Abstract

While inputting metadata as part of my RA work for Simon Fraser University’s SpokenWeb team, there was one tape that I kept coming back to. The tape is a recording of poet Brian Fawcett reading and being interviewed for the radio program Mountain Pass. After returning to this recording again and again, I decided to visit SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books to read the manuscript of a poem featured on the recording in person. The physical poem, however, carried a sense of dissonance from the recording. Reading it challenged my understanding of what the poem was and disrupted the sense of familiarity I had developed through listening. This post is an attempt to work through some of these differences and question what I expected to find in the poem in the first place.