By Annie Guthrie

Annie Guthrie: Where, how, and why did Black Cake begin?

Kelly Schirmann: Black Cake was born out of several desires each coming to their own necessary fruition. I live in Portland, Oregon, a town that is rich in fantastic poets and readings, and having the opportunity to attend so many of them made me acutely aware of and interested in the varied ways in which poets perform. I thought there should be more delineation between reading poetry and watching poetry being read, and I felt that more people should have access to hearing it. As a person who writes and records music as well, I’ve always been interested in the impetus to make noise. It feels so much different than writing: so necessary in a completely different way. So in 2013 when the poet Brandon Shimoda gave me an album of songs he had recorded a decade before (under the moniker Cactus Cooler), I knew there was some substance to this impetus that many poets must share—a predisposition toward the lyrical, toward music and noise-making. I wanted there to be a forum where this could be explored, and Black Cake was born shortly after that.

Annie: What is the difference between reading poetry and watching poetry being read? Why recordings instead of books?

Kelly: There’s something that happens when a poet stands to read their work. Sometimes it’s invisible—the poet appears to be wrestling with something, or racing to overcome something, or maybe just keeping the something at bay. In these cases, the performance is more of an act of getting through the performance; the difficulty of sharing, of transitioning a private work to a public performance of the work (a universally relatable struggle for poets). Sometimes, though, a really miraculous thing happens. Standing before an audience, the poet seems to be actively connecting with something, channeling something, and we (the audience) are reminded of what draws us to poetry in the first place. It is the sense of this magic—a strange, nameless, eternal force—that inspired me to start Black Cake. I wanted there to be a forum for people to experience the energy of performance, and to bring attention to poets who I think are doing an exceptional job at harnessing it. Just as reading poetry is a personal and powerful experience, I wanted listening to poetry to be just as powerful and just as accessible.

Annie: What makes Black Cake different from other poetry archive projects?

Kelly: There are lots of variations on audio-poetry or archival recording projects—I love Harmony Holiday’s Afrosonics/Beautiful Voices project, which archives rare audio clips of African American voices. PennSound is also obviously a huge resource for poetry recordings, as they have archived somewhere around 1,500 audio clips. Cassandra Gillig’s poetry mashups are also really fantastic examples of the intersection between sound and word, especially as commentary on the emotional charge of popular culture. So while this desire toward archiving is not new or even necessarily unique, I think what Black Cake has to offer is a new forum for new work—that is, work that is being solicited, produced, and shared right now, featuring poets who may not already have recordings of their own work. I’m more interested in producing than archiving, and am hoping to give a new generation of contemporary poets an opportunity to record and share their work.

Annie: What were some of your favorite experiments, surprises, or unexpected moments?

Kelly: Honestly, I think every recording so far has had some element of surprise and delight. My aim is to have as few requirements as possible in regard to the length or content of each albums. In this way, “poetry” can be anything that the poet deems meaningful or poetic. For instance, Sommer Browning submitted a comedy album, Zachary Schomburg did a beautiful collaboration with a musician (Kyle Morton from Typhoon), Dot Devota included field recordings from last summer’s Ferguson protests, and Sampson Starkweather submitted two albums—one of himself reading his own poems, and another of almost twenty poets and musicians ‘covering’ his work. I think because poetry has no real place in a capitalist economy, poets are often multi-faceted out of survival and necessity; this project has sort of uncovered that fact for me, and I like that it’s now a forum for experimentation across multiple mediums. In allowing authors to have free reign over what kind of record they want to make, it not only makes for a much more interesting library, but it allows the word poetry to be blurred into something new and different and weird, which is something I’m always interested in doing.

Annie: What’s next?

Kelly: Black Cake has released four new albums this year so far, and we will continue to solicit & archive releases throughout 2015 and beyond. In 2014, we released 14 albums of poetry, and for our one-year anniversary in January 2015, we released a compilation album featuring one track from each album in our catalog. The Year One // Anthology can be listened to, downloaded, and shared for free (like all of our releases) at blackcake.org. It features all of our contributors for 2014, including Lisa Ciccarello, Dot Devota, Emily Kendal Frey, Cassandra Gillig, Robert Duncan Gray, Amy Lawless, Zachary Schomburg, Danniel Schoonebeek, Brandon Shimoda, Sampson Starkweather, Bianca Stone, Nick Sturm, Sara Woods, and Wendy Xu. I am so proud and amazed at what this project has become and humbled at the effort of all the amazing artists involved. I truly can’t wait to see where we go from here.