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Lillian Allen et. al, "Muttertongue: What Is a Word in Utter Space" (Exile Editions, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to nbn. I am your host, Holly Gady, and I'm excited to be joined today by Gregory Betz to talk about a new poetry collection, S.L. sonic poetry recording that he is part of called Mutter Tongue, what Is a Word in Utter Space? Which was released with Siren Recordings. If you're into the audio experience of these wonderful trippy poems, or with Excel Edition, if you want to see the print edition. Welcome to the show, Gregory.
- [01:38]
C
Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be here.
- [01:40]
B
Oh, it's so good to talk to you. So you are our representative. Your collaboration partners, Lillian Allen and Gregory Barwin are not on the show with us today, but you are going to speak for them and wonderfully, I am sure.
- [01:54]
C
I didn't mean to be so Christian. Here I am. 3, 3 and 1. 1 and 3. All these representations occurring right in the moment. I'll do my best to represent both Gary and Lillian, who are much more brilliant than I am.
- [02:08]
B
Well, I. I'm sure they would argue that. I will argue that. I'll call it different kinds of brilliance, but I think this trifecta of you is just fascinating. So for those of you who do not know. Ilian. Lillian. There we go. Lillian Allen is the seventh Poet Laureate of Toronto and a professor of Creative Writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University. Lillian is a two time Juno Award winner and a trailblazer in the field of of spoken word in dub poetry. Gary Barwin is definitely a man about town. He's a writer, a musician, a multimedia artist, and the author of 34 books, including Scandal at the Elphorn Factory, New and selected short fiction from 2024, 1984, everyone. I have interviewed, Gary, about that on this program, so you can go check it out. As well as Yiddish for Pirates, which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and that was the finalist for the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. A Little Bit About Gregory Gregory Betts is a poet and a professor at Brock University and the author and or editor of 25 books. His poems have been stenciled into the sidewalks of St. Catherine's and selected by the SETI Institute to be implanted into the surface of the moon. My God, Gregory, can we just pause? What is it? What's that about?
- [03:36]
C
That's a real thing. Yeah, that's fun. I'm happy to talk about that one. I've been working with the SETI Institute, which is a subset of NASA in the United States, on communication with aliens, and they're sending my poem to represent Earth and to the moon.
- [03:52]
B
I mean, that's a. That's the Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Greg, There you go. Yeah. Wow. I'm so impressed. Well, let's just focus and talk a little bit about MUTTER Tongue so. MUTTER TONGUE CRACKLES an exploration of land, language and sound, combining the intensity of dub poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics. This album is a sonorous soundscape partner of the collection of the same name from Exile Edition. So, Gregory, tell me about where this collaboration started from at least your perspective.
- [04:24]
C
It goes back so long. Lillian and I have been working together as long as Gary Barwin and I have been working together as two sort of ends of my experience. And we were able to draw them together into a performance space around 2015. I have an experimental noise band here in St. Catharines that jams and will jam for hours and will bring in poets and strange people of all ilks and just explore the possibilities of the moment. And one time we invited Lillian and she came down and it was spectacular. I mean, she is a poet, a page poet par excellence. She's a great teacher, but boy, can she let it rip as a performer. And in that space we realized we had something special. So we actually organized a number of subsequent gigs that were phenomenal here in St. Catharines. We did a number of performances, and it was from the strength of those performances that we decided to hit the studio and we started recording. Now, we had ideas by that point, we had text, we had tracks that we were working on, but these are sort of loose conglomerations of ideas that would work themselves out differently each time because of the improvisatory nature of the album and the project as a whole. So we went to the studio and we recorded. And this was a spectacular studio, or an Isaac's studio. I mean, he is responsible for many gold albums and Juno awards. And we gave him something strange to wrestle with. And he was so much fun to work with. The album, we're so happy about it. I actually just got my copy on Saturday night. Finally got the vinyl, my first vinyl, and I'm just tickled about it. It's so fun to hold. And so we just got the vinyl, and our original plan was to have a kind of insert into the vinyl of our lyrics, of our, you know, some aesthetic statements, some ideas about what we were doing as a complement or supplement to the. To the record that grew and grew and grew until it became its own standalone book, which was just published by Exile Editions as well. So there is a book, there is a record. We've done performances all over the place. We love to perform, and we're going to Trinidad in a couple months to perform down there at the end of Carnival. So we get to take this to the Caribbean as well.
- [07:03]
B
I would love to. I've seen you and Gary perform together live. I've heard the album, I've read the book. But watching YouTube perform live, Lillian, unfortunately was not there. I. I was amazed by other people's reactions, the way that people who were not part of the audience that was there for the poetry slash fiction reading, they were just kind of popping in to see what was going on, what the sound was about. Is that something you're used to?
- [07:36]
C
Yes. I don't. Yeah, there was. There was an amazing performance that we had at the Niagara Artist Center a while ago. This is going back seven, eight years, where we were loud and people just started sort of coming in from the street, and you could see just a look of, like, bafflement, curiosity, and even a sense of mischievous glee as they're like, this is something new and strange and fun. So we lean into that. We do lean into that.
- [08:07]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's. I love that. And I mean, so Mother Tongue is about exploring language and sound. And it's. It deconstructs it, it reconstructs it. It's so playful. I mean, I mean, there's one thing that I love about seeing the. The sound, not sound poetry, the sonic poetry on the page, is you get to see the visual representation within the confines of a book. You know, there's only so much you can do in that small space. But of what perhaps the actual. What the performance would look like. I was wondering about the process of taking that sonic performance and putting it on the page. What kind of considerations did you three talk about?
- [08:52]
C
Well, there's a lot of different things to balance out there when we're going to the page. And there was an ongoing conversation. Um, we've all published a lot of books before and we've all. We all know and think of the page as a kind of canvas, a template to work with. We wanted to get it so that we could actually work from the page. Right. Because we are an improvisatory group that stands in front of audiences on a fairly regular basis. We needed something that would trigger us. So it's gonna, it's gonna be audience oriented in the sense that there's things to look at and they're. They're intriguing and beautiful in their way. But almost as important is the fact that these are systems of notation that we use for our performances so that we can stand in front of an image that to most people would look pretty abstract and strange and perform it. And we know what it means from a embodied perspective. So they really are performance scores, even as they're visually dynamic on the page. I don't think of. I don't think of that as being any kind of tension between the two projects, which is interesting. I mean, they are doing different things, but they're so integrated and overlapping. As I said, the book is really liner notes, but it's a book length liner notes.
- [10:14]
B
At this point, I was wondering if you could tell people because, I mean, I even found myself having to stop myself from using the terms interchangeably. And maybe I'm overthinking this, but what is there, and if so, what is the difference between sonic poetry and sound poetry?
- [10:32]
C
It's a great point, Lillian. Lillian and I organized a conference last year at Brocken, at OCAD on the question of new sonic poetries. And we're investigating this. This is a proposition as much as anything else. To our mind, the history of sound poetry is rich and full and has a long tradition. And it's Got its own parameters and its own heroes and legends and myths from BP Nichols, Steve McAfee, the Four Horsemen. And we just lost Paul Dutton last summer, and they've done enormous and incredible work. Paul Dutton was the one who started to pull away from sound poetry. He called himself either a song singer or a sound artist.
- [11:18]
B
He.
- [11:19]
C
He used different configurations to describe himself, and that's gotten us thinking about where we are now. We use. When we perform in front of an audience, we are just using our voices. So that's pretty traditional sound poetry. But when it comes to the record itself, there is a lot of remastering, some digital trickery. There are new layers thrown in that couldn't be done live, that it's lost its kind of pure connection to the organic voice. And as soon as we're into that space, we've pushed away from the habitual Four Horsemen mode into something new. And that's where we're starting to call this sonic poetry. And, of course, working with people at Siren Recordings like Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Barron, they're very, very invested in the idea of sonic poetry as a space where music and poetry mixed together in more robust fashion than maybe your typical sound poetry. Is there such a thing as a typical sound poetry record? There might be, but it's been a while since there's been a lot of new recordings in that field. And the things that are coming out now are different. Like, they're mixing in digital effects, they're mixing in beats, they're mixing in various instruments. So it seems like there's new terrain that's opening up as we think about the space between poetry and music. And for us, that's really exciting. When we launched the records, we performed with three Toronto musicians, and that was. Boy, that was an incredible experience. They were so talented. Kevin Barrett was the lead guitar on that one, and he was the band leader. Just a phenomenal Toronto musician. And then drums and bass as well. But we were able to use the musicality of that they brought, and push, push into spaces that we just couldn't get to just by our voices. So this is where we're thinking with this idea of sonic poetries, as opposed to sound poetries, is that it's pulling away from just the voice as its center.
- [13:30]
B
Yeah, I'd never heard anything like this, which is. Which is great. I mean, I. I knew about Siren. I knew about their previous album, your Devotee and Rags with Ann Waldman. And then, I don't know why I would expect something similar from you three. I was like, oh, this is gonna. No, it's not even close. It was such a treat to listen to, and I. I do think I had that kind of astonished bafflement. And what a wonderful state to surrender yourself to. I mean, I'm constantly astonished, horrified in this day and age, but to be like, astonished, baffled, astonished, curious, like, that's a really wonderful state to occupy. So I was wondering about the collaboration process. I do want to ask you to read, and I understand that obviously reading without Gary and Lillian, you know, is going to be very different, and you can just feel free to read whatever you'd like. But I would like you to talk about the collaboration process because, you know, I don't. I. I don't collaborate well, you know, on anything, but definitely not art. I've never even attempted. But I have talked to other collaborative poets like Maid Jade Wallace and Mark La Liberte, and it's a really fascinating experiment. And I don't mean experiment in that it's like, have formed. I mean, there's a sense of play in collaboration that I don't think can be tapped the same kind of play cannot be tapped into when you're, you know, playing in a sandbox by yourself. Right. It's different. And I'm not saying it's better or worse. I'm just saying it's different. And I. I would love to hear about the collaboration process between the three of you to create this book or album.
- [15:18]
C
Yeah, well, so Gary and I have two books together before, so we've. We've done a lot of performances and performed together as a sound poetry duo on st. And as a collaborative entity. And one of the things that working with Gary taught me is you're not writing as yourself when you're working in a collaboration, and you have to let go of that. And that's very difficult. And I get why people resist it and can't do it. But what happens by letting go of yourself is you end up creating what Brian Gysen once called the third mind, a space in between the two of you that is not necessarily a clean merger of the two, but something else entirely. And that creation is something that's so remarkable and unique. Now, when we write, you're doing it much more intentionally than when you perform, especially when you're in the world of improvisation. But both of us have a background in improvisatory music, Gary, much more so than I do, where you're used to talking to each other through the process of creation, live and on stage. And so when we're up There we are having a full conversation, and he's throwing me curveballs, I'm throwing him curveballs, and we're bouncing ideas all around as fast as we can and having a lot of fun inventing this conversation. What's interesting to me is in writing, every now and then when I'm writing with Gary in particular, I would bump into something that was so clearly Gary and from his mind, that it couldn't have come from my voice. Because, of course, as I'm reading this, it has to work for me, too. But I'll bump into things that are shaped by his experience with his parents, with his mom, his dad and his grandparents, his experience growing up in Belfast. And there's something so weird when you read a text as you're creating it. You know, the collaboration is back and forth. We're writing back and forth, editing each other's work constantly. And you bump into something that's so not your voice. It affords you an intriguing alienation experience where you are inside your own creativity, but outside of what could possibly come from your mind. And that, to me, is the gem. So Gary and I started working. We started doing stuff back in 2005, and we had a book come out in 2009, and then another one in 2013. One of our first performances, we did the very first poetry reading in Dundas Square, what's now Sankofa Square, in downtown Toronto. And we used to wear monkey masks and ogre masks when we performed. And that reading in downtown Toronto was remarkable because we had the masks on so we couldn't see properly. But a guy from the audience came out and started. There were steps leading up to the stage and started interpretive dance, slithering on the steps as we were performing. Seeing that Lillian Allen, who was also on the bill, grabbed a mic and started riffing off of the dancer and doing interpretations. But we had these masks on so we couldn't see the dancer, and we couldn't see tell who was. Who else had joined us. But it was Lillian. And she. And she came in and caught the strangeness, the fun and the exuberance of what we were working towards and just dove in with two feet. And that's been our experience with. My experience with Lillian is she is such a professional. She's so talented, and she brings so many interesting questions to the table. But when we're doing improvisatory work on stage, she brings so much to that conversation as well. Like, she has chops, man. I mean, when we're doing sound poetry, people think of her as you know, straight dub writer. But if you listen to her records carefully, she has an enormous range of vocal expression and form in her. In her works there. And so when we. When we perform together, she has a place to really dive into those aspects and skills that she's developed. And she's got. She's got a strong voice. When it comes to the three of us together, we. We have a lot of fun. But this project isn't just about joy and fun and exploration. That's. That is part of our. Part of our task is to create a space where we can explore language to its absolute limits and really try to open up new ground. But this project is also motivated by the idea of mother tongues. All three of us, in very different circumstances and in very different histories, have this unique experience of being outside of our mother tongues that we've lost connection to it. So that when we hear what is ostensibly our mother tongues, it is noise and sound poetry to us. It is patterns and rhythms that we can't follow as semantic content. So we started thinking about what is our relationship to mother tongue. Well, it is a mother tongue that we hear, and we wanted to think about that history and where it comes from and what's been lost and why it's been lost. And a lot of that is about the. The path to meeting each other here in Canada. So maybe I could read right now a poem in the collection Mother Tongue that talks about where I'm coming from in relation to all this. This is a villanelle called what is a word you use? What is a word you use to speak through old silence? As mother sounds echo, you may come from away, but of your folding in pain. What is a word you use? They sailed stuffed in the hector cleared a loch room as mother sounds echo from foxle to boom before an unreadable land rising. What is a word you use? Such Scots that birthed a country in the image of Gaelic sorrow As mother sounds echo in the lash of old tomorrow, Peace, order, old horrors. What is a word you use? As mother sounds echo? So that's from the book. That was a text that. An early text that was written that we used to start a conversation to think about place. My family came from Scotland and in Ireland, both countries that had been colonized by the English had seen their languages outlawed. Both Gaelic, in that case, had their dance stripped away, had their customs and culture outlawed, and they were ultimately chased off their land. And that's why both my Irish side and my Scottish side came to Canada two generations. Two generations ago. My family were living in Cape Breton and still had Gaelic, but that's gone now, so there's traces of it I hear every now and then, but it's growing fainter and fainter and less meaningful. And in that one, it's a thinking through of the linguistic history that we trace back. Gary and Lillian had their own encounters and stories, but we started that one as the question to orient the project. And it brought us outside of language, but it didn't allow us to arrive anywhere. And that helps to explain where we're coming from when we do the sound poetry.
- [23:13]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's really just. It's an experience that I feel like requires a, a level of just getting outside of your own head and just really listening. Like I said, like when I, when I, when I heard you perform, I just loved the people coming in to watch. I mean, it's impossible not to. So it's impossible not to be curious by what's going on. And I find the longer you listen to it, the more it feels completely like natural. Like, I mean, this is, of course, of course, this is a sound. Of course, this makes sense. Of course, everything said. Yeah, it's just something that I think we're not accustomed to here.
- [23:53]
C
Well, well, we, we, we are though. I mean, we start, we start learning through the imitation and repetition and babble of sounds. Right. And so as we're thinking about language, we have, we walk backwards in sound poetry to those, to those beginnings before sound had really stationed and locked itself, locked itself in and become something hardened in our mind. So we go, we're actually going back to something we all had at one point in our lives. The ability to babble freely and create. And create a meaningful world out of sound.
- [24:27]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can say that I think, you know, sitting in that audience at night, hearing people read novels and nonfiction and I guess more traditional poetry, I mean, page poetry. I hesitate to use the word traditional because to me there's, you know, in contemporary poetry, I don't know exactly what traditional would be, but then having you two come up and just completely blow everybody's tiny minds was, was quite a treat. I remember my 7 year old sitting outside the room with his dad and he just peeked his head around with his eyes wide open like he was being called home to the mothership or something. I don't know. But it was very cool. I did want to talk to you a little bit about experimental poetry though, because that's, that's something that I hear a lot. Somebody saying oh, they're an experimental poet. And to me it seems redundant, I guess. Like, isn't all poetry very experimental? Maybe not. I want to hear your opinion on this.
- [25:23]
C
Well, every poet who's creating something new is working into new territory. And in that sense, yes, everybody is experimental in trying things. In most cases, people will do their experimenting at home. Paul Dutton used to hate the term experimental literature or experimental poetry because he said, I did all my experiments at home, and what I publish are the results. They're not experimental at all. They've already been proven. But I think there's. I think there's room in the literary world for people who are trying things that aren't necessarily established or proven or fixed, you know, and that's where I think experimental literature as a category is still useful. It's for people who are coming up with new ways to create form, new ways to create text that has never been tried before in that way. And seeing what happens when we put this out as a book. And that's it. And that's where I think it's. I think it's still a very useful category. There's other ways to talk about that, you know, innovative literature, but all literature is innovative. It gets pretty generic there. But that sense of like trying something new and really pushing it, and there's countless examples of, Of. Of kinds of texts that have created a new forum, a new genre emerging. There's. There's a risk involved in that. And so I like the space of experimental because it opens up the possibility of taking a risk.
- [27:00]
B
Yeah. What I was thinking, I like what Paul Dutton said, and I was thinking how whenever anyone describes my work, particularly my prose, as experimental, I'm always like, please stop calling it that. No one's going to read it. Because to me, there is this kind of notion of it when you say something's an experiment, that it's half baked, that it's not finished. And yeah, like that. That's. That's my problem. But then I also think, oh, you know, people aren't going to read it who aren't adventurous. And I thought, well, do I want not adventurous people reading? You know what I mean? Like, may. Maybe this is more like a crowd control word you can use. You know, like, what's wrong? I. As soon as soon as I hear that something's experimental, I want to know about it. I'm like, yes, I want.
- [27:45]
C
Well, it is. There's. But there's the paradox, right? You have. You have a group of people who want to, you know, push the boundaries and create new genres. Well, as soon as you call them a genre, then people are going to try to break out of that one, too, right?
- [27:57]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's just like I never started wearing leg warmers until they weren't popular. As soon as people started wearing. As soon as something's trendy, I don't want any part of it anymore. So I definitely feel that. So I'm wondering about collaborations moving forward. Do you, Gary, Lillian, have future collaborations in mind? Are you perpetually collaborating or are you perhaps working on something solo?
- [28:21]
C
Well, we're always, always, always, always working on other projects. As you said at the beginning, Gary has 35 books out, and I think 20 of those are from the past 15 years. So there's a lot of activity. I've got projects that I'm working on. Lillian's got projects that she's working on. Lillian and I are working on a book together right now called New Sonic Poetries, which comes from that conference. And we're trying to think of new ways to push the conversation forward through that book. We've got lots of performances lined up. We are, you know, the record just arrived. We got it on Saturday, so we're going to be doing a bunch of events to celebrate and promote that and get the word out. Get the word out into utter space. Right. And in the process of that, we may well end up with some new material. And it feels like the process by which we created Mother Tongue was very organic. And when we went to the studio, we had a small number of ideas, but we produced work in the studio that far exceeded what we brought in. It's not quite like Bob Dylan sitting down and writing Blood on the Tracks in the studio, but it's sort of in that school of using the opportunity and the tools of the studio to create something new. And so I could see us revisiting that, and I would do so with great relish and joy.
- [29:55]
B
Well, it was an incredible joy to talk to you and to dig a little bit more into this book, everyone. I writ book, slash, album, everyone. You can get the album at Siren Recordings. I believe they have it as a digital version or vinyl, if you would like. Yeah. And then you can also get the page book. The page book a little bit redundant.
- [30:20]
C
The traditional book.
- [30:21]
B
No book. Oh, talk about words just disintegrating. Yeah. And you get that with Exile or anywhere books are bought or borrowed. Thank you so much, Gregory, for talking to me about Mutter Tongue. What is a word in Utter Space, which was also written in collaboration with Lillian Allen and Gary barwin. I look forward to talking to you again.
- [30:42]
C
Thanks so much. It's been a great pleasure.
- [30:44]
B
Sa.