Voice Say Research Articles

Hold Music

Hold Music Marianne Chan (bio) New to Cincinnati, in a parking lot, I am on hold with roadside assistance, flat tire keeping me out late when I have grading ungraded, homework left undone. I could turn on the car's interior light, read a book while I wait, but instead I put the call on speaker, scroll through my Twitter feed, find this Tweet: The moon is a beauty tonight. Look up! I lean my temple against the half-open window, and all I see are streetlamps, the window-lights of old buildings, occasional holes poked through the dark-blue-construction-paper night, no moon. I'm waiting here because I'm not smart enough to change this pierced rubber, my car's injured foot, which has spun and spun me around these new and painted places. I've had flat tires before, other problems I couldn't fix, but tonight is different. In this new place I feel both moonless and unmoonlike, the hold music holding me in my moodiness. The music—a jazzy woodwind cover of a '90s pop song—clogs my attention so that I forget I'm not listening willingly to its tinny warble, I forget I'm waiting, forget [End Page 169] this isn't the sound of ambient nature, not wind, not crickets blurting complaints into the wild, not the recorded Cabin Downpour that I sometimes listen to, which is also not nature, but nature's spare, the one the earth keeps in its trunk for moments of urban desperation. I don't know, perhaps this is what hold music is meant to do, to hold you so tightly that your body forgets to move, like a baby stock-still in the arms of her mother. And you, Moon, wherever you're hiding, what music holds you safely somewhere, but not here with me? I want to feel safe too. Instead I'm scattered in this new city, with its German-style half-timbered houses made into college fraternities, with its breweries in old, abandoned churches, with my new occupation as student and teacher, a position I have always wanted, but of which I find myself undeserving, of which I find myself afraid. Brave Moon, why can't you be inside me, under my ribs, meteor-pounded, cratered, and yet— The hold music stops. There is a silence on the line, and then a human voice says: How can I help? Within minutes, I see the full headlights of a car approaching, here to replace my sad tire, replace my motionlessness for movement. Finally, I drive back to my apartment with the radio off, windows down, listening to a city doze. A light turns red, so I stop and look at the sky. There, Moon. [End Page 170] You find me, at the corner of my street. The Tweet was right: You are a beauty that I both see and hear, the world's whole note, making me brave again, holding the tide of me within your cratered flute. [End Page 171] Marianne Chan Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College

Finding Community After Suicide and a Near-Death Experience.

Finding Community After Suicide and a Near-Death Experience Chris Batts I felt rejected throughout my life. At six months old, my mother threw me in a dumpster, and for years I lived in foster homes. I lived in bad neighborhoods with unkind and untrustworthy people. I felt alone and worthless. No one understood my pain. I kept it all secret. I dropped out of high school. After a breakup a few years later, I started experimenting with drugs. Because I used to have epilepsy as a kid, I went to the doctor and told him I was having seizures. That way, I could get prescription drugs and try to overdose on them. I ended up experimenting with those pills, taking them every few hours. Something else started happening, too. Maybe it was my abuse from childhood coming back. Whenever I would go to certain places and see crowds of people there, I would get nervous and start freezing up. My body would shake and my stomach would hurt. I felt scared and paranoid, thinking that everyone was against me. This feeling hit me even when I was playing basketball. I started thinking people were criticizing my every move. I felt angry because I [End Page 24] didn't want to feel that way. It began to depress me and impacted my ability to find and keep a job. I went through a period of drinking heavily. I didn't have many options for my addictions or anxiety. I didn't have insurance or money to pay for treatment. I didn't even know what treatments were out there for my situation. I made some small improvements on my own, but my depression kept coming back and got stronger. At age 24, I got despondent over unhealthy, unsupportive people in my life. Everyone seemed to be rejecting me. While in a car with my friend, I received a call from my mom. (My grandmother gave her my phone number because she wanted to talk to me.) Rather than offer any words of comfort, she told me not to look for her and not to call her. She said she didn't want me and told me, "I'm not your mom." Life didn't seem worth living. I decided to commit suicide there and then by jumping out of my friend's moving car. My head hit the concrete, and I had a severe head injury. My head split open. I had an out of body experience while my physical body lay on the pavement. Somewhere, I heard a voice say, firmly, "I wouldn't do that if I were you." I found myself in a white void-like space. I didn't see anyone at first but felt this strong presence. I just knew it was God. God's presence was familiar, strong, and definite. Some things are just so hard to put into words, but when you feel God, you know God in every aspect of your being. In that place, your vision is perfect, your hearing is perfect, and everything is perfect. You're not hungry, not thirsty. You're just in your spirit. Nevertheless, I was in disbelief. I didn't think to look at myself because I was scared and uncertain. I thought, "Whoa, this is crazy! This is insane! Humans can't come up with this stuff." Then I thought, "Wait, this stuff really does happen." I was certain that God knew all my thoughts. He knew I was trying to understand what was happening. I had so many questions too. What was God all about? Who is worthy of God's love? He answered my unspoken questions right away because God and the Source know you completely down to every particle of your soul. God assured me that everyone is loved, and I should make sure they know it. God introduced me to beings I call angels. I was scared at first but was surprised that I recognized them. The angel on my left side did not look human. He had male energy and was closest in appearance to a large beetle with huge lavender-grey wings. The wings looked thin and had...

Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters

Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters Ian Davidson (bio) In her long poem, Revolutionary Letters (1968–2007), Diane di Prima is constructing a world at the same time as she is narrating its environmental and military destruction. As she says in #75: You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmologya cosmogonylaid out, before all eyes (103) Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as potential [End Page 314] alternative futures, through a roll call of forgotten or neglected figures, many of them engaged in armed and violent struggle. The poem’s politics, as its title suggests, are those of the militant counterculture, committed to revolutionary action. Revolutionary Letters not only incorporates public and private spheres, but blurs the distinctions between them, producing a world that deals with the histories of things that have happened and those fictional things that might have happened.1 The poem does this through the narrative of the life story of its speaking voice, that of di Prima as subject and author of the Revolutionary Letters. Rather than mimetically mirroring, doubling, or representing the experience of the speaking voice, the poem is integral to its production. In #75, speaking of the poetic work, the narrative voice says: “there is no part of yourself you can separate out” and “it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole / you do not ‘make it so’” (103). Through its self-conscious use of literary forms, the poem also works with and against the development of a single speaker. The poem uses the idea and the practice of multiplicity as a pedagogic practice. The potentially revolutionary audience is not taught things by an authoritative speaker, but learns by being part of the development of many voices. Rather than functioning as a form of individual consciousness-raising or heroic address, the poem combines and sustains critical and discursive conversations between forms of poetry, revolutionary politics, and aesthetico-political philosophies that inform the work.2 Revolutionary Letters and the American Long Poem Revolutionary Letters is, at least in part, informed by the predominantly masculine history of the American long poem. While there are earlier examples of long form experimentation by women, which could serve as models for some of di Prima’s strategies in Revolutionary Letters, many of these received little attention at the time of their writing. Mina Loy’s “Love Songs to Joannes” (1915–17) explores the nature of sexual relationships in a sequence that adopts typographical modernist tropes. Her use of gaps between words to indicate the rhythms of the poem was ahead of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” by some four decades. Loy’s use of asyntactic grammar and the free verse sequence anticipates the interests of later experimentalists in constructing works that articulate, simultaneously, diverse [End Page 315] perspectives on a single topic. Loy’s emphasis on the fluidity of the body and of sexuality outside of romantic love is feminist, and close in many ways to di Prima’s concerns in poems such as “The Practice of Magical Evocation” (Pieces of a Song 20). Muriel Rukeyser’s multi-voiced documentary epic, The Book of the Dead (1938), uses a range of material to document the Gauley Bridge construction project, which resulted in the...

Can the Subaltern Communicate?

Following Gayatri Spivak's Controversial essay, the subaltern Speak? a host of debates have come to the fore as regards whether or not the subaltern voice can speak at all, especially after the era of independence. Of course, Spivak has her reasons to answer the question she raises in the negative, but other writers (I take the example of Moroccans) have proven that they can speak and they actually have spoken in their writings though the means whereby the speech is conducted is Western. In this sense, my contribution addresses the question of the subaltern voice in some post-colonial literary works, especially of the Moroccans, and the extent to which this voice is able or abled to speak. This is seen into especially through the content of what the subaltern voice says and the literary techniques employed in speaking its mind.

What Does Your Voice Say About Your Attractiveness?

What Does Your Voice Say About Your Attractiveness?

Can the Subaltern Communicate?

Following Gayatri Spivak's Controversial essay, the subaltern Speak? a host of debates have come to the fore as regards whether or not the subaltern voice can speak at all, especially after the era of independence. Of course, Spivak has her reasons to answer the question she raises in the negative, but other writers (I take the example of Moroccans) have proven that they can speak and they actually have spoken in their writings though the means whereby the speech is conducted is Western. In this sense, my contribution addresses the question of the subaltern voice in some post-colonial literary works, especially of the Moroccans, and the extent to which this voice is able or abled to speak. This is seen into especially through the content of what the subaltern voice says and the literary techniques employed in speaking its mind.

Wisdom: Experience or Education?

One day when I was mourning the loss of a wonderful and remarkable young man, I heard a voice say, “There are other ways to grieve besides crying.” When I asked what they were, the spirit said, “Wi...

Selections from The Littlest Death

Selections from The Littlest Death TC Tolbert (bio) When a death occurs it is not your death.You do not know this instinctually.The death is outside of you.You are in a dark hole and someone isoutside of you. Someone outside of you isis in a dark hole. You know this.You know this like the dark hole that isinside of you. You are someone.You are someone outside and near you.What is in a dark hole is near you and it is dead. [End Page 123] Yesterday it was 28. Today it is 29. Tomorrow it will be 30. I won’t be able to remember how to get to the Transgender Day of Remembrance Memorial page for weeks. The year is already over and still it is 2010. This is the same year as last year and the same as the year before that. Yesterday it was 143, today it is 31. Chances are any one of them could have lived in Tucson. Although it is unrealistic to say that any one of them could be me, I say it anyway. I say that the women who were stabbed with sharp objects in their own homes were women who looked out their windows before they were women stabbed with sharp objects in their own homes. I say that the electrical cord will continue to be a weapon long after it was used on her throat. I say that the women with bruises on their palms were women with voices before they were women identified by the bruises on their palms. I say that the women strangled with scarves were women with scarves. I say that the women who were beaten with bricks were women with bones. I say that the women who drowned were women who talked. I say that the women whose homes were set on fire were women with homes. I say that the women who were run over by cars were women who walked. I say that the women who were stabbed in the neck were women who knew they were being stabbed in the neck. I say that the women without names were women with names. I say that the women who were found in the dumpster I say that the women who were shot with an automatic rifle I say that the women who were gang raped I say that the women whose heads were shaved and their videos were shown on the internet I say that the women who were executed I say that the women who were found naked in the street I say that they were women. I say they were women. And I say that the ones with sharp objects, with electrical cords, with scarves, with hands, with fires, with cars, with knives, with shoulders, with rifles, with razors, with clothes, were men. They were men. They were me. [End Page 124] The 8 year old, asleepunder her mother’s desk in the morning. (you are in a dark hole) Strangled with an electrical cord. Shot. Burned and found next to her packed luggage. Shot. Wounds and defensive bruises. Partially clothed. Shot. A bruise (shot) in the open palm of the left hand. Shot. (someone is near you) (shot) Seventeen times. Shot. Stabbed in the chest. Shot.In the dump. In the street. Shot. In her home. Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.Beheaded. Shot. Shot.A mile away from her body. Shot. Raped. Shot. Andthen raped. Shot. And then raped. Shot. (At close range) shot. [End Page 125] the body hates being spoken of collectivelybut there are bodies collected and bodies held uplike trophies and there are still bodiesto be hunted and won. when a transgenderwoman says simply, I am a woman, she ismaking strong the very same musclethat betrays her. the same bodies withthe same histories are slaughteredin the same fashion by different bodieswith the same designation: men. the body hearsa voice like its own voice say, I am a woman,and it wants the voice to apologize. it wantsthe voice to be wrong. when the body attacks itselfthere is...

A Boat in Restless Seas: Mission from the Margins

theme The salt of the earth: mission from the evokes a wonderful picture of the church receiving energy and help from those pushed to the periphery. picture it brings to my mind though, is of a large and secure centre with a smaller, more vulnerable edge, rather like the fringe on the border of a shawl. This doesn't seem to match the reality that there are a lot more people on the margins than at the centre; in other words, the fringe is larger than the scarf. I would therefore like us to explore the same issues with a different metaphor, using the language of the little boat on the vast and restless sea. Listen while I tell you a story we all know, using my own Jamaican language, considered by many to be a marginal patois. One time, long, long time ago, Jesus followers them get into a boat, and Jesus make them sail off without him. Well, friends, big storm blow up when them in the middle of the water. And them frighten frighten frighten. Then just when them feel things couldn't get any worse, them see something coming towards them on the water. Some bawling loud loud duppy! Ghost! Some praying, help we! Where Jesus when we need him? Then a voice say, Calm yourselves. Is me, Jesus! And them recognize him. And them shame shame shame because them wasn't looking to see him outside in the wild water. And Peter, him take brave heart and say, is you, make me come to you walking on the water too. And Jesus say, Come. And Peter get out and was walking good good on top of the water, then him see the waves and start to sink. And Jesus tell him, You was doing alright till you start to lose confidence! And him lead him back into the boat. (1) Now when we were in theological college in Jamaica, a long long long time ago, a wise man, a bishop called Neville DeSouza, used this story as an allegory to remind us that sometimes we, Jesus' disciples, see ourselves in a beautiful little boat with a red cross on the sails, battered by the winds and waves of chaos, bringing Jesus to the people on the edges of the lake. But when we look around, Christ is not in the boat with us. There is something scary out there! It's coming closer! It is Jesus, but we did not recognize him because he is coming from the sea where we never expected to find him. Jesus, the Holy Word, the second person of the Trinity, who was and is involved in creation, cannot be confined. He was and is there in the glorious chaos of the making of the world, so wondrously good, and he comes to us dancing on the tempestuous seas. Our question is, how do we recognize this God, who is not confined to our boat, to our concepts of gender or space or time or even species, who dances to meet us on the waves? We will only recognize him, our dearest friend, if we are attentive and open to hearing and looking and tasting and smelling and seeing strange and unusual things in peculiar places. All our cultures contain our own old testament Another wise man, a bishop called Jonathan from Rwanda, explained to me that all our cultures contain our own Testament. If we pause a moment, we realize that this makes sense. early followers of Jesus interpreted their experience of Christ in the light of the thoughts and teachings about God that they knew best, the teachings of the Jewish people. uniquely Christian collection of books we call the New Testament is full of references to the Jewish teachings and of arguments about how they should be used. Jesus' followers seem to have spent a lot of time arguing about food laws and circumcision, for instance. Even after the Jerusalem meeting seemed to reach a consensus about food sacrificed to idols, Paul still stated his own rather more radical views in the first letter to the Corinthians. early Christians didn't always agree about how to use the Jewish scriptures we call the Old Testament, and indeed we, their successors, still don't. …

Girl On Tracks

Things never noticed before: the ceiling above me is curved downward, tiled with blue and white squares. Some of the tiles are chipped, and beneath the veneer is a gray, concrete color that matches the grout, which in many places is stained black. The lighting is fluorescent, and one of the fixtures is plugged into a dirty orange extension cord that snakes through a rodentsized hole in the ceiling. The textured anti-slip strips at the edge of the platform are Crayola cerulean. The strips are some kind of plastic, and they seem to be glued to the dull granite slabs that are the floor. The edge of the strip behind me looks 71 to be coming unglued, a slight lip forming where it should be flush with the stone, a tripping hazard maybe. Maybe she tripped, think, maybe. About half an hour ago, a girl standing on the platform just behind me, close to my shoulder, launched herself in front of the express train. I'm sitting here because this is where was told to sit by the two policemen who seem to have taken charge of things. They think you might have pushed her. There's another guy leaning against the adjacent side of the pillar. don't know what he looks like. wasn't paying attention when he sat down. His voice is deep, and in my head picture him old, older than me. I wouldn't worry, though, the voice says. I saw it all. Why would they think that? ask, my eyes on the ground. I don't know. You were close enough to have done it. Anyways, the way saw it, that girl was on a mission to die. It looked like you tried to grab her. She knocked my phone out of my hand. It fell on the track. I wonder if it survived.

‘Fascinate’ Your Way to Success on Campus and Further

‘Fascinate’ Your Way to Success on Campus and Further

TWO POEMS

1 4 1 R T W O P O E M S R O B E R T P E N N W A R R E N W A K I N G T O T A P O F H A M M E R Waking up in my curtain-dark bedroom, I hear, Cottoned in distance, the tap of a hammer: Tap-tap. Silence. Then anguish Of band-saw on white oak. Yes, I know what it is. My boy, this early, At his five-tonner, at work, the schooner. I shut eyes and see, rising upright in stocks, The sanded gray hull. Dew-gleaming, It swims in first daylight. Yearns long Atlanticward. He lives in a dream of his passion, hands Never quite still, eyes often fixed on great distance. You speak, he at first does not hear. Slowly, then smiles. He sleeps while the blue prints stare down in the darkness. Tools gleam when a star spies in. His head is thrown back in sleep. He dreams Of sail-crack like a pistol, of spume. Gulls scream in their hypothetical sky. Oh, tell me the nature of passion and the flower thereof! What would I have otherwise than truth, even my own dream? Who have waked in the night from a dream In which I, like a spirit, hung in the squall-heart – 1 4 2 W A R R E N Y There saw how, one rag of a spit-fire jib forward, the bows Climbed the gray wave-steep, plunged, emerged, While through rain-slash and spray-roil, Behind plexiglass dome, hands on wheel, the face, Carven, stared forward: gannet-gaze, osprey-eye. Slowly it smiled. I dreamed it was smiling at me. S T A R F A L L In that far land, and time, near the castrated drawbridge where, For four bloody centuries, garbage, In the moat’s depth, had been spilled To stink, but most at the broiling noontide – There we, now at midnight, lay. We lay on the dry grass of August, high On our cli√, and the odor we caught was of bruised Rosemary at pathside, not garbage, and sometimes The salt air of sea, and the only sound to our ears Was the slap and hiss, far below, for the sea has never forgiven The nature of stone. We did not lie close, and for hours The only contact was fingers, and motionless they. For what communication Is needed if each alone Is sunk and absorbed into The mass and matrix of Being that defines Identity of all? We lay in the moonless night, Felt the earth beneath us swing, and watched The falling stars of the season, that fell Like sparks in a shadowy, huge smithy, with The clang of the hammer unheard. T W O P O E M S 1 4 3 R Far o√ in the sea’s matching midnight, The fishing lights marked their unfabled constellations. We found nothing to say, for what can a voice say when The world is a voice, no ear needing? We lay and watched the stars as they fell. Vol. 67, no. 3 Spring 1978 ...

Quetiapine Treatment for Delirious Mania in a Military Soldier

Quetiapine Treatment for Delirious Mania in a Military Soldier

Reflections for March

Doctor Robert Kraus dictating one EEG report. Put it in the usual format and add all proper punctuation. Patient: Cullen Hicks. Age: 17 years. Date of examination: March 8, 2009. EEG case number: 09-063. Referring physician: William Harvey, MD, Neurosurgery. Reason for referral: Gunshot to the head. This patient's electroencephalogram recorded at both standard (7 μV/mm) and maximal (2 μV/mm) amplification, shows (pause) no evidence of electrical activity of cerebral origin (pause) either spontaneously or in response to stimulation (pause) during a 30-minute recording–isoelectric EEG. End of dictation. Sign my name at the bottom. He pushed “#” and then “9,” heard the feminine machine voice say, “You have specified high priority,” and returned the handset to the cradle. Despite the pauses, the words came out more easily than he had anticipated. Dr. Kraus took the staff-only elevator down three floors into the ICU. As he approached the nurses' station, Kelli, a pretty young woman wearing a floral pink top and light blue scrub pants, hurried toward him. “Sherry has finished cleaning up after the EEG. She said it looked flat to her.” “It is,” Dr. Kraus replied. They walked by the long counter built for writing while standing. The unit secretary, seated behind it at her desk, called to him, “I printed the Apnea Test Protocol off the Intranet and gave it to RT like you asked.” They walked past the ICU manager's office and heard, “Dr. Kraus!” Both paused while Melissa rose, skirted the corner of her desk, and rushed toward them. “We tried to reach both doctors. The answering service said you were on call and they couldn't be reached.” Dr. Kraus replied, “I called the cell and home numbers I have and didn't reach anybody. Either one would have done it. I guess they're out of town.” …

The place of nature in Godard's late films

The place of nature in Godard's late films

This Is Me

This Is Me Charles E. May (bio) When I walk into the intensive care ward, people are gathered in small clusters in different sections of the long, brightly-lit waiting room. Because my family has been here the longest, they have the best corner, with a recliner and a lamp. They have brought thin foam mattresses, pillows, and a patchwork quilt, and are eating from a big barrel of Kentucky Fried Chicken. They lick their fingers and come to hug me with their elbows, their greasy hands held high, relieved that I am here, for I am the oldest. “How is she?” I ask, when the hugging is done. “About the same,” my sister says. “Can I get back to see her?” I ask. My brother says, “Here, I’ll do it for you.” He pushes a red button on the wall, and in a moment a female voice with the Appalachian twang I grew up with comes from the speaker. “Can I help you?” “Yes, please,” my brother twangs back, “I’d like a double whammy burger, a scoop of fries, and a Big Gulp.” A moment of silence, and then giggly-stern: “Sir, did you wish to see a relative back here?” I lean toward the speaker. “Yes, I’m Mrs. McKenzie’s oldest daughter and have just flown in from California. May I see my mother, please?” “I’ll buzz open the door, and you can come on back,” the voice says in a little hillbilly rhythm that lengthens on the last word. The door lock clicks, and my younger sister goes back with me. We pass a row of glass rooms; in each is an old man or woman with tubes in their mouths. Television sets drone on from wall mounts, but no one is watching them. My mother is in room six. She looks like the rest of them. I lean down and speak in her ear. “Mom, I’m here. It’s me.” Her eyes flutter open for a startled moment and then close again. We establish our routine. I will stay during the day, sitting in the big recliner my family has claimed, and my sister June will spend the night sleeping in the same chair. [End Page 47] A teenage girl comes in with her boyfriend. She wears a cheerleader jacket and heavy brown make-up on her face and legs. The boy is tall with long legs and arms. He tries to comfort her by patting her and putting his arms around her. He can’t keep his hands off her. She knows what he is after and pushes him away. He sits down with a sullen look and opens a newspaper. He has snuff tucked under his lower lip and looks as if someone has hit him on the mouth. He carries a McDonald’s cup into which he spits. The girl doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. I wonder if later that evening she will kiss him. A new group comes into the waiting room, one couple at a time, until there are ten or twelve. The men have red cheeks where the blood vessels are close to the surface of the skin; they wear baseball caps and bib overalls drawn tight against their bulging stomachs. The younger women have broad bottoms and thick thighs; they wear baggy nylon jogging suits. The older women are worn away and sit with arms folded. One woman enters alone and joins them. She is in her early fifties, slim and tanned, and her hair is fashionably cut and professionally colored. She wears a well-fitting pair of black slacks and a gray wool jacket that fits her shoulders well. She has a leathery look about her from too much sun, perhaps golf or tennis rather than cornfields and gardens. However, if she wore a shapeless flowered dress and let her hair fall gray and uneven around her shoulders, she would look like one of the women who wait here for their husbands in the icu. The men take off their caps, pull their chairs close, lean in and speak earnestly to this woman; they try to impress her, even flirt...

Granularity, and: The Devil’s Pollard

80 ange mlinko GRANULARITY A sufficient diner; a fish tank in the middle of it to put the kiddies by, and distracting it was to notice a guppy methodically mouth up burp out as we ate single grains of blue gravel —The spruce holds its breath until its cyan needles scatter like a shattering of compasses at cascading Polaris. Weighted with orbs it’s realigning its spine; wound with strobes, it’s a brain + electrodes. Amidst the miracle, poetry went on scrutinizing itself. A yet and a but halted us; I said it was a chime, he called it a propinquity; over my shoulder I heard a voice say, “Well, it was legal but cumulatively it was bad business—” Christmas. Away in a managed a centrifuge bed twas decided one zygote had the stuff to get—granular, and I am more granular and more apparitional with every annular veer of the geese; there’s green in the leaflitter, one obese squirrel: winter’s abundance abundantly clear, getting clearer, even the snow is stackable CRSUM09 poetry.indd 80 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 81 ange mlinko THE DEVIL’S POLLARD Great angelic civic trees cropped into Ys and Vs to accommodate the powerlines appear now that their leaves are sheared as the wings (rather than horns) of a dilemma, a diptych. It’s the realpolitik of utilities—saying the powerlines must be accommodated and therefore either nonaction is out of the question or finding solutions to aesthetic injury is too costly (that the injury is more than aesthetic and may weaken the tree is thought a small but acceptable risk) and therefore we have come to the tip of one wing— we’ll argue no more: the other wing is the bard naming the devil’s pollard. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 81 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...

Personal Accounts: Rodolph H. Turcotte, M.D.: Another Perspective

Personal Accounts: Rodolph H. Turcotte, M.D.: Another Perspective

Personal Accounts: Rodolph H. Turcotte, M.D.: Another Perspective

Personal Accounts: Rodolph H. Turcotte, M.D.: Another Perspective

Place, authenticity time: a framework for synthetic voice acting

Current solutions to computer speech are evaluated by the degree to which the synthetic speech signal replicates a human speaker. While there has been significant progress in this area, users are still unenthusiastic about most synthetic speech. The Place, Authenticity, Time (PAT) Framework provides an alternative perspective that addresses the problem of ‘likeabilty’ for synthetic speech. The multidisciplinary framework draws upon concepts of ‘liveness’ from performance theory, theories of spontaneous speech from linguistics and techniques derived from performance practice including renaissance verse speaking. This article presents an outline of the theoretical position and a summary of findings from user evaluations: that users will be ambivalent about the truthfulness of a human or synthetic voice; that what a voice says is important; how it says it is also important; humour may be helpful in achieving user acceptance and the setting of the voice and user is also significant.