Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival

The SpokenWeb Podcast

For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.

Until recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary event from the margins.

This episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

All archival audio played in this episode is from SpokenWeb’s Ultimatum collection—including interviews conducted by Mathieu Aubin and Ella Jando-Saul with Alan Lord, Fortner Anderson, Sheila Urbanoski and Jerome Poynton, as a way of building this archival collection—with the exception of one clip of Alan Lord sourced from here.

WORKS CITED

Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.

Aubin, Mathieu. "Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.

FURTHER READING / LISTENING
Lord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.

Stanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.

"What's that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival." Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,

https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/