Listening on the Radio

by JASON CAMLOT and KATHERINE MCLEOD

Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb – a SSHRC-funded partnership grant focused on digitizing, making discoverable, and creatively and critically reactivating literary audio held by university archives and community archives across Canada. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as The SpokenWeb Podcast, a podcast for disseminating sound-based research produced by scholars across the SpokenWeb network. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform “talk radio” in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this soundwork, “Listening on the Radio,” as performative scholarship that answers these questions and others – out loud. 

In this soundwork, you will hear a collage of sounds excerpted from a full-length podcast episode that we have produced for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That podcast series, now in its sixth season, has offered researchers and artists across SpokenWeb’s network a sonic space to share their sound-based research in a sonic format and to explore the affordances of the podcast as a format for research-creation. As co-host of The SpokenWeb Podcast Hannah McGregor has argued, “[t]he playfulness, intimacy, scrappiness, and independence of podcasting as a medium makes it an ideal place in which academics can rediscover the joy of scholarly community, connect to non-traditional audiences, and move past the barriers of traditional scholarly communication to embrace experimentation, authenticity, and immediacy” (Copeland and McGregor). Having been part of the production team of The SpokenWeb Podcast since its inception and having produced multiple episodes for it individually and collaboratively (see “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence”), we were interested in exploring how our campus radio show creates a similarly playful yet contained sonic space through which to listen to spoken word poetry; however, what we noticed our (imagined and real) immediacy and intimacy with a radio audience changed to the extent that our sonic experimentation was happening in real time with listeners, which then, in turn, impacted how we were performing on the radio – as curators and as listeners. By paying attention to how various “audile techniques” (Sterne) have informed the show, we found that our talking and listening on air has become a performance of dialogism with its own tone, affect, and dynamism. Thus, this soundwork performs dialogism and sonically enacts a variety of theses that we arrived through this performative process: namely, that when played on the radio spoken word poetry can disrupt listener expectations of “talk radio” as a broadcast genre; that radio has the power to connect with listeners across distances through the intimacy of voice and the temporality of broadcasting; and that what seems most effective for playing spoken word poetry on the radio has been to present it through a practice of listening on the radio. “Listening on the Radio” builds upon SpokenWeb’s various approaches to listening – from performing the archive to listening practices – all of which are based on collective acts of tuning in and listening together.  

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References: 

Camlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46, no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271, https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421.

Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18, https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412

Copeland, Stacey and Hannah McGregor. “Why podcast?: Podcasting as publishing, sound-based scholarship, and making podcasts count.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 27(1), https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html

“How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” Producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 4 May 2020.  

“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-show.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke UP, 2002. 

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Show Notes:

“Listening on the Radio” is a soundwork presented as part of this digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025. It is based on audio that will be released this same month as an hour-long episode on The SpokenWeb Podcast. 

Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast here, or wherever you find your podcasts. 

Learn more about SpokenWeb as a research network. 

Listen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.

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Credits:

Recordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 – 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).

Main narration audio recorded by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod at the AMP Lab, Concordia University. Audio excerpts from Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, The Tommy John Show, and 514-Core were recorded on air at CJLO’s studio at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University. 

Mixing, mastering, and musical composition by Jason Camlot

Produced by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod

Thumbnail by Miguel Alcântara on Unsplash

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Author Bios: 

Jason Camlot is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His recent books are Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Spoken Recordings (Stanford UP 2019), Vlarf (poems, McGill-Queen’s UP 2021), and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives, and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge 2023), Unpacking the Personal Library: Unpacking the Personal Library  (with Jeffrey Weingarten, Wilfrid Laurier UP 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill-Queen’s UP 2019). He directs the SpokenWeb research partnership, and is President of the Canadian Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.

Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, at Concordia University. As a co-applicant of SpokenWeb, she researches poetry, performance, and archives and has been published in journals such as Canadian Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Mosaic. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research” and she has co-edited the book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, 2019). She is the co-host of The SpokenWeb Podcast, for which she has produced the series ShortCuts – and, occasionally, she dances to and with the archives. https://katherinemcleod.ca/