March is a time of year when you can hum along to “It Might as Well be Spring,” but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. Can we hear spring in the archives? And what does it feel like to listen to sonic representations of change – at a distance – together? Listen to Margaret Avison read “Thaw” (on 27 January 1967) as our ‘short cut’ this month. Then, get ready for the first ShortCuts audio challenge when a special guest joins us to talk about a perplexing moment in archival listening.
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: Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCES
Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967.
Audio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.
Audio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin are from a conversation recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.
RESOURCES
Aubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.
@mathieujpaubin. “In today's listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work... eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980.
Avison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982.
Sarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.
Nickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.
Quebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records, 2006.
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 Podcas_t feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with _SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.
01:10
SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]
01:18
Katherine McLeod:
Welcome to ShortCuts. It’s March 2021. Our deep dive into the SpokenWeb audio collections continues to ask the question of how to hear time. We’ll be listening to a poem that describes the moment between winter and spring. I’m recording this minisode in a city where the month of March feels a lot like winter. Here, March is a time of year when it might as well be spring, but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. It is a time of year when you can hear snow melting – a sound [Sound Effect: Snow Melting] that tells of the coming spring, and a sound that conveys the lasting presence of the past season, a frozen archive of winter... What does it feel like to listen in and to this season of change? Can we hear the spring thaw in archival recordings of poetry?
02:21
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
This is one of the very cold days, I guess, about 10 below, cold enough. It's inside the pane of glass – separating inside from outside comes into it, a certain kind of sky that goes with that which is like glass again...
02:46
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
The sun has not absorbed this icy day and this day's industry in behind glass hasn't the blue and gold cold outside. Though not absorbing this sought that…
03:03
Katherine McLeod:
That was Canadian poet Margaret Avison introducing her very wintery poems on January 27, 1967. She read that night at Sir George Williams University, at what is now Concordia, in Montreal. That is the first event you’ll hear audio from in this ShortCuts. The second event was also held on January 27, but in a different year, not in 1967 but in 2021. On that January 27, I played some clips from Avison’s reading as part of a SpokenWeb Listening Practice.
03:40
Katherine McLeod:
In choosing to listen to the recording on the same day, it was like organizing a Ghost Reading, a listening activity in which the reading is listened to on the same day as it would have taken place and, while listening, listeners make things out of the listening (such as notes, doodles, booklets, paintings and more). I thought I’d try out how the Ghost Reading translates into a virtual environment in which we are listening together, but not in the same place. How would we listen and what would we make?
04:12
Katherine McLeod:
Poet Barbara Nickel joined us for the Listening Practice and I asked her what it was like to hear that opening that we just heard of Avison introducing the wintery poem “The Absorbed” from _Winter Sun_…
04:30
Audio Recording, Barbara Nickel, Listening Practice:
I spent the whole morning just reading Winter Sun. I have, from years of reading her, I have a certain voice in my mind: the voice of the page. And then to hear her voice for the first time ... I can’t put words to it – it’s so mundane to me, her voice, it feels mundane in one sense it’s almost disappointing; but then, on the other hand, I find that the articulation of the consonants, something I love so much about Avison’s work, comes through so clearly, and articulates those sounds to me in a way that I’ve never noticed before.
05:13
Katherine McLeod:
Also listening was poet Stephanie Bolster and she had a very similar reaction to Barbara, in that this poet who she had spent so much time listening to on the page was now audible. I asked Stephanie if she had ever heard an Avison recording before…
05:29
Audio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:
No, I never have, that's what was sort of magical about it is her authentic voice, having had the voices of poems in my head, but never attributed any particular voice. And I guess I'm getting a sense of expectation of formality based on the work itself, but never really having thought about what she would sound like.
05:46
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Listening Practice:
Yeah, I think, that's such a great point, even to introduce her voice to us – to start with – because she's somebody who —we've seen titles of her work — she has a book called Listening. So you think: what is this voice going to sound like? Or all of her work — say the poem “Snow,” maybe encountering that as an undergrad, and her words about “the sad listener” or “optic heart” that get so often quoted from that poem, but thinking: what does her voice sound like reading it?
06:15
Katherine McLeod:
As I started riffing upon Stephanie's point, she added a comment into the Zoom chat that it was important to remember that Avison's voice is mediated through recording technologies. So that really raises the question of where the authentic voice is, and whether there are other ways of understanding it's embodied and material source – where the voice is coming from. Let's hear more of Avison's voice from this archival recording, as she reads the poem…
06:45
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967
"The Thaw". Sticky inside their winter suits / The Sunday children stare at pools/ In pavement and black ice where roots/ Of sky in moodier sky dissolve. / An empty coach train runs along / The thin and sooty river flats / And stick and straw and random stones / Stream faintly when its steam departs. / Lime-water and liquorice light / Wander the tumbled streets. A few/ Sparrows gather. A dog barks out / Under the dogless pale pale blue. Move your tongue along a slat / Of raspberry box from last year's crate. / Smell a saucepantilt of water / On the coal-ash in your grate. / Think how the Black Death made men dance, / And from the silt of centuries/ The proof is now scraped bare that once/ Troy fell and Pompei scorched and froze. / A boy alone out in the court/ Whacks with his hockey-stick, and whacks / In the wet, and the pigeons flutter, and rise, / And settle back.
08:15
Katherine McLeod:
“Thaw” is a poem that I wrote about last year in March 2020 – when ShortCuts used to be Audio of the Week – I chose the poem as a way of coping with the uncertainty of the pandemic. By chance, the poem ends up having a reference to the plague in it. There I was, trying to find a poem to guide us from winter to spring, through a transition, and I was forced to confront the pandemic again. I could have pressed stop, but I chose to re-play the poem and to re-listen to it again, as I have done again here and in the listening practice. The poem depicts a solitary image – “a boy alone,” making a sound with the hockey stick, causing the pigeons to “flutter and rise and settle back” – a scene and a sound of winter solitude and of repetition. What was it like to listen to this poem together?
09:22
Audio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:
I guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything, and slow it down and take in the details, just the density and abundance of details. I was scribbling things down, and couldn't keep up. And, in that sense, it really felt the same sense I would have had in a live reading. Even though it was recorded, because we were listening to it together, I couldn’t just stop it and go back. And so I think it really did replicate that sense of having a communal experience. Sharing something, and gaining all that I gained and also losing what one does lose in a live reading.
09:53
Katherine McLeod:
Here we were on January 27, 2021, listening to a recording of Avison from January 27, 1967, and we were struck by the immediacy of her voice. I couldn’t help but think that maybe all of these online readings were making us even more attuned to the recorded voice. With nearly all literary events as virtual over this past year, we are practising our skills of hearing an archival recording as a performance, one that is mediated and live. Let’s liven up the end of this miniside – get ready for our first ShortCuts audio challenge, [Sound Effect: Fanfare] solving mysteries in the audio archives, together! There's a very curious moment in the recording of the Avison reading. I had wanted to talk about this curious moment in the recording but we didn’t have time in the listening practice... Then a couple weeks later I saw that SpokenWeb researcher Mathieu Aubin – a friend of ShortCuts as you may recall he guest-produced a minisode last season – he had posted a tweet about this very same moment. He agreed to revisit this moment in the archives together.
11:02
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
So, thank you for joining me for this conversation, and welcome back to ShortCuts.
11:09
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
Hi, happy to be here.
11:11
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
What was the tweet that you wrote after listening to the Avison reading? Would you mind reading that out for us?
11:16
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
Yeah, of course. So “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work... eh boy. But, as a badass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.”
11:35
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
I think it is just beautiful, but nobody gets it unless I explain, so I'll explain, it's like you take a piece of 8 by 11 typing paper….
11:44
Audio Recording, Audience Member at Avison at SGWU, 1967:
Don't explain, just say it.
11:46
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison:
Alright, you can tell me then, eh? "Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka." Now, come on... [Audience Laughs] Hmm? Does anybody want the explanation? Well I've read it. It's just a crumpled-up letter, you know, you get it and you read it and you cry and you crumple it up and you throw it down and the mic goes up...now I'll read it again. "Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka."
12:45
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
When I was listening to it the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately – it’s different with you, obviously, because we’re actually responding and we're both in on this is about to happen – but it’s, first, the audacity of that anonymous man just interrupting her and then telling her to do something, on the one hand. On the other hand is her being like, come on, do you want to do it? Do you, do you really want to – just calling him out and you could feel it generations later of that awkwardness and everyone is like ‘eee’….
13:24
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
I’ll read it again: “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter. Eureka!”
13:35
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
That point that we're almost, we're listening, almost anticipating knowing what she's going to do —.
13:39
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
Yeah.
13:39
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
— I love thinking of all the sounds in there. Even I’m wondering what this is: it almost sounds like she stamps the desk with her hand or something. So, I'll just play this here…
13:52
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
All right. You can tell me then. [Muffled Bang] Eh?
13:58
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
Yeah, you're right! I didn't notice that — I was paying attention more to the sorts of the words that I could understand. But you're right. You hear the book hitting the — I don't know the podium or whatever it was.
14:07
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
Yeah, just that sound. It really sounds like either hitting something down onto the desk or a book hitting… but it punctuates it. [Sigh] It's also interesting that the whole joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then, this, if she does like slam the book down, the presence of the weight of the page is right there.
14:34
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
[Recording overlaps with Katherine] It’s just a crumpled up letter – you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down…
14:36
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
[Katherine overlaps with Avison recording] You cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down – and there are so many emotions happening in this moment.
14:41
Audio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:
Now I'll read it again...
14:41
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
Do you feel like, do you feel like you get it?
14:46
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview
Yeah. I think –I mean I'm trying to picture it in my head and obviously when I'm listening to it and I can kind of see it. Do I immediately get this symbolic significance? Not necessarily. At the same time, I think it gains more significance with what's happening in that moment, and in the performance, like with the “Eureka!” – the here we are! Like what you were saying earlier, almost like drawing a parallel between what's happening with the paper and her using the paper and speaking up. If I were to read it on the page, I would probably sit with it a bit longer, but that's the thing about audio, right? You can pause it, but you're trying to listen along and trying to be in that moment.
15:27
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:
We talked about it even more than I could have imagined from the clip itself. So thanks so much for listening back to this moment in the archives and for joining me once again on ShortCuts.
15:38
Audio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:
And it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
15:40
Music:
Piano Interlude
15:45
Katherine McLeod:
Let's leave this mystery unsolved. And, more than solving the mystery, I hope that this audio challenge will unite us as an audience – in 1967 and in 2021 – as having to figure something out, together, as having to share our confusion and our curiosity. My name is Katherine McLeod, [Piano With Distorted Beat] and ShortCuts [Sound Effect: Chime] is produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. This minisode was recorded in the city of Montreal, on the unceded lands known as Tiohtià:ke by the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. A special thanks to Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, and to all of the listeners in the Listening Practice. And, of course, to our guest Matthew Aubin for taking on the first ShortCuts Audio Challenge. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives, and next month… it might be spring.