by Jason Wiens

ENGLISH 473.01 CANADIAN LITERATURE SINCE 1950
TRANSCRIPTION EXERCISE
Value: 2.5% of your final grade
Due: Wednesday, November 28 at 7 p.m.

You have each been assigned one poem, or a section of a poem, that has been recorded at a Flywheel reading this term, selected by students in our class, and posted to omeka.ucalgary.ca. You will find these under “Recently Added Items.” Listen to your assigned section, and transcribe the poem into a word document, in 12 point, Garamond font. Your transcription should notate line breaks, spacing, margins, punctuation, capitalization, italicization, or any other elements of a written poem according to how you interpret the audio recording of the poem. Dr. Wiens has been given written versions of each poem by the poets. This exercise will allow us to compare the different transcriptions of the poems by different students, and those transcriptions with the poets’ written poems.

Do not put your name or any other information in the word document in which you transcribe the poem. Submit your transcription to the appropriate Dropbox in D2L. Because Dr. Wiens may reference these transcriptions in conference presentations or in future publications, you have been asked to sign consent forms to have your transcription kept by Dr. Wiens for these purposes. Your name will never be mentioned in reference to your transcription or to this assignment in general in any future public discussion. It is up to you whether you wish to consent to this or not; but, you must sign a consent form before this assignment can be evaluated and you can be given credit for completing the assignment. Dr. Wiens will not know who has consented to have their transcriptions included until after grades have been submitted and the appeals period is complete. Isabelle Groenhof, the research assistant on this project, has the consent forms. If you are unable to sign the consent form in class, please contact her in order to make arrangements to do so.

Transcriptions completed with reasonable effort by the deadline will receive the full 2.5%.

Please note which audiotext you have been assigned. They have been assigned alphabetically and largely arbitrarily, with students who wrote on certain recordings for their archival assignments asked to transcribe other recordings. Although multiple students have been assigned to the same texts, this is not a group assignment. Please complete your transcription on your own. We will compare the different transcriptions in class. Do not transcribe the paraliterary comments (i.e. the host’s introductions, or the poet’s introductory remarks). Note that for all but the Fitzpatrick poem students are transcribing half of a poem.

Laurie Fuhr, “Your Last Day in Germany” (“on our backs” to “serious chamber” [1:35-2:36))

Laurie Fuhr, “Your Last Day in Germany” (“cold iron fires down” to “to base” (2:36-3:10])

Ryan Fitzpatrick, “Off Spectrum” (posted on omeka.ucalgary.ca as “Discourse”)

Jeff Kochan, “Anthropological Chorus” (“Nature is often seen” to “Daedalean light” [0:34-1:38])

Jeff Kochan, “Anthropological Chorus” (“On scattered winds” to “ring of our campfire” [1:38-2:43])

Jeff Kochan, “After Listening to King Missile” (posted on omeka.ucalgary.ca as “Detachable Penis”)

(“If I had to choose” to “all these elbows” [1:00-1:52])

(“The variable foot uses” to “rhythms that welcomed us” [1:52-2:47])