Hearing the Interior with Fred Wah and Pauline Butling
As part of the SpokenWeb Symposium Re-Sounding Poetries: Collections Classrooms, Communities, Karis Shearer and Erin Scott co-curated an exhibition called “Hearing the Interior with Fred Wah and Pauline Butling,” which opened at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and ran 11-19 May, 2025, alongside a second exhibition called “The SoundBox Collection: Creative-Critical Remediations.” The exhibition text is presented here:
“Poets, literary scholars, community organizers, and keen audience members have spent years recording the tender recollections, poetic compositions, and improvised words of some of Canadian literature’s biggest names at literary events across the country. At the same time, members of historic poetry movements, such as TISH, were also recording one another – in their living rooms, around the kitchen table, and at conferences. This exhibition focuses on Canadian poet Fred Wah and literary scholar Pauline Butling. Together, Butling and Wah – life partners — attended and organized myriad events throughout the 1960’s through 80’s and with Wah often recording these events using ever-evolving technologies, including his Wollensak tape recorder. With a revolutionary portable audio recorder and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, Wah was able to capture the vitality of the west coast of Canada’s literary scene and its many public reading events. Poetry readings, Butling tells us, “have often supported subversive, investigative, and community-building activities” (35). Their records, then, leave the traces of a collective body of work, the words of their peers, mentors, and one another shared and re-shared amongst eager listeners.
As part of the SpokenWeb Sound Institute Re-Sounding Poetries: Collections, Classrooms, Communities, held at the University of British Columbia, this exhibition explores the audio recordings created by Fred Wah that are housed in the SoundBox Collection. Many of these recordings echo the institute theme, with the collection holding the voices of the Vancouver and BC Southern Interior poetry scenes. Wah and Butling both felt that the power of these audio recordings lay in their communal design, in the power of people’s voices to open hearts to new poetries, and the immense value that teaching with such archival materials can bring to classrooms (oral history with Karis Shearer). With bibliographic support from the Fred Wah Digital Archive, and featuring audio clips from the SoundBox Collection, co-curators Dr. Karis Shearer and PhD student Erin Scott present a glimpse into the world of literary audio archives. Featuring works such as Evan Berg’s “Reel to Reel: a Meditation,” Miranda Eastwood’s “What’s In a Box?”, An Tran’s “Fred and Pauline,” Kailee Fawcett’s “Liminal,” Lauren Naidoo’s “Hyphenated Subject,” and Ronnie Cheng’s “In the Doorway,” Hearing the Interior explores the delight of what Wah calls “making inner/an outer world” (Wah 32). For the co-curators, this inner world is externalized as the richness of the Interior of British Columbia: the deep oranges, lake blues, mountains, the scree of the peregrine; but also, the students, artists, and scholars who are made up by and make up this region. Shearer and Scott welcome you into the world of Wah and Butling, and encourage you to pause and listen as they re-sound poetry across time, technologies, and communities.”
Poetry reading at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, 103-421 Cawston Ave, Kelowna, Syilx Territory, 16 May, 2026, 7-9pm. The exhibition opening featured an evening of readings by Sharon Thesen, Daphne Marlatt. While Fred Wah and Pauline Butling intended to participate, owing to circumstances, they were not able to attend. They were nevertheless made present by Erin Scott, Deanna Fong, and Klara du Plessis who read work by Wah and Butling, while Thesen and Marlatt also each read work by Wah during their sets. The poetry reading also marked the opening of on-campus exhibitions dedicated to Daphne Marlatt and Sharon Thesen’s recordings. We hear Erin Scott introduce “Hearing the Interior” exhibition and read a new piece of writing that situates the exhibition within the collectivity of the SpokenWeb Institute, and honours the many contributors whose labour may be less visible. In doing so, Scott’s piece calls back to Pauline Butling’s feminist ethos and critical writing about organizational labour. Klara and Karis introduce the “Remediating Daphne Marlatt” exhibition. Sarah Cipes and Slava Bart introduce “The Eros of Time,” an exhibition of Sharon Thesen’s sound recordings. The reading was hosted by Erin Scott and Karis Shearer.
| Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the SpokenWeb Project, SSHRC, the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies, the Reichwald Family, and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art for their support. Our heartfelt thanks to Inspired Word Cafe, the amazing folks who ran the refreshment table all evening, FCCS Technical Director Phillip Wyness, Media Manager Joanne Gervais, Comms Manager Shauna Oddleifson, Sam Neil, and Kaila Kalinocka for their exceptional work. To the entire SpokenWeb UBCO student team, we’re so grateful!