach to the annotation of these recordings belongs to Rowan Pickard, Emily Christina Murphy, and Karis Shearer’s project “Hearing Lived Experience.” In this project, the authors consider not only the voice, audience, and environment, but crucially a juxtaposition in time: this recording annotates Marlatt reading from her collection leaf/leafs in both 1969 and 2019 and shows us where one historical moment begins and ends. Pickard, Murphy, and Shearer discuss the dynamic interplay between these two historical and personal moments as reflected in the poet’s voice. As the authors annotate the two different years throughout the course of the recording, they contextualize their differences within women’s history. Ultimately, Pickard, Murphy, and Shearer connect the differences between Marlatt’s two recorded voices from 1969 and 2019 to a broader feminist politics of voicing poetry as resistance to the heteropatriarchy.

While each annotated performance recording in this micro-edition demonstrates innovative research, these recordings and their accompanying essays speak to one another. The project in this micro-edition—consisting of an annotated recording and contextualizing essay— complement one another through their studies of recorded time, voice, avant-garde performance methods, and the shifting history of literary culture from 1969 to 2019. Keeping time with the accelerating digitization of audio and video collections, emergent modes of collaborative scholarship like this micro-edition of performance recordings from the SpokenWeb collections facilitate fresh conversations between these artifacts, a deeper understanding of their context, and new paths for critical engagement with recorded performances in the present.