ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.

For the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice of feminist listening, and that listening has informed continued audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio) and publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).

For this final ShortCuts, we listen to Brandon LaBelle in a conversation recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.

Stay tuned for what is next!

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SHOW NOTES

More about Errant Bodies Press and The Listening Biennal.

LaBelle, Brandon. "Poetics of Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.

McLeod, Katherine. "Archival Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.

Copeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024.

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APPLAUSE

A round of applause for all who have been part of the production-side of ShortCuts, from 2019 to the present: Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Manami Izawa, Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, Miranda Eastwood, Ella Jando-Saul, Kelly Cubban, Zoe Mix, Yara Ajeeb, James Healey, Maia Harris, and of course ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod.

This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.

In this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.” The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.

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EPISODES NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

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AUDIO

Huang, Xiaoxuan. “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”

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RESOURCES

Read “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,

For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.

Until recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary event from the margins.

This episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

All archival audio played in this episode is from SpokenWeb’s Ultimatum collection—including interviews conducted by Mathieu Aubin and Ella Jando-Saul with Alan Lord, Fortner Anderson, Sheila Urbanoski and Jerome Poynton, as a way of building this archival collection—with the exception of one clip of Alan Lord sourced from here.

WORKS CITED

Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.

Aubin, Mathieu. "Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.

FURTHER READING / LISTENING
Lord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.

Stanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.

"What's that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival." Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,

https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/

As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.” In the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks Andreas if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.” Listening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts.

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Listen to the entire recording of Maxine Gadd reading at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) here.

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.

In this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.

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Adam Hammond is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of Jett (Coach House, 2021) and Literature in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2016). His is editor of Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, 2024). He co-edits the series Cambridge Elements of Digital Literary Studies. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Wired.

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Works Cited

Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022

This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?

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Brian Fauteux is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies. He holds a PhD in Communication from Concordia (Montreal) and has completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies music industries and music radio, often from the interrelated perspectives of cultural studies, history, and policy and is currently a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project that investigates copyright and cultural labour in the digital music industries. His book, Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to surrounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-based mandates.

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Show Notes

Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015

deWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. "Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)." Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 - 278. [open access]