Voice(ing) Appropriations: Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada

Voice(ing) Appropriations:Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada Jason Wiens (bio) This essay has its origins in an undergraduate Canadian literature course I taught at the University of Calgary in the autumn of 2019, in which I gave students the option of selecting a reading of a poem by one of the Canadian writers in the "poetry series" at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) between 1965 and 1974 and performing a close listening of that reading, comparing the audiotext to the written text. Three students selected poems which incorporated found text in some way: Phyllis Webb's "The Time of Man" (read 18 November 1966), which embeds citations from an essay of that title by Loren Eiseley published in Horizons; Alden Nowlan's "Secret Life" (read 13 October 1967), consisting entirely of citations from the "confessional magazine" Secret Life; and several poems by F.R. Scott (read 22 February 1969) appropriating written text by or about Indigenous peoples, including "The Indians Speak at Expo '67" and "Treaty Poem." Although I was already familiar with F.R. Scott's work in the found poetry genre, and his poems which draw on materials relating to settler colonial and Indigenous relations, I was not familiar with the Nowlan or Webb poems, and these excerpts from the reading series suggest that, at the time, found poetry—or what I'm calling appropriative poetry, that [End Page 101] word more resonant in ways I wish to explore here—was widely established by the late 1960s as a significant experimental form in Canada. The term "appropriative poetry," as opposed to "found poetry," emphasizes agency rather than serendipity on the part of the writer who appropriates and recognizes the ethical issues of appropriation, more pronounced in some of these instances than others, that we hear and consider today and which may not have been heard and considered as widely in the late 1960s, not least among settler colonial writers and audiences. Listening to these readings by Nowlan, Webb, and Scott prompted me to consider how a vocalization of a text which consists partly or entirely of language appropriated from another source might differ from vocalizations of other poems. The oral performance of found poetry presents a new layer of interpretive complexity to a practice in which appropriation and recontextualization already complicate understandings of voice, origin, and expression. However, there has not been much consideration given, to my knowledge, to the oral performance or audio recordings of found or appropriated poems, either from the historical moment I discuss here or in the contemporary conceptual poetry which is its successor. Similarly, the ethical issues of "voice appropriation" have been the subject of much recent debate, although without much attention given to the oral performance of appropriative texts.1 In Appropriate: A Provocation, Paisley Rekdal writes, "[w]ith regard to writing and appropriation, the real question is not whether I can simply ignore or override racial stereotypes, or even whether certain cultures have immutable claims to particular subjects and content, but what appetites I feed when I write from a position outside my own" (50). Rekdal's argument builds upon that made by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda in their introduction to the collection The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, who argue we must shift our thinking about cultural appropriation in terms of rights to thinking about it in terms of desire: "What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it? To speak not [End Page 102] in terms of prohibition and rights, but desire" (17–18). These "appetites" and "desire" implicate both writer and audience in the ethical questions around appropriation, an implication which takes on further significance when listening to audio recordings of live readings, in which a writer's performance and an audience response are (partially) recorded, as I hope to demonstrate below. I want here to situate the emergence of found or appropriative poetics in Canada in the 1960s, compare oral readings of such work at the time, and consider the differences in how we might hear these readings over fifty years later from how they...

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