This ShortCuts minisode listens to one of the January readings that we heard about last time: a reading by Muriel Rukeyser that took place on January 24, 1969. Along with listening for mentions of January in the recording, this minisode listens when Rukeyser’s reading enacts the very connection that she describes as being created between the poet and the audience during a live reading. The audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.
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
Resources
Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/
Robinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.
Rukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” [audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series]. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969
Find out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.
00:07
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]
01:19
Katherine McLeod:
Welcome to ShortCuts. You are here. Last time we listened to clips from the SpokenWeb audio collections in order to try to hear time. Or rather to hear an anticipation of the new year, a marking of time. Whenever the host would say something like "our next reading will take place in January".
01:42
Audio Recording, George Bowering:
This is the final reading of the fall series, and we'll be picked up again in January…
01:47
Katherine McLeod:
Here we are now, in January. And let's imagine that we are at one of those January readings that we heard about last time.
01:55
Audio Recording, Unknown Announcer 1
I'd just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and his blasphemy with us tonight, and to remind you that our next reading is with Muriel Rukeyser on Friday January 24th. Goodnight.
02:12
Katherine McLeod:
Arriving to the reading, most likely in big winter coats, the audience has been looking forward to it. And now it is here…
02:25
Audio Recording, Unknown Announcer 2
I’ll now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause]...
02:26
Katherine McLeod:
Rukeyser is in front of us, reading her poems, in Montreal on January 24th 1969. Along with knowing that it took place in January, we can hear a sense of time in the recording. Let's listen to this clip as our "short cut" into the archives for this minisode. She has just read “Elegy in Joy,” ending with these words that lead her into a story about something that marks this recording in time.
03:00
[Simultaneous] Katherine McLeod and Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
“Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion and the world unbegun.”
03:12
Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
I thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It's a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico, I wonder whether you saw it. I heard of it yesterday in New York, as a little, three line story, in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada in the States. And to that test, came five scientists, in Utah, in the States, to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground test made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack.
04:29
Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
There's a crack in the earth, big enough, they said — the way we talk — big enough for the Empire State Building. There's a crack there, and deep under the crust there's a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts —unpredictable parts — of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now, last night, before I came here, on TV — late news in New York — they said that there'd been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are, I give it to you simply that something has happened to shift the under-crust – there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground, the way we are bound to each other, we are also bound to each other through the air and the fall out has come over Canada – this is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story…
05:33
Katherine McLeod:
"I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story." By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are. We are listening to the relationality created there in that room. Now, if this is sounding familiar, you might recall that in minisode 2.2, we listened to how Rukeyser introduced this very same reading. She talked about why on a cold January night we come out to listen to poetry…
06:06
Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
…it is partly out of curiosity, and looking at the person. And I go to see – what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms…
06:19
Katherine McLeod:
And because of something else that is created while listening together…
Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
We come to something with — almost unmediated — that is, the poem among us, between us there…
06:34
Katherine McLeod:
In her reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Well, I would say that the story that we just heard of how we are all bound to each other does precisely that by asking us to think about our relation to one another. But that was through a story, an extra-poetic diversion between poems. What about in the poems themselves?
07:05
Katherine McLeod:
Let’s listen to one more ShortCut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and the audience, but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. In a recent collection of poems called, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, there is another “Anemone” poem by Canadian poet Erin Robinsong – and I would say that Rukeyser’s “Anemone” poem could be in this collection too as she too is responding to the climate crisis in her own way in 1969.
08:23
Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:
Anemone, my eyes are closing. My eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing. My mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing. My sex is opening. You are singing and offering the way in. My life is closing. My life is opening. You are here.
09:04
Katherine McLeod:
That was Muriel Rukeyser reading “Anemone” a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate. And a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”
09:22
Katherine McLeod:
[Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] I’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [Music Ends: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]