Word of Mouth: Strange Corridors, Dizzying Syntax, and the Unexpected Echoes of Underwhich Editions

Abstract

Underwhich Editions was a publishing collective and music imprint under which a group of Canadian writers, sound poets, and electronic sound explorers released books, chapbooks, postcards, broadsides, one-folds, leaflets, handmade editions, cassettes, microfiche, floppy disks, and CDs. It was a freeform outlet for their interests in linguistic, sonic and visual experiments. Active from 1978 through the ‘90s, Underwhich had a revolving cadre of contributors, including at various times, Michael Dean, Brian Dedora, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, John Riddell, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steven Ross Smith, Susan Andrews Grace, Richard Truhlar, and Mara Zibens. The cohort represented a communal DIY ethos, that acted in collective opposition to mainstream publishing and recording industries. Utilizing affordable and accessible technologies, such as letterpress, home-recording, Letraset, cassette duplication, xerox, and desktop publishing, the artists where able to circumnavigate impervious and top-down industry structures to create and distribute challenging cultural artifacts and objets d’art within a niche, but world-wide network. Throughout its lifetime, the group pushed against the boundaries of conventional poetic expression, creating works that utilize nonsense, visual forms, synthesized sound, dysfluent speech, textual appropriation, errors, technical malfunctions, computer code, musical experiments, and consumer electronics. The Underwhich Audiographics Series, which released over 40 albums of sound poetry, electronic and avant-garde compositions, set the endeavour apart from a typical publishing outlet, announcing an interest in expanded poetic form and emergent technologies, both of which define the overall project. Examining the relationship between audio and publishing technologies and their distribution networks, this paper demonstrates the ways in which Underwhich was able to employ the independent spirit and innovative methodologies of both to help disseminate their own releases. The Audiographic Series also links the collective endeavour to the oral tradition of poetry, re-establishing this historical origin, after poetry became mute on the page for much of the 20th Century. To date, no comprehensive bibliography or discography of Underwhich exists, and the inclusion here will be an aid for further research on the collective, or generally on Canadian avant-garde writing, publishing practice, electronic music, and sound poetry.