Senior Lecturer in Writing Dr Katy Price features in newly released set of archive recordings

Recorded in London on 24 February 2011, 'Kippered (Edison) Herring' consists of two poems especially written for the archive, overlaid by recording one groove and then superimposing a second on a single wax cylinder. One layer (in three parts) is loosely based on the Wikipedia entry for Charles Cros, incorporating two verses of his nonsense poem 'Le Hareng Saur'. The other layer uses words and phrases from Thomas Edison's holiday diary, put into the form of Cros's poem.

For example:

Perpetual coroners of London: grave, grave, grave,
Rose Hawthorne a big live lobster: bite, bite, bite,
Freckles are mudholes of beauty: skin, skin, skin.

The poet and visionary Charles Cros (1842-1888) invented a system of reproducible sound recording several months before Thomas Edison designed the tinfoil phonograph. Cros was never to construct his invention but named it the 'paleophone' (voix du passé).

Katy Price's poems have appeared in Seam, Blackbox Manifold, and new collections on ekphrasis and LGBTQ spirituality. She co-designed Blastup! with babel, and has performed text/computer works at the Supercollider Symposium (Berlin, 2010) and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Her book Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe is published by the University of Chicago Press (2012).

To read the full poem and listen to the recording please visit the Phonographies website.

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