The SpokenWeb Anthology

I. Introducing The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology

The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology showcases audio and video recordings of literary events from archives across Canada to promote new modes of listening to and engaging with these important artifacts. As SpokenWeb “aims to develop coordinated and collaborative approaches to literary historical study,” the anthology does exactly that through a collaborative digital edition of annotated audiovisual recordings from the SpokenWeb collection. Each project in the anthology annotates an artifact in sync with the time of the recording and theorizes new ways of understanding or contextualizing it. These recordings are longer only a canister on a library shelf reserved for scholarly use or one recording among many on an academic library website; the audio and video recordings exhibited in The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology are made newly present through the writer, the reader, and the listener’s multimodal annotations. In conversation with one another, each project reframes what is heard, touched, and seen on these recordings.

Common to each contributor’s project in the anthology is the use of the AudiAnnotate audiovisual extensible workflow created by Dr. Tanya Clement (UT Austin) and Brumfield Labs. As a workflow and platform for sharing and curating annotations of audiovisual materials held at libraries, archives, and museums, AudiAnnotate combines metadata for online audio and video assets with user-generated annotations to create simple web-based editions and exhibits. Crucial to how we experience time-based media, these scholarly annotations function less like a placard contextualizing a piece at a museum and more like taking notes during a lecture, poetry reading, or film screening. Using timestamped annotations, writers in this anthology suture their ideas into the time of the recording. Using AudiAnnotate, the scholars in this anthology remediate the gap between transcripts on paper and the push to digitize audiovisual materials. And, as evident in the seven projects created for The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology, researchers using AudiAnnotate can organize transcripts in new ways, drawing our attention to larger patterns, sounds, histories, tones, and forms that often fall outside of the transcript.

II. New Approaches to Annotating Time in Literary Audio

Many contributions to the anthology employ unique ways of annotating that surpass the limits of transcription, including the ability to discuss recordings that combine different moments in time. Rachel Pickard, Emily Murphy, and Karis Shearer’s project, “Hearing Lived Experience,” exemplifies this type of close attention to the recording’s unique temporality. The authors examine a recent recording of Daphne Marlatt that juxtaposes the poet reading from her first collection leaf/leafs in 1969 at the home of her former professor, Warren Tallman, and then fifty years later at UBCO’s AmpLab in 2019. Pickard, Murphy, and Shearer discuss the dynamic interplay between these two historical and personal moments as reflected in the poet’s voice. Their argument uses theoretical interventions from MacArthur and Clement discussing how positionality shapes voice to understand the development of Marlatt’s poetics and politics. Ultimately, the authors 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.

Similarly, Trent Wintermeier’s project “Annotating a Duality of Spaces in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness” makes us aware of a silent facet of poetics: stanza breaks and caesurae. In Wintermeier’s research, these spaces become palpable as he demarcates the extended silences heard during Muriel Rukeyser’s 1969 reading at the Sir George Williams Reading Series. For Wintermeier, the ability to annotate within the time of the recording makes the absence of sound newly audible and crucial to our understanding of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness.” Wintermeier tells us that, in Rukeyser’s original performance, the poet viusally indicated stanza breaks in the 13 stanza poem, “Speed of Darkness,” which is of course not evident in an audio recording. Instead, Wintermeier uses this omission 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.”

III. Redefining Sound and Voice

As well as making time audible, many of these projects redefine how we understand sound and voice by theorizing these terms through case studies of avant-garde performances or experimental audiovisual artifacts. In “Sonic Layers in Small Stones”, Miranda Eastwood annotates a contemporary videopoem from SpokenWeb’s “Archive of the Present:” “Small Stones” by Kaie Kellough, Jason Sharp, and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo. Eastwood isolates the audio from the video in order to home in on the piece’s sound design. By focusing on specific layers of sound, Eastwood draws our attention to the piece’s multiple sonic registers in dialogue. As Eastwood argues, audio effects (aka “FX” in the project), voice, whisper, and music all have roles in the affective experience of listening to “Small Stones.” Eastwood’s projects brings a new formalist lens, via the work of Caroline Levine, to a sound studies audience as it combines with their expertise in sound design and audio engineering.

While Eastwood’s work expands our understanding of sound’s design affordances, Matthew Kilbane’s project “Out of the Cage: Michael McClure and the Digital Lyric Archive” uses a recording of Michael McClure–the San Francisco Renaissance poet famous for reading poems in his experimental “Grah!” language to lions at the zoo–as a means to theorize the broader “digital lyric archive.” Kilbane explains that this “digital lyric archive” is composed of projects to digitize and make accessible audio recorded poetry, like SpokenWeb or PennSound, but also new tools for curating and contextualizing these artifacts like AudiAnnotate, allowing us to puncture the “isolation tank of history.” As Kilbane formulates this digital current in lyric studies, he also argues that the notion of voice on these recordings must be further interrogated. 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.

To extend Kilbane’s schema, several projects in The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology emphasize a much-needed attention to “the situated” and “the social voice” of recorded literary events. Bringing together multiple understandings of performance from Marit MacArthur’s idea of the “performance reading” to Butler’s now-canonical work on gender performance, Nadège Paquette’s project “Formulating Affinities and Defiances Through Discomfort” analyzes a 1986 video recording of “the priestess of the new Beat generation [and] of the punk literatures,” Kathy Acker performing at Les Foufounes Électrique in Montreal. On the recording, Acker’s voice ranges from a lilting question to a growl as her body curtsies and contorts while she interacts with a vocal audience and speaks through the persona of a lusty young pirate. Paquette points out that Acker uses her embodiment to shock her audience on screen and in the room, troubling gendered modes of performances and raising questions of the audience’s consent; much as her writing’s graphic sexual content responds to the 1980s anti-pornography feminist movement in the United States. In deeply attending to issues of audience, Paquette practices 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.

IV. Moments and Movements: New Genres in the Study of Literary Audio

While the majority of projects in The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology consider an eclectic set of performance readings, two projects, “Paranoid Desire” and “Annotating Literary History,” address other genres of literary audio. However, audience and environment remain crucial. The audio recording in Zach Morrison’s project, “Paranoid Desire”, promotes new engagement with a 1977 classroom visit to the University of Alberta by the Japanese-Canadian experimental artist Roy Kiyooka. During this visit, Kiyooka irreverently responds to a student aggressively asking him how to read experimental work like Kiyooka’s Transcanada Letters Morrison uses a Lacanian theorization of paranoia and the Other (as well as its reception by Deleuze and Guattari) to review this micro-interaction in the classroom and unpack the power dynamic between the avant-garde artist and the annoyed student. Morrison reflects on how analyzing the recorded classroom visit elevates what might be considered a minor genre, largely used to supplement our reading of a literary text, to be worthy of archival research in its own right. And, Morrison is not the only writer in the anthology to look towards other ways of addressing literary history beyond performance.

In “Annotating Literary History: Canadian Modernism of the 1930s and 1940s,” Teddie Brock explores questions of how we remember and contextualize modernism retrospectively. In the project, Brock transcribes an almost two-hour long recording of a 1978 panel on Canadian modernism at SFU in which several luminaries of the movement–Dorothy Livesay, Irving Layton, and Ann Marriott–discuss their memories of it. During this discussion, a monolithic sense of Canadian modernism’s styles and politics fractures into Layton’s and Livesay’s lived experiences of leftist social movements, their explication of the little magazines First Statement and Contemporary Verse, and critiques of traditionalist verse typified by the Maple Leaf School. Breaking down the monolith of modernism, Brock rather “maps the constellation of… literary communities, cultural institutions, and historical conditions” that make up the modernisms represented by the panel’s feisty interlocutors.

V. Conclusion:

The network of connections that Brock’s project charts speaks to the work of The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology as a whole. While each project honors original modes of attention to newly digitized and audio and video literary artifacts, they also speak to one another through complementary studies of recorded time, voice, style, and sociotechnical history. Keeping time with the accelerating digitization of audio and video collections, emergent modes of collaborative scholarship like The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology facilitate fresh conversations between these artifacts, a deeper understanding of their context, and new paths for critical engagement in the present.