Annotations for Voice: Situational

Marlatt's cadence picks up on "certainly not" and as she laughs we can also hear laughter from an audience close by.

Laughter

The texture of the laughter tells us about the situatedness of this reading. It’s a small, packed room with over 70 people. The room seems to shape these moments of audience reciprocity as ones of intimacy: audience members are close together and close to Marlatt. This particular reading occurred at a record store in Kelowna, BC, called Milk Crate Records which was open for 8 years before it was required to vacate its location with less than a month of notice in 2019. This night was the final event before the closure of the store’s location, and the event was co-sponsored by Inspired Word Cafe poetry collective and the AMP Lab. The situatedness of the event in time and circumstance as well as space shapes the sense of intimacy that is audible in the recording.

Laughter, reciprocated from the audience

In listening to her revisit this time, we hear a change in her vocal delivery when Marlatt talks about her younger self: she uses more uptalk, or high rising terminal, in this early biographical narrative than she does in other portions of the recording. Today, uptalk is most often identified as a feature of the speech patterns of young women and girls (see Warren 2016), but this vocal feature didn’t become predominantly associated with young women until the last couple of decades. There is an interesting overlay, here, of a newer trend in young women’s vocal style onto Marlatt discussing her youth. For us, it indicates discomfort and a recollection of the uncertainty and unhappiness Marlatt describes. The echoes that this discomfort has with contemporary gendered speech reveals Marlatt’s situatedness to us as listeners who interpret her speech patterns through our own context.

rustling pages

Rustling pages

A microphone clunk as the tape from 1969 switches on

Soft laughter from the room

Clunk/static sound from microphone; soft rustling

Soft rustling

Marlatt signals to the audio technician to begin the recording.

Laughter begins in the room before Marlatt finishes her sentence, louder than before, possibly from one person

Marlatt ends in lilting laughter that echoes the laughter in the audience

Rustling pages

By the end of the recording, Marlatt’s vocal delivery has lost much of the self-conscious performativity of the beginning. Even in these moments of situated voice, where she addresses the audience, she is focused on the poems that she sorts through and the decision of what to read. In this moment, we hear the reading voice begin to overtake speaking, situated, and social voice. It may be that Marlatt is more tired, or perhaps more comfortable in front of her audience. But what we hear is also the ways that written poetry, which she holds in her hands, becomes her object of attention. It would be tempting to interpret this shift within a conventional approach to literary audio, given primacy to the pre-existing textual artwork. However, we think instead that we hear the material object of the poem begin to shape Marlatt’s performance and embodiment. There is a compelling resonance, then, with the contrast between object and action that Marlatt sets up near the beginning of the recording. The mediated object of the written poem is shaping the action of reading, not just the sounds that Marlatt articulates, but her situatedness within a room and her relationship to audience.

Soft laughter, rustling

Marlatt's final words, possibly addressed to someone sitting beside her, are cut off.

McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It was a regular habit of McClure's to recite these lines before public performances of Ghost Tantras. The gesture "suggest[s] the origins of his poetry in early English verse," as Michael Davidson notes (86). On the day he shot the USA Poetry episode at the San Francisco Zoo, McClure also recited Chaucer to the tree kangaroos, for whom "beast language was not right" (Kahn 340). Several months after the reading at Naropa, on November 25, 1976, McClure recited from the opening of Chaucer's prologue on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom during The Band's famous farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978).

Applause

The reference to John Lilly, the neurophysicist-turned-cetologist-cum-“cosmonaut of heightened consciousness,” is curiously overdetermined (Burnett 14). Emerging from the same incipient “culture of feedback” that would come to characterize ecological thought in the 1970s, McClure’s beast language parallels, in an eccentric key, the experimental work Lilly had begun in the late 1950s on the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins and possibilities for interspecies communication, as documented in *Man and Dolphin* (1961) and *The Mind of the Dolphin* (1967) (see Belgrad 138-73). And yet at the same time that he was researching dolphins, Lilly was also responsible for major contributions to the field of sensory-deprivation research, including the invention of the water-immersion isolation tank. Lilly’s *The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique* (1977) was published the year after McClure’s reading. It includes the logs of “scores of men and women volunteers,” from Gregory Bateson to Burgess Meredith, “who have recorded their extraordinary experiences” in a Malibu facility with five isolation tanks. Though McClure is not featured in the book, it seems likely he made the trek, and this presumption entails an irony worth pausing over. For Lilly, the isolated flotation tank is a therapeutic means of probing interior experience by cleaving mind from body: “For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes” (22). Meanwhile, the zoological expression of McClure’s beast language precisely refuses any distinction between the mind and body. “I knew that consciousness was part of the physiological body,” writes McClure, “and not separate from the rest of nature—that it was wound through, woven in, bursting out from, and pouring through all nature” (Scratching 28). In the *Ghost Tantras,* the unprepared passage from English to beastly nonsense and back performs the extreme dissolution of the Cartesian subject. And given that beast language so exuberantly infuses body, meat, and muscle with capacities for expression, we have to ask: why should the experience of floating in Lilly’s tank, designed to banish the body, license McClure’s reading in beast language before the Naropa audience in 1976? I have never recited a poem in an isolation tank, but I suspect that one hears one’s voice as if from the inside, by means of what the poet calls “the inner organs of perception” (Scratching 156). In this way, the notion of reciting beast language in an isolation tank, the supposed spur to McClure’s performance of Ghost Tantra 49 (49) offers an arresting counter-image of what is interpretatively salient in what actually happened at Naropa on June 6, 1976. The isolation tank, in other words, is a foil for that set of difference-making material contexts to which critical readings of the audio archive might attend—and all the more successfully so when equipped with platforms like AVAnnotate. Because it allows one to layer observations and interpretations across a single time axis, this flexible annotation tool enables close listening to the multiple voices one hears in the audio record.

Applause