Klara du Plessis
Dr. Klara du Plessis is the postdoctoral fellow on the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant at UBC Okanagan, supervised by Dr. Karis Shearer. Klara’s current research project is titled “Curatorial Listening: Politics of Relational Attention in Sounded Poetry.”
Klara’s doctoral research took literary studies off of the page to incorporate insights from a sound and curatorial studies perspective too. It focused on curatorial structures in the context of twentieth century and contemporary Canadian poetry in performance. Thinking critically about the poets’ and curator’s often neglected labour, it considered how that labour shapes poetry reading events, whether live or in the audio archive. Her postdoctoral project marks a significant new phase, departing from the doctoral work by connecting the practical and conceptual labour of organizing literary events to the subjective act of listening relationally to that curation. This listening includes that of performing poets and of event curators, but now significantly ropes in the audience’s attention too.
“Even in its most basic formulation as attention through the ears, listening is itself a radical act that works to unbalance and rebalance dominant strands of agency and subjecthood. As coupled with the curatorial’s dynamic potential and sound’s open network, listening meditates on and mediates the political conditions of poetry in performance,” Klara suggests.
While at UBC Okanagan, Klara will be engaging this practice of critical listening in relation to the SoundBox Collection of poetry audio recordings housed at Dr. Shearer’s Audio Media Poetry (AMP) Lab. Working with a team of SpokenWeb graduate and undergraduate research assistants, she will offer curated close listening sessions of archival materials, collaborate on exhibitions, script curatorial performances, and compile creative publications—aiming to showcase and activate the audio archive as relevant and embodied knowledge in the present.
All of these projects fold back into Klara’s ongoing research creation expertise. Since 2018, she has developed a practice of literary event organization called Deep Curation. This approach places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each other and heightens the curator’s agency toward the poetic event. In this capacity, she has worked with an amazing array of contemporary poets, including Liz Howard, Kaie Kellough, and Kama La Mackerel, among many others.
Karis Shearer says “We’re so lucky to have Dr. Du Plessis joining the AMP Lab and SpokenWeb research team as a postdoctoral fellow. Klara will be a member of a dynamic and interdisciplinary research team that includes Marjorie Mitchell, Myron Campbell, and Paige Hohmann. As a poet and literary scholar, Klara embodies the creative-critical ethos of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and her work across media is a wonderful match for the SpokenWeb project here at UBC Okanagan.”
Beyond the monograph manuscript that Klara is working on, much of her postdoctoral work will be public-facing. In collaboration with Dr. Shearer, she will, for example, be co-organizing the SpokenWeb summer Sound Institute taking place at UBC Okanagan from 14-17 May 2025. Certain of these plenaries and performances will be open to the wider public. Please feel welcome to attend these events that will be advertised over the span of the coming year.
About Klara du Plessis
Klara du Plessis holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University. She is also a critically acclaimed writer known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics (mainly between English and Afrikaans). Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film, composed by Jimmie LeBlanc, and premiered at the International Festival of Films on Art in 2023. She is the author of three more books of poetry and literary criticism, most recently Post-Mortem of the Event (2024). This collection encompasses creative work mobilizing audiovisual media, transcription, waveform visualization, and digital humanities and interdisciplinary methods. Klara develops her writing practice to include visual, sound, and moving installations, and has exhibited work at Artexte, Centre Clark, and the Johannes Stegmann Gallery, among other venues.