Bob Perelman on William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant"

It's entirely possible that you missed out on English Studies in Canada's special issue "On Discreetness: Event and Sound in Poetry," coedited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, which came out in the summer of 2009. Today, we're highlighting one of that issue's most exciting pieces — Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript: Listening to 'The Sea-Elephant'" — which was subsequently republished in Jacket2 in 2013.

I first met Bob at John Ashbery's reading at Haverford College in February 2008, not long after I started working here at PennSound, and one of the first topics we discussed was his piece for the forthcoming ESC special issue and his desire for the essay to be accompanied by a number of brief excerpts and composite tracks from William Carlos Williams' two readings of "The Sea-Elephant." Eventually, I'd step in at the last minute as sound editor for the issue and put together a CD of tracks to complement the various articles, but even with footnote-esque prompts in the text to indicate when readers should listen to a particular track, this was not the ideal presentation we'd imagined. That's why we're very glad that the essay can finally be read as it was originally intended. 

The Jacket2 reprint includes 50 embedded streamable MP3s, which allow readers to hear illustrative snippets of Williams without having to leave the document. It's a truly marvelous piece, and even more so when made available in this fashion, so head on over to Jacket2 right now (by clicking here) to start reading and listening.