There are multiple pathways from Anne Carson’s poetry to Ross Gay’s prose. One need only listen, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson reminds us, and follow the trail of audience participation, decolonization, and ants.
In August 2024 the center announced the complete transcription of Voca, the audiovisual archive of its poetry recordings, including its longtime reading and lecture series, which began in 1962. The result is more than twelve thousand captioned media files of poets reading—and talking about—their poetry, making the archive’s intellectual content accessible to users with disabilities, visible to search engines, and available for linguistic computational analyses, library director Sarah Kortemeier says. The transcriptions date back to the center’s earliest recordings, in 1963, and amount to some six million words, spoken in at least twenty-five languages, including Japanese, classical and modern Greek, Bosnian, Swedish, Arabic, Diné Bizaad, and O’odham.
A reading by Ada Limón held in 2024. (Credit: Tyler Meier)
This enormous undertaking was made possible by a 2021 Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge grant of $135,000, which allowed Voca to hire professional transcribers to create the initial text documents. (Artificial intelligence was only of limited help in creating transcriptions, Kortemeier found: Large language models “are trained to predict the most likely word in a sequence based on thousands of other texts,” she says. “But when we write poems, we’re frequently looking for the most surprising next word, not the most likely one!”) Over three years, the center’s library staff and graduate student interns proofread, revised, and uploaded the transcriptions—with input from the center’s staff and community on some non-English language entries. The center also collaborated with web developers at the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities to redesign the Voca site to enable captions, as well as new features like playlists and lesson plans.
A unique aspect of the archive is that it captures poets talking extemporaneously about their work. This spontaneous reflection is another reason the universal design of captioning is so important, Kortemeier says. “An author’s commentary can provide a crucial on-ramp for access to the poem, an open invitation to experience the artwork with the artist.”
While Voca’s digital cataloging system already flagged recordings of early drafts, captioning helped identify “real wild cards—poems that subsequently got chopped up into multiple published pieces, say, or poems that retained only a couple of lines from the first draft in their final published versions.”
A reader might begin exploring Voca with a 2001 reading by Anne Carson, in which the poet coaches her audience through an interactive performance of several of her “short talks.” Carson’s words light up on-screen as she promises their first assignment is easy; at her signal, all they have to do is call out a single word, deciduous, in a questioning tone. “Okay,” she warns them with mock sternness, “remember your line.” (They nail it.)
Entries in the Voca archive are accompanied by keyword tags generated by library staff (and, in some older examples, by members of the public), creating a site-wide taxonomy of literary ideas. Carson’s reading is tagged: classics, audience participation, franz kafka, john keats, beauty, innovative, painter, artists. Clicking on “audience participation” offers a spate of other recordings, including a 2014 reading by Craig Santos Perez. Introducing the event, Poetry Center executive director Tyler Meier thanks the audience for braving local storms. Then Perez himself explains that the weather has cost him one of the props for his series of poems on colonization and American food: When the center warned him his flight might be canceled, he ate his can of corned beef. One doesn’t need the audio to know there is laughter in the room.
Clicking on decolonization, one of Perez’s keywords, will send a reader to Sawako Nakayasu discussing source texts for her “micro-translations,” including Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” and Ron Silliman’s “Ketjak.” Such references are easily missed in a live event or audio recording; the transcripts, which have been uploaded as plain-text files, can be scrolled through or searched to verify a word. The text format also offers a treasure trove of material for digital humanities scholars. Kortemeier hopes for the creation of a Voca concordance (an alphabetized index of key terms and their usage), which would allow for the study of the frequency with which poets use certain words across the archive’s six decades—just one avenue of research made possible by Voca’s transcription.
Nakayasu’s irresistible keyword ants delivers a Voca visitor to Ross Gay, reading poems from his insect-friendly Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) as well as “essayettes” from a work-in-progress.
Gay’s reading, on the eve of Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration, is accompanied by a Q&A in which the poet describes the inspiration he finds in human interactions. Walking to an Ethiopian restaurant earlier that day, Gay recalls, he saw a man in roller skates—“half purple and half pink”—skating over something written on the sidewalk: Repent. Fear God. The skater, Gay delightedly observed, was slowly erasing the text as he rolled across it. “That person,” Gay promises, “is going to show up in something I write.”
Two years later, he did. The pink-and-purple skater and the message over which he rolls appear in The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, 2019), the book those budding essayettes would become. The Voca transcript makes it simple to compare the two texts—Gay’s off-the-cuff story and its eventual manifestation in print—side by side. In the published version, the pink of the skates is refined (“a color I want to call fuchsia but I think that’s wrong. Magenta?”) and the pavement text is now “REPENT OR BURN,” but the anecdote is largely unchanged. Then the essayette swerves, in its final line, into new territory. As he watches the skater erode the text, the poet recognizes himself as part of the tableau—and active in it. “And, too,” Gay concludes, “the slight erosion was I, admiring him steadfast like this, all the herons in my chest whacking unrepentantly into the sky.”
Reading along exemplifies what’s precious about Voca’s transcription project: In following the text’s development, in listening to writers discuss their own work and discovering their lines of intersection—from Carson to Perez to Nakayasu to Gay—more readers can chart a poet’s imagination taking flight.
Evangeline Riddiford Graham is the senior editor of Public Seminar and host of the poetry podcast Multi-Verse.
Thumbnail credit: Jeff Smith