Today, during our summer break, we bring you an episode from our ShortCuts archive: Moving. Here are the show notes from this April 2021 episode: This month, it is April – the month of poetry. The audio we will be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. In fact, it is a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space and that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. How is a poem held in the space in which it is spoken, and what happens to desire in this speaking? How are they held in the archives?
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 Producers: Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCES
Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Phyllis Webb’s reading in Montreal on November 18, 1966. The entire recording can be accessed here.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
---. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.