Klara du Plessis (she/her) is currently the SpokenWeb postdoctoral research fellow at UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, affiliated with Dr. Karis Shearer’s Audio Media Poetry Lab. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University and her ongoing research extends across sound studies, curatorial studies, archival studies, and research creation. Klara’s current interests include curatorial structures in the event-formation, performance, and archiving of twentieth century and contemporary literature, and listening as critical method. Klara is also the author of five books of poetry and literary criticism.
Authors | Klara du Plessis
Articles on Amodern by Klara du Plessis
SOUND DRAWS US TOGETHER
Irene Revell and Sarah Shin in Conversation with Klara du Plessis
Irene Revell and Sarah Shin co-edited an expansive collection of over fifty contributions centring feminist sonic cultures and radical listening practices, Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024). The wide variety of contributions harmonise to produce a collective community space in the pages of the book. In “Sound Draws Us Together,” Klara du Plessis talks to Revell and Shin about their project of creating an affective space where sound can resonate thematically, but also as physical bodies of sound in conceptual allusion to its own status as signal.
CURATING POETRY RELATIONALLY AS SOUND
Four Modes of Literary Event Organisation
This essay maps out concepts and methods for a formal analysis of the poetry reading event and series. This research foregrounds and resuscitates the agential and often underrepresented role of the literary event curator, and investigates literature as sound through mediating acts of curation and as a dynamic construct called the curatorial. The speculative nature of this research informs the schematisation of four curatorial modes with which to catalogue different priorities manifested in poetry reading curation, namely framed, open, self, and deep curation. The four curatorial modes offer varying ratios of shared agency and directorship between curators and performing poets over the imaginary of the literary event.
AMODERN 13: AFFECTIVE SIGNALS
Sounding the Curatorial
How is sound curated? How does sound affect concepts and practices of curation? What are the affordances of sound recordings in material and/or digital formats for acts of curation? What are the political and ethical considerations of making archival sounds public? How might curated audio collections make us feel, and why? Hinging on the distinction between sound as a vibrational, audibly perceivable entity and signal as a representational entity of that sound made manifest through recording and its preservation, these fundamental questions amplify the tension between sound as abstract and immaterial, and signal as artifactual and discernible. The “Introduction” to this special issue explores concepts and examples of sound and their signals in relation to acts of curation.