reBirth from a track that doesn't work

  dance/ ...indigo folio leaves by Brenda Clews

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

You can watch the video poem in this blog, or at YouTube.

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The next day: listening, no, I don't think this recording works. The sound of the breath is okay in the dance video but here it is bothersome. And it looks like I didn't fully remove the former filters from the clip right at the end, which is alright in the recording I guess.

Anyway, I think to make something listenable I need to re-record the prose poem, perhaps layer it in the style I was developing in my last poetry album. A style I haven't continued exploring because, except for one person, no-one commented on, or even mentioned their response to the intricacy of all that layering of readings of single poems. Virtually none of the musicians whose music I used came by my Jamendo site to leave a comment and so I took that to mean they did not particularly like my experiments.

But, who knows? Everyone is so busy and working on their own stuff. I work mostly in a vacuum of silence and keep going, well I have no idea how. And I have experience from the past - the explosion of painting that produced the birth paintings in about a year (mostly from about May 1986-May 1987), and such a difficult topic, especially in those early days of 'women speaking their bodies,' left me feeling that I had accomplished something. But everyone who came to my house remained fixedly silent on them (ten were framed on my wall). I submitted them to an art show and was politely told they were not appropriate to show publicly, and to a 'feminist' magazine, and the photos were returned to me two years later in a brown envelope, no letter, no note, just a sense of anger emanating from that rejection. It was numbing, hard. It wasn't until around 2000 that I began to receive accolades on them, and some were used as journal covers, and one of the reasons I set up an accessible art website was because I get one or two academics requesting use of them in seminar or conference presentations every year.

And now we are nearly 25 years later, and the birth paintings continue to evoke strong and positive responses. I just have to remember how I was treated during the first ten years after producing them. The silence, the disapproval. Oh, people liked the colours. But the subject, the woman's growing belly, the opposite of the femme fatale, and birthing, the baby emerging from her, oh, it was too much for people in those days I guess.

Sort of like my poetry readings, video poems, and video dance poems. Perhaps. Who knows? Perhaps my current work isn't that good. I am unable to judge myself as others would see me. I only know that personally I feel I am amassing quite an oeuvre, and am accomplishing a multi-media art that incorporates and crosses disciplines and boundaries that leaves me mostly feeling good about myself.

But then, I always get self-reflective on Easter Sunday, depressed and resurrectory. It's a day of reBirth.