Introduction

Sound is a moving medium. Through audio recordings and oral storytelling practices, sound is capable of transcending time and bringing elements of the audible past to the listening present. It is sound’s peculiar relationship with time that allows meanings and patterns of a moment in time long passed to be recognized in, applied to, and perhaps (re)created in the present. Voices carry memories, emotions, influences of the past and present, motivations for the future, and an unmistakable sense of the speaker’s presence, wherever they may be. Bringing sounds of the past to the present allows us to hear living moments, the sentiment, experiences, and thinking underpinning every pause and shifts in intonation, and the changes that have happened in between.

In July of 1969 at twenty-six years of age, Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt sat in the home of her former professor, Warren Tallman, and read from her first and recently published collection of poems leaf leaf/s (Black Sparrow Press, 1969). The recording of Marlatt’s reading of leaf leaf/s––framed by conversations between Marlatt and Tallman––is now part of the AMP Lab’s SoundBox Collection at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. The digitised recording carries the voices of Marlatt and Tallman from 1969 to present time, and most notably, Marlatt’s distinct reading of her poems. The unique spacing, caesuras, use of poetic sound effects like alliteration and consonance, and overall form of the written text can be heard and presented through Marlatt’s fluctuating tone, speed, stress, and pitch. With every pause, breath, emphasis, strain, quickening or slowing pace, raising or lowering of tone and pitch, Marlatt provides listeners with an intricate network of meaning and context with her voice alone. As Tanis MacDonald writes:

To read a volume of collected works is to be invited to read together what has been ‘collected’ until then only in the writer’s mind, and it should be said that one of the things we gain from reading these poems together is the enormous power of propinquity. (162)

Fifty years later, in 2019 and at seventy-six years of age, Marlatt read from leaf leaf/s during an event held by Inspired Word Café and the AMP Lab. During the event, Marlatt read alongside the 1969 recording of her voice, with her past and present voices exchanging turns reading. Despite the distinct differences in recording quality and Marlatt’s voice, the transitions are almost seamless. In text, the poems remain unchanged; however, Marlatt’s contemporary reading presents differently from her earlier reading. Aside from recording quality, acoustics, and echoes, the sound was different. Marlatt’s 2019 voice carried nearly fifty years worth of new experiences, understandings, and context heard in her fluctuating intonations. Despite being Marlatt’s first published collection that “was written out of learning” and experimentating with language, little scholarly attention has been given to leaf leaf/s nor to Marlatt’s readings of it (“Performing the Archive” 00:22:53-00:25:44). This contribution to the digital anthology places two recordings—one past and one present, taken five decades apart—side by side, and examines the dynamic nature of Marlatt’s voice over time and the social, political, and economic contexts underpinning her contribution to women’s writing in Canada during the 20th and 21st centuries. The heteropatriarchy, defined by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as “an umbrella term” to signify “the intertwined systems of patriarchy and heterosexism to include its manifestations as heteronormativity, transphobia, and cis-normativity,” continues to be deeply embedded in media and sound practices (Simpson 253). This contribution seeks to reveal the ways in which time and Marlatt’s lived experiences as a lesbian woman and poet often navigating male-dominated and heteropatriarchal environments influence her readings of her poems. In highlighting the differences in Marlatt’s readings over time, this contribution additionally seeks to address the gaps frequently seen between sound and language, soundwork and feminist theory, and the digital humanities and poetry.

Listening

As people are incredibly “time-sensitive creatures,” it is often easy for us to pick up on changes in pace and timing whenever we engage with time-based mediums such as sound recordings (Camlot 4). Especially in the case of poetry readings, when a smooth and rhythmic meter is suddenly disrupted by an unexpected pause, tone, or sound, listeners’ attention is called to the unexpected and opportunities for new or deepend meanings arise. In addition, we each carry a “listening history” and experiences that inform our “speech perception” when we listen to things such as poetry readings (MacArthur 13). When we listen to the prosodic elements and patterns of a speaker’s voice, we often attribute characteristics related to gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, and national origin (Clement 406; MacArthur 14). While imagining a speaker’s characteristics may be beneficial in navigating and positioning oneself in relation to the speaker, it can also feed into stereotypes and biases already distorting interpretations and enforcing oppressive power dynamics (MacArthur 15). However, the last few decades have introduced significant changes with the concurrent development of technological advancements and socio-political movements and interventions. With the improvement of––and increasing access to––sonic technology and a growing number of spaces and platforms for performance and poetry, ways of communicating began to get easier and more accessible. In addition to the active resistance and resilience against men-dominated spaces and heteropatriarchal regimes, voices often silenced or pushed to the margins were presented with new mediums and spaces in which to speak and share their art, words, and experiences. In the world of Western poetry, sonic technology and the amplifying of marginalised voices within colonial and heteropatriarchal structures continue to have great impacts on speaker demographics, voice, style, language, rhythm, and intonations that are changing with time.

In their 2018 study, Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller demonstrate how different backgrounds and contexts can cause significant changes between speakers’ pitch, speed, acceleration, and dynamism in poetry readings. From their findings, MacArthur, Zellou, and Miller suggest that women poets “are attempting to sound more masculine and thus more authoritative” and will continue to adopt “a less Expressive style of reading, associated with male poets, as long as that is the norm for male poets” (46). For instance, women poets born before the 1960s were recorded to have a “wider pitch, faster pitch speed, slightly faster pitch acceleration, and greater dynamism” than women poets born after the 1960s (37-9). The narrow pitch range seen amongst the women poets born after the 1960s thus aligns more with the average pitch range of all the male poets that were examined under the same study at the same time the women poets had a comparatively slower pitch speed and acceleration than the male poets (45-6). Regarding the sexualities of the poets, results show that, while non-heterosexual men poets were shown to have very little differences in intonation than heterosexual men poets, non-heterosexual women poets demonstrated a slightly wider pitch range than heterosexual women poets (46). Further, the study’s findings reveal that audience can be a critical factor in the ways in which a poet reads their own poems. For example, African-American women poets who “find mainstream recognition” and therefore “frequently read to ‘the mainly white room’” tend to “read in a less Expressive, more Formal manner” (56-7). Considering how colonial and patriarchal expectations standardise particular forms of “acceptable” poetry, MacArthur, Zellou, and Miller’s conclusion may accurately reflect the intentions of many female poets navigating white and male-dominated literary worlds. However, as Virginia Woolf affirms, “as women overcome impediments of creativity, our writing will more and more resemble that of a man” (Knutson 7). Perhaps the study’s conclusions could additionally be interpreted as female poets shifting away from performing heteropatriarchal ideals and expectations of (acceptable) femininity and towards their own voice.

In an episode of “Performing the Archive” by SoundBox Signals, Marlatt explains why she vowed to always read her own poems out loud to audiences after attending her first poetry reading. Having expressed that she felt too nervous to read her poem aloud at the event, Marlatt reveals that a male peer offered to read it for her, subsequently causing Marlatt to squirm in her seat because “he didn’t read it the way [Marlatt] thought it should be read” (“Performing the Archive” 00:05:35-00:06:55). Marlatt’s personal experiences and challenges influenced much of her work following leaf leaf/s. In an interview with Laura Moss and Gillian Gerome, Marlatt recalls how––having navigated much of the literary world during the 1960s––one of the first things she had to learn was how to stand up for her own perceptions and her own voice (256). Although Marlatt affirms she received immense support from a number of other women writers in the 1960s, she reveals it was not until the 1970s when “American feminism became a powerful influence” that she felt “a strong sense of shared experience with women writers” (257). Reflecting on her experiences living in Vancouver during the 70s, Marlatt states that it was “a strongly collective decade in its movement for social and political change” and a “time of great experimentation” in the realms of visual arts and writing (250). As Marlatt goes on to explain, the “genre and syntactical experimentation and word play” continues to be crucial and “useful techniques for disrupting any dominant structures of thought” (259). Because language is pertinent to our thinking, Marlatt affirms that “disrupting old patterns of binary thinking feels essential to changing social realities” (259). In other words, reimagining language and its meanings beyond hegemonic thought could provoke an interrogation of the surrounding systems of power and patterns that confine, restrict, and silence.

Published right before the 1970s, leaf leaf/s preceded numerous historical events and movements that either stemmed from or led to momentous shifts in women’s writing. Ironically, Marlatt states that leaf leaf/s was “more radical in its language use” than much of what she has published since (Moss and Jerome 263). Following a conversation with linguist D. Alexander, Marlatt states that she realised that she viewed language as “referring to objects and actions in the world” rather than as a medium, prompting her to experiment with language accordingly in leaf leaf/s (00:24:03-00:25:35). Although Marlatt finds the collection to be “a rather abstract book now,” she also affirms that it taught her a great deal about language (“Performing the Archive” 00:25:35-00:25:44).

The voice is a powerful tool of communication, not only for the purposes of presenting explicit information and knowledge, but for conveying emotion and simulating experiences vital to understanding. Like most literary readings, the recordings of Marlatt reading leaf leaf/s carry an auditory experience that can “provoke strong feelings” (MacArthur 2). Despite these opportunities of experience and the interdisciplinary nature of sound, scholarship regarding audio recordings, soundwork, sonic texts, and voice are often neglected, especially at intersections involving feminist and women histories (Lacey and Hilmes 2, MacArthur 1-2). As seen in much of Western culture, politics, and media, “[w]omen’s bodies have been widely displayed as objects of desire” while their “voices, words, and soundmaking have often been muted or marginalized at best, and censored or silenced at worst” (1). Although the development of and growing access to sound and amplification technology proved to be a fraught process, it eventually allowed women’s voices to be heard in public spaces and facilitated “women’s entry into the political arena” (1). Compared to Hollywood cinema and films that notoriously emphasised women as a spectacle through visuals rather than sound, radio evoked “negotiations between body and voice” as women’s voices were subject to scrutiny and argued to need “‘body’ to succeed in this nonvisual medium” (1-2). At the same time––from being composers and recording artists to consumers and listeners––women’s contributions to soundwork has “been essential to the economic success, cultural circulation, and social impact of sound-based media of all kinds (2). It is at the intersection of soundwork and feminist readings where much of the great significance of Daphne Marlatt’s readings of leaf leaf/s lie, especially in relation to their relevance over time in the face of the (hetero)patriarchy.

In the same episode of “Performing the Archive,” Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart note several differences between Marlatt’s 1969 voice and 2019 voice. For instance, Butchart highlights how Marlatt’s 1969 voice came across as “more performative, in a deliberate sense” while her 2019 reading was felt to be “a softer reading” (“Performing the Archive 00:35:53-00:36:25). Shearer later adds that Marlatt’s recorded voice sounded more “clipped and deliberate” compared to her contemporary reading in which Marlatt “opened up some of the vowels” and made the poems feel more “flowy” with “gentle” turns (00:43:27-00:43:58). While recalling the time she was recorded reading leaf leaf/s in July of 1969, Marlatt reveals that the recording took place nearly two months after she had given birth to her son (00:22:53-00:23:06). Upon reflection, Marlatt explains that she was interested to listen to the 1969 recording of her voice reading her poems, stating: “my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience” (00:23:18-00:23:34). The adjacency offered in leaf leaf/s and Marlatt’s readings evokes ways of thinking about what lies “between one state and another, between Marlatt’s past and her present, and between her sense of history and the undeniable present of her writing” (MacDonald 162). As heard in the recordings, demonstrated in Marlatt’s many works, and revealed in developing discourses and scholarship regarding sound and feminist media, changes in voice tend to reflect the contextual influences and experiences carried with the speaker. Thus, in this edition’s comparison of Marlatt’s voice from 1969 to her voice fifty years later, the deeply interconnected nature of sound, voice, time and meaning is revealed, even as the words and structures of the poems do not change.

Authorship Statement

This introduction and edition of Daphne Marlatt’s readings related to leaf leaf/s (1969) is a collaborative project by Rachel Pickard, Emily Christina Murphy, and Karis Shearer. Pickard is primary author. Pickard and Murphy are centrally responsible for the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of the introduction, and worked closely together on the conception and execution of the edition. Shearer contributed substantially to the conceptualization and acted as central subject-matter expert on Marlatt’s work. It is Shearer’s stewardship of historical recordings, care for research relationships, and long-standing mentorship of other researchers through SpokenWeb and the SoundBox Collection that supported and provided the materials for this edition. Thanks is also due to Megan Butchart and the Inspired Word Café for organising the event at which Marlatt spoke in 2019. Pickard was chiefly responsible for technical execution in AudiAnnotate, with support from Shearer and SpokenWeb Research Assistant Lauren Sinclair. Editing and conceptual refinement were shared by Pickard, Murphy, and Shearer. The allocation of workload is approximately: Pickard, 50%; Murphy, 30%; Shearer, 20%.

Works Cited

Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Clement, Tanya. “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory.” Information & Culture, University of Texas Press, vol. 49, no. 4, 2014, pp. 401-426.

Knutson, Susan L. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2000.

Lacey, Kate, and Michele Hilmes. Feminist Media Histories. U of California Press, vol. 1, no. 4, 2015.

McArthur, Marit, et. al. “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-72.

MacDonald, Tanis. “In Her Element.” Canadian Literature, Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, no. 237, 2019, pp. 161-2.

Moss, Laura, and Gillian Jerome. “‘Beyond the Hungry Edge’: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 248-65.

“Performing the Archive.” SoundBox Signals Season 1, Episode 2. Co-produced by Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam. Available online: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/performing-the-archive/.

Simpson, Leanne B. As We have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.