Hearing Lived Experience
By Rowan Pickard, Emily Christina Murphy, and Karis Shearer
Bringing sounds of the past to the present allows us to hear living moments. New sentiments, experiences, and thinking underpin every pause and shift in intonation. With a recording of Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt in 2019 reading her poetry alongside her voice from 1969, this contribution suggests that Marlatt’s changes in voice indicate how sound carries experiences and audio recordings continuously build meaning over time.
In July 1969, twenty-six-year-old Daphne Marlatt sat in the home of her former professor, Warren Tallman, and read from her first collection of poems leaf leaf/s (Black Sparrow Press, 1969). The recording of Marlatt’s reading of leaf leaf/s⎯framed by conversations between Marlatt and Tallman⎯is now part of the AMP Lab’s SoundBox Collection at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Marlatt’s unique spacing, caesuras, use of poetic sound effects like alliteration and consonance, and overall form of the written text can be heard through Marlatt’s fluctuating tone, speed, stress, and pitch.
Fifty years later, at age seventy-six, Marlatt read from leaf leaf/s during a 2019 event held by Inspired Word Café and the AMP Lab, and co-hosted by then-undergraduate research assistant Megan Butchart. During the event, Marlatt read alongside the 1969 recording of her voice, with her past and present voices exchanging turns reading. Despite the distinct differences in Marlatt’s voice, the transitions are almost seamless. In text, the poems remain unchanged; however, Marlatt’s contemporary reading presents differently from her earlier reading. Aside from recording quality, acoustics, and echoes, the sound was different. Marlatt’s 2019 voice carried nearly fifty years worth of new experiences, understandings, and context heard in her fluctuating intonations. Despite being Marlatt’s first published collection that “was written out of learning” and experimenting with language, leaf leaf/s and Marlatt’s readings of it have received little scholarly attention (“Performing the Archive” 00:22:53-00:25:44). Marlatt’s voice in her 1969 readings of leaf leaf/s provides an instance of a young woman poet’s reading ahead of a series of significant social, political, and literary shifts. Her 2019 reading, however, reveals a distinct change in voice in the wake of⎯and possibly informed by⎯these shifts. In their 2018 study, Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller demonstrate how different backgrounds and contexts can cause significant changes between speakers’ pitch, speed, acceleration, and dynamism in poetry readings. From their findings, MacArthur, Zellou, and Miller suggest that women poets “are attempting to sound more masculine and thus more authoritative” and will continue to adopt “a less Expressive style of reading, associated with male poets, as long as that is the norm for male poets” (46). For instance, women poets born before the 1960s were recorded to have a “wider pitch, faster pitch speed, slightly faster pitch acceleration, and greater dynamism” than women poets born after the 1960s (37-9). The narrow pitch range seen amongst the women poets born after the 1960s thus aligns more with the average pitch range of all the male poets that were examined under the same study at the same time the women poets had a comparatively slower pitch speed and acceleration than the male poets (45-6). Regarding the sexualities of the poets, results show that, while non-heterosexual men poets were shown to have very little differences in intonation than heterosexual men poets, non-heterosexual women poets demonstrated a slightly wider pitch range than heterosexual women poets (46). Further, the study’s findings reveal that audience can be a critical factor in the ways in which a poet reads their own poems. For example, African-American women poets who “find mainstream recognition” and therefore “frequently read to ‘the mainly white room’” tend to “read in a less Expressive, more Formal manner” (56-7). Perhaps the study’s conclusions could additionally be interpreted as women poets shifting away from performing heteropatriarchal ideals and expectations of (acceptable) femininity and towards their own voice.
In an episode of ”Performing the Archive” by SoundBox Signals, Marlatt explains why she vowed to always read her own poems out loud to audiences after attending her first poetry reading. Having expressed that she felt too nervous to read her poem aloud at the event, Marlatt reveals that a male peer offered to read it for her, subsequently causing Marlatt to squirm in her seat because “he didn’t read it the way [Marlatt] thought it should be read” (“Performing the Archive” 00:05:35-00:06:55). Marlatt’s personal experiences and challenges influenced much of her work following leaf leaf/s. In an interview with Laura Moss and Gillian Gerome, Marlatt recalls how⎯having navigated much of the literary world during the 1960s⎯one of the first things she had to learn was how to stand up for her own perceptions and her own voice (256). Although Marlatt affirms she received immense support from a number of other women writers in the 1960s, she reveals it was not until the 1970s when “American feminism became a powerful influence” that she felt “a strong sense of shared experience with women writers” (257). Reflecting on her experiences living in Vancouver during the 70s, Marlatt states that it was “a strongly collective decade in its movement for social and political change” and a “time of great experimentation” in the realms of visual art and writing (250). For Marlatt, “genre and syntactical experimentation and word play” continues to be crucial and “useful techniques for disrupting any dominant structures of thought” (259). Because language shapes our thinking, she affirms that “disrupting old patterns of binary thinking feels essential to changing social realities” (Marlatt 259). In other words, reimagining language and its meanings beyond hegemonic thought provokes an interrogation of the surrounding systems of power and patterns that confine, restrict, and silence.
Published right before the 1970s, leaf leaf/s preceded numerous historical events and movements that either stemmed from or led to momentous shifts in women’s writing. Ironically, Marlatt observes that leaf leaf/s was “more radical in its language use” than much of what she has published since (Moss and Jerome 263). Following a conversation with linguist D. Alexander, Marlatt says she realised that she viewed language as “referring to objects and actions in the world” rather than as a medium, prompting her to experiment with language accordingly in leaf leaf/s (00:24:03-00:25:35). Although Marlatt finds the collection to be “a rather abstract book now,” she underscores that it taught her a great deal about language (“Performing the Archive” 00:25:35-00:25:44).
Works Cited
Lacey, Kate, and Michele Hilmes. Feminist Media Histories. U of California Press, vol. 1, no. 4, 2015.
MacArthur, Marit, et. al. “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-72.
Moss, Laura, and Gillian Jerome. “‘Beyond the Hungry Edge’: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 248-65.
“Performing the Archive.” SoundBox Signals Season 1, Episode 2. Co-produced by Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam. Available online: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/performing-the-archive/.
| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 - 0:19 | Marlatt introduces the event. | Marlatt speaking |
| 0:20 - 2:13 | Marlatt provides an introduction to leaf leaf/s and the poems, explaining that they were written at a point when she was "trying to figure out who [she] was" and "trying to figure out language." | Marlatt speaking |
| 5:55 - 6:30 | Marlatt provides some background on the inspirations behind the poem played aloud through the recording. | Marlatt speaking |
| 6:32 - 6:48 | Marlatt decides between reading one or two more poems from leaf leaf/s. | Marlatt speaking |
| 8:15 - 8:26 | Marlatt introduces the second part of leaf leaf/s. | Marlatt speaking |
| 11:11 - 11:17 | Marlatt prefaces the next and final poem that she will read aloud. | Marlatt speaking |
| 3:30 - 4:55 | Marlatt reads her poems aloud from where the 1969 recording left off. | 2019 |
| 6:49 - 7:15 | Marlatt reads her poems aloud. | 2019 |
| 8:28 - 9:20 | Marlatt reads her poems aloud. | 2019 |
| 11:17 - 11:41 | Marlatt reads the last poem for the event out loud. | 2019 |
| 2:20 - 3:30 | The 1969 recording of Marlatt reading leaf leaf/s is played. | 1969 |
| 5:00 - 5:54 | The 1969 recording of Marlatt reading leaf leaf/s is played. | 1969 |
| 7:23 - 7:57 | The 1969 recording of Marlatt reading leaf leaf/s is played. | 1969 |
| 9:28 - 11:07 | The 1969 recording of Marlatt reading leaf leaf/s is played. | 1969 |
| 8:05 - 8:15 | Marlatt points out that "you never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another." People in the audience laugh. | Audience |