
This fourth issue of the online journal Amodern should be of particular interest to the local people on the London Open Mic site. Most of the issue's articles reconsider the poetry reading series as a place to distribute and bring attention to new poetry. It is guest-edited by Jason Camlot, lead investigator of Concordia University’s SpokenWeb project, and media archaeologist Christine Mitchell.
Camlot’s Spoken Web project has been examining, in his words, “digitized live recordings of a Montreal [Sir George Williams University] poetry reading series from 1966-1974 featuring performances by major North American poets, among them Beat poets, Black Mountain poets and members of TISH, a Canadian poetry collective[;]" his "team is investigating the features that will be the most conducive to scholarly engagement with recorded poetry recitation and performance.” Much of this Amodern issue concerns that research, while other articles address contrasts between the role of the public poetry reading series in the 1960s and its function today.
Al Filreis contributes the essay “Notes on Paraphonotextuality” – a useful and accessible essay, despite its potentially daunting title, on the extras that a poetry reading can add to the printed text. Using US tape-recorded readings, he looks at the role of audience reactions in changing a poet’s way of presenting the poems, the effects of different kinds of audiences – friendly,