In the recording studio, text transforms into sound, and poetry is reshaped as voice. Klara du Plessis reflects on both the theoretical foundation and the making of a sound and video installation, Incipit. Scree. Explicit., produced with Kadie Salmon and on display at artwords (Gallery @ Glen Carlou).
The common definition of text is written or printed matter. Text functions as an immediate visual impression of standardised shapes that can be deciphered through the eyes. With the development of recording technology since the mid-19th century, though, language as an oral medium has been losing its ephemerality and become legible in sonic terms, too. An author can now read a text out loud, for example, and leave traces of those spoken words on a variety of recording technologies. Housed on vinyl, cassette tape, CD, MP3 and more, this sounded and recorded language, “foreground[ing] the audible acoustic text”, is what Charles Bernstein calls the audiotext (Close listening 12). “The audiotext, in the sense of the poet’s acoustic performance, is a semantically denser field of linguistic activity than can be charted by means of meter, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and the like,” Bernstein says (13). Jason Camlot’s rearticulation of the audiotext models the term as simply “the heard” (Phonopoetics 23). The audiotext, then, is the audible text, absorbed through the ears, that lends itself to interpretation in the same way as one might engage critically with words on paper.
Recording poems at SpokenWeb’s recording studio, Concordia University
It is from this theoretical field that I stepped into a sound lab, the SpokenWeb recording studio, to be precise. This research centre for the study of sound and literature, based at Concordia University in Montreal, offered me access to the latest technology and software in sound recording and editing. I showed up with my poems – text in the traditional sense, words printed on paper. These poems included a series of 20 sonnets originally composed for a collaborative, sculptural artist’s book, Incipit. Scree. Explicit., created with Scottish visual artist Kadie Salmon at a residency through Artexte, Montreal, in May 2021. Surrounded by microphones, computers, sound boards and cables, I began to inscribe poetry through my voice. On 6 May 2023, I wrote hopefully to the Austrian sound artist Christina Goestl, “I have a recording studio booked for this month and so yeah, am excited perhaps even to scream.” Reading is a material action equal to the physical formulation of sound through the body. I could feel my initial coldness, how my body wasn’t in sync with my vocal cords. I was recording with my mouth, not my body, not in relation to the space or the mediating equipment. Goestl responded, “I very much like my own voice and listening to it while speaking easily drags me away into a pleasurable space.” Her embodied attitude towards voice encouraged me. It focused me. I returned to the studio with gesture and a relationship towards the space surrounding me. I grasped the literal air in my hands, as it was also entering and being expulsed by throat in the vocal production of audiotextual versions of my poems.
Screenshot from the video version of Incipit. Scree. Explicit. produced by Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon (2023)
Screenshot (shoulder) from the video version of Incipit. Scree. Explicit. produced by Klara du Plessis and Kadie Salmon (2023)
For Steve Evans, recording poetry attends to the intertwining of text, timbre and technology (“The phonotextual braid”). I would suggest that, in this equation, text needs to extend to audiotext, and timbre needs to relate more concretely to body and voice. Technology becomes not only the mediating equipment that captures sound, but also the infrastructure of text, hands, mouth, room and more. In order for the recorded voice to be more than a slick rendition of so-called “perfectly” articulated words, the moment of recording has to validate presence, to amplify “the grain of the voice”, as Roland Barthes would say (“The grain of the voice”). Although he writes about musical voice rather than sounded poetry, it is nonetheless significant to consider that the “‘grain’ of the voice is not – or is not merely – its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language. The song must speak, must write” (507). Barthes famously distinguishes between readerly and writerly texts as ones that invite passive, or active, dynamic and creative engagement respectively (S/Z). Transposing Barthes’s insight to recording poetry implies that a voice reading poetry must expand towards a writerly essence, rewriting the poetry in sound. The sounded voice cannot represent or interpret itself, but must work to make the text its own, to transform the text into an audiotext. The grain of the voice vocalises its presence beyond reproduction towards an independence of sonic depth and inherent meaning.
For the video version of Incipit. Scree. Explicit., Kadie Salmon and I combined a filmed construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of part of the sculptural artist’s book, overlaid with my recorded voice reading five poems from the set of 20. Although I had visualised presence in my own body while recording the poems, my physical body isn’t visible in the film. Instead, Kadie’s hands are featured manipulating the sculpture, as the grain of my voice merges with the granularity of technology and screen. In three instances throughout the first draft of the video, though, Kadie’s shoulder is visible, too. On 25 June 2023, I wrote to Kadie, suggesting, “Your shoulder at 05:49ish bothers me a little bit. I don’t know if it’s feasible to cut?” Again on 1 July 2023, I insisted, “The shoulder moment?? needs some kind of smoothing out.” By 6 July 2023, the video had been edited to the point that I exclaimed, “Shoulder removals work great now!” But by the end of that same day, Kadie texted the decision “to add the shoulder back in right at the end so that we could have a better collapse …. I also quite like the revealing of the body at the end of the video.” This editorial zigzag back and forth between removing and reinstating the shoulder feels like a metaphor for the subtle blinking in and out of presence inherent to disembodied voice. My voice is embodied through its recorded presence, its poetic articulation, its audiotextual, writerly intentionality. But my voice is acousmatic – that is, heard but not seen – as the film’s materiality is taken over by sculptural parts and a pair of hands. The video creates its own visual language that does not represent the making of my voice, but reinscribes sounded poetry as an alternate, redirected script. This is when Brandon LaBelle might speculate that sound functions “as a body or skin … making apparent the negotiations of inner and outer, as intensities of dialogue, or abrasions and marks left to be read through fantasies of possibility” (Background noise xvii).
The video version of Incipit. Scree. Explicit., along with the original sculptural artist’s book and a publication of its documentation, is on display at artwords, a group exhibition curated by Jean Dreyer at the Gallery @ Glen Carlou, 10 September to 5 November 2023.
- Klara du Plessis is a South African-Canadian poet, artist-scholar and literary curator. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. In the fall of 2023, she releases a book of essays, I’mpossible collab, and a collaborative poetry collection, G, composed with Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi in English, Afrikaans and Persian. Klara holds a PhD in English literature and lives in Montreal.
Works cited
Barthes, Roland. “The grain of the voice”. The sound studies reader. Edited by Jonathan Sterne. New York: Routledge, 2012.
—. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Bernstein, Charles, editor. Close listening: Poetry and the performed word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The making of early literary recordings. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019.
Evans, Steve. “The phonotextual braid”. Jacket 2 (March 25, 2012). Web. 10 Nov. 2016.
Goestl, Christina. Private correspondence. 2023.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background noise: Perspectives on sound art. New York: Continuum International, 2006.
Salmon, Kadie. Private correspondence. 2023.