Vast digital trove of recordings by Canadian literature greats nears completion

The recordings are more than just readings. The writers introduce their works, answer questions and muse about what it is they're trying to achieve.

Jason Camlot was chatting with his new boss in the English department of Montreal’s Concordia University in 1999 when he spotted a dusty cardboard box of 80 reel-to-reel tapes in a corner of the department head’s office.

He asked about it. Oh, he was told, it’s just a bunch of old poetry readings from the ’60s and ’70s that nobody’s ever heard.

He never forgot that dusty box. About seven years ago, he tracked it down, found an old reel-to-reel machine, and started to listen.

“It was this incredible reading series,” said Camlot. “All the biggest names in North American poetry were there, all recorded in beautiful sound.”

As it turned out, a lot of other universities had similar dusty boxes.

And now, Camlot’s discovery has grown into SpokenWeb, a digitized bonanza of thousands of hours of readings and off-the-cuff remarks from Canada’s greatest writers during the time when the nation’s literature was being invented.

They’re all there: Margaret Atwood, W.O. Mitchell, Mavis Gallant, Rudy Wiebe, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Irving Layton — a national pride of literary lions, roaring once again.

The boxes from Concordia University feature 60 different poets, including international luminaries Alan Ginsberg and Jose Luis Borges.