In this ShortCuts minisode, listen to the contrapuntal poetics of poet Alexei Perry Cox. In a recording made at home, Alexei reads and improvises in response to a second voice in the room – the voice of her daughter Isla. Their interaction itself could be heard as a poem. Meanwhile, sounds of place enter and exit the room of the recording, with what sounds like cars passing by outside and even the “Zoom room” becoming audible at times. The audio you hear in this ShortCuts was recorded, over Zoom, as part of the first online version of The Words and Music Show on March 29, 2020. What are you listening to when you listen to an online reading? From where do you listen?
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO SOURCES
Audio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.
Audio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.
RESOURCES
Gibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019, http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.
Moss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.
Perry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019.
----- Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.
00:10
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
00:10
Hannah McGregor:
Welcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's ShortCuts mini-series. We'll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine's favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine MacLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.
01:17
SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]
01:17
Katherine McLeod:
Welcome to ShortCuts. Each month, we listened closely and carefully to a shortcut or cuts from SpokenWeb's audio collections. The recent ShortCuts have been from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but last season we ventured into a more recent collection in episode three, when we heard a truly innovative way of starting a reading.
01:42
Audio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words and Music Show:
I want to forget/ 1980s /high school fever / forget articles in the Herald/ in the moment of heavy evangelical / black-haired teens from reserves / who drank themselves to death in macho contests/activity and much extreme conservativism/ trying to prove to themselves that they exist/ as night drifts into next days headlines / some of the challenges that arise growing up and trying to live and become oneself in a climate like that / I want to forget my stupid conviction that a boy had to be distilled into a man/ that the Caribean bloodline had to be spiked with rum / which seems to be a climate that is re-emerging/ that amber alcohol...
02:13
Katherine McLeod:
That was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. And the audio collection for Words and Music is where we're headed to you for this minisode. But we're not going to be listening to audio that was recorded at Casa de Popolo where so much of the Words and Music show has been recorded live over these past 20 years. No, we'll be listening to the Words and Music show recorded from home — the first one to be online and hosted on Zoom. On March 29th, 2020, the Words and Music Show took to the Zoom stage. Co-hosted by Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot. That first online show was meant to test if it worked. And it did.
02:58
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:
I wonder how many people can hold.
03:01
Audio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:
300 people.
03:02
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:
Oh wow. Okay.
03:04
Audio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:
I think we'll be okay.
03:06
Katherine McLeod:
Since then, the Words and Music Show has been online usually every third Sunday of the month. By now, most of us are used to attending Zoom events, or at least whereas used to it as we'll get — or want to get. But back in March 2020, it was incredibly new. The reason why among the many recordings that are now part of the archive of pandemic poetry readings I'm selecting this one, is because it demonstrates the blurring of the public and the private through sound. In these archival recordings we listen on ShortCuts, we often ask: what are we listening to? And what are the sounds around the poem that tell us about the space, the sociality of the room, and how the sound was recorded? These sounds around the poem give context. They become part of the relationality of the listening. Sound doesn't exist on its own, but in relation. What is our relation to this sound now? What does it feel like to listen to it? With that in mind, let's listen to the ShortCut for this month: A reading by poet Alexei Perry Cox on March 29th, 2020.
04:21
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:
And the next thing we have is a video which was created under extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18 month old child on her bed. And it's by the poet, Alexei Perry Cox. So I'm going to bring that up now and we can take a listen. Yeah, here she comes.
04:46
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
The unequivocal [french word], according to the [inaudible], comes in the chorus that has a lullaby. It makes use of emphasis on the incantatory present participle and is a consultation. Tropical, the island breathes, and this was where I long to be. Time is portrayed as malleable and is a journey. The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time. We are taken there to this Isla Bonita, and there is wherever we are. In a vice grip with my lover in exile. As time went by, my lover was gradually overtaken by an urgent desire whose futility exceeded all measures, but the circumference of the universe itself. I desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see a system's undulating veil. In the universe of our civil war, systems have the insubstantialabily of hummingbirds song and the iridescence of its plumage. While their manifestations were immutable. Told that my lover, my love for my lover, told that my love for my lover was a vice. That loving another woman wasn't very womanly of me [Baby Speaking] that our civil war as being against ourselves. Wasn't the same as their civil war as being against us. [Baby: Coos] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect in congress would get through to human kind. In exile, in Paris, in Sausalito. I want you to touch me here and here. I want it to be worn for me, for you. I want to love systems that are women so that you can enter them by being untrue.
07:10
Katherine McLeod:
[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] We're listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at the Words and Music show online on March 29th, 2020. She's reading from "Finding places to make places" and she's accompanied by the voice of Isla her then 18 month old daughter –
07:35
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
[Baby: Coos] La revolution ....
07:37
Katherine McLeod:
What are we listening to in this clip?
07:41
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
[Baby: Cries]
07:41
Katherine McLeod:
[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] The poem? The interaction between Alexei and her daughter that becomes a duet? The improvisation, or to the quality of the sound, the audibility of the Zoom room? –
07:57
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
The entropy in an open system –
07:57
Katherine McLeod:
– [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] When listening to a recording of Phyllis Web reading from Naked Poems on a previous ShortCuts, I suggested considering how desire is held by the archives and how the poem creates a space for the listener. Similarly, how does this recording hold the poem's desire and how does the poem make space inhabit space? From where are we listening?
08:25
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
To a certain logic for disappearing. You cannot live the same life as you imagine. [Aside: Alexei laughs at baby] You must live a smaller life. A more compact life. [Aside: Yeah? Laughs] [Baby: Coos] The life is too capacious. You will lose your balance. Driving home, I think this. [Baby: Coos with increasing volume] A door opens on an eye, an eye opens on a line. A line of eyes, looking into a coffin, carrying the body. Body to the river and into a vision. You know your conscience cannot forgive what left you long ago washed away by summer floods like a body loosened from a grip into something death made transformative.
09:21
Katherine McLeod:
[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] As I listened to this back in March, 2020, I was right in the middle of making an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast with Jason Camlot. We were making an episode called "How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence", which you can have a listen to if you feel like revisiting that time of March 2020 sonically. When I heard Alexei read at the Words and Music show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices, what improvisation at a poetry reading. Plus it felt like her reading was enacting exactly what the podcast was trying to say: that we are missing the noise around the signal. We still miss it now. We miss the buzz in the room, the social sounds around the signal, the voice of the speaker. I know I can't wait until I can stand in a crowded room and listen to Alexei read on stage at a microphone again. By the way, [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]in January 2019, I was at an album launch for the Montreal musician, Jessica Moss and Alexei read poetry as the opening act. She read with her newborn strapped to her chest.
10:38
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Album launch, 2019:
[Baby: Cries] Even as a new you moves about the womb –
10:41
Katherine McLeod:
This little voice that we're hearing in this recording had already been with her mother on stage for a poetry reading. [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]
10:48
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox,___, 2019:
– the world is smaller than the center of your eye. But when I –
10:51
Katherine McLeod:
[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] Going back to readings onstage doesn't mean that we will not perform with our full selves, with the public and the private self coexisting. Even if the audience doesn't always see it or hear it that way. With that, let's return to Alexei and Isla who inhabit a poem with "Womb or the World".
Audio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020:
[Baby: crying and cooing] A book without room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from out of time, brimming with life. Fabulous a wing, unfolding in a poultry field appearance while night finds no constellation in night but in it's eclipse. Like this. [Aside: Kisses baby]. [Baby: Coos].
11:54
Theme Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
11:54
Audio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:
And there's bye-bye to Alexei, who was being seriously upstaged there.
12:08
Katherine McLeod:
ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat continues and fades]