Voices: Micro-editions of Readings by Marlatt, McClure, and Rukeyser

Edited by Tanya Clement, Emily Murphy, Karis Shearer, Trent Wintermeier, and Matthew Kilbane, the micro-editions gathered here include Michael McClure reading from his book Ghost Tantras (City Lights Books, 1964) at the Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado on June 16, 1976; Muriel Rukeyser reading a poem-sequence that shares a title with her poetry collection The Speed of Darkness (Random House, 1968) at Sir George Williams University in 1969; and Daphne Marlatt reading from her first collection of poems leaf leaf/s (Black Sparrow Press, 1969) in 1969 and then later in 2019. It is a collection that shows an investment in the audition of context. As digital sonic archives snatch the literary concept “voice” from the realm of metaphor and render it conspicuously concrete, the horizon of observation widens. It becomes possible to apprehend dimensions of audio recordings that have been neglected by the latter’s subordination to printed objects, or spirited away by reductive practices of transcription. This project was constructed using AVAnnotate (av-annotate.org), developed with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Contributions to earlier versions of these micro-editions had contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Nadège Paquette, and Rowan Pickard.