Polyvocal Feminist Curation in 1980s UAlberta Radio
Chelsea Miya, Nicholas Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon
The main issue that I’m concerned with, especially as it relates to language, is: what kinds of assumptions do people have about sex roles that they don’t recognize? And language is a tremendous carrier of those assumptions, but we don’t know how to self-examine them. Yes, people are beginning to realise that there is a male culture, there is a female culture, and culture and language are terribly intertwined. But... Read more...
The Queerness of Sound in Action
Christopher Reeves
The first major art exhibition dedicated to sound was MOMA’s Sound Art, which took place in 1979. This landmark exhibition was a manifestation of various ideas and movements around sound – conceptual music, experiments with tape, feedback, installation – by artists that had been incubating since the late 1950s.1 Since then, varieties of sound (Sound Art, recorded and live music, installation ambience, soundtracks, audio tours) are frequently found in museums... Read more...
Four Modes of Literary Event Organisation
Klara du Plessis
Poetry is sound. This much is clear from a study of prosody, but equally, or more so, from the wide spectrum of sound poetry and the linguistic sounding of poetic composition as spoken word or slam. Though less overtly performative sounding, reading poetry out loud at literary events and reading series’ likewise results in live events that foreground the relational act of voicing and listening to literature. Increasingly, these live... Read more...
Co-curating the Marvin Francis Audio
Jason Wiens, Duncan Mercredi
The following is a dialogically-composed essay produced through collaboration between Duncan Mercredi, a Winnipeg-based Cree/Métis poet, writer and storyteller, and Jason Wiens, a settler scholar in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. In early 2023, Mercredi, Wiens, and University of Manitoba English professor Warren Cariou organized “Do I Have Time For One More? Remembering Marvin Francis: A Reading and Listening Celebration,” a SpokenWeb-sponsored listening practice with audio... Read more...
A Feature Interview with Tanya E. Clement
Jason Camlot, Tanya E. Clement
Tanya Clement’s recent book Dissonant Records offers an important and welcome intervention in technologically conscious research that aims to engage with literature beyond the printed or manuscript page. Clement’s contribution to the burgeoning field of literary sound studies is unique for its function as “a form of advocacy for the continued, responsible use of historical audio artifacts in literary study” formulated through the theorization and explication of “close listening as... Read more...
OnTime is Away
J Shea-Carter
In early 2020, Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, the two DJs behind the monthly NTS online radio show, Time is Away, exhibited their “Fable of the Bees” broadcast in an exhibition entitled Time is Away: The Fable of the Bees at South London’s project and artist space, Black Tower.1 Both the radio hour and exhibit were inspired by Bernard Mandeville’s provocative 1714 satirical book of the same name which celebrates... Read more...
Irene Revell and Sarah Shin in Conversation with Klara du Plessis
Klara du Plessis, Irene Revell, Sarah Shin
Irene Revell is a researcher and curator, lecturing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Leading the Scoring Warnings AHRC research project at CRiSAP,University of the Arts London. Sarah Shin is one of the co-founders of Silver Press, a feminist publishing venture also based in London, U.K., featuring international authors and artists, as well as a wide array of hybrid approaches to book-making. Together, Revell and Shin co-edited an expansive collection of over fifty... Read more...
Trans- Feminist and Queer Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods-of-Scale
T.L. Cowan
This essay is a slightly revised transcript of the opening plenary talk I gave at the 2022 SpokenWeb symposium, “The Sound of Literature in Time,” on Monday, May 16th. In order to accent the live quality of this work, I have kept it in the “talk” form, addressing readers as audience, and maintaining the speculative and malleable quality of sound over the linearization and reification of text. In this sense,... Read more...
Encountering Sonic Traces of Emotion in Archived Colonial Radio Programs
Luc Marraffa
The production of academic research on sound archives entails a recurring encounter with the limitations of language: making sound present to the readers through writing is an endeavour that seems bound to fail. In this failure, predicated on sound’s excess, I find room for experimentation. I play with various methods for rendering tangible to my readers my practice of close listening to archived radio programmes. In the following essay, based... Read more...
Unearthing the Sounds of Underwhich Audiographics
Brandon Hocura
The element of sound lives a self-oriented life. –Velimir Khlebnikov  By the late 1970s, the Canadian quartet of sound poets, Four Horsemen, had become a feral phenomenon coast to coast. The group was an infamous and inflammatory presence in the Canadian and international literary underground and sound poetry networks. They were an explosive extra-linguistic force, captured in full corporeal ferocity in Ron Mann’s 1983 documentary Poetry in Motion, where... Read more...
