direct link: https://youtu.be/Foyvq1uDCM8
This is a video of a reading at Minstrels & Bards* Spring 2022 for an upcoming show.
For Calling In The Muse, May 1 - July 13, 2022, an on-line show by Erica Ross curated from her Open Studio sessions, I share two poems written in 2022, Unwindings and The Unanswering. These poems share my inner perceptions in, hopefully, a language that is honed, polished, yet which flows, that has an aesthetic beauty of its own.
In Unwindings, Virginia Woolf is a muse. Re-reading her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, I came across a sentence that reverberated. Each day, another image arose in response. The final poem is about the unwinding in her novel, and the unwinding in us when we undergo inner revolution.
My second poem has five potential titles, Woman Walking In-Verse, Hanged Woman of the Tarot, Pittura Infamante, and Soul Question. As of writing this, I think it's last line works best: The Unanswering. I took a Movement & Memoir course with Sara Porter in January 2022. We moved between dance and writing. In the session out of which this poem arose, she asked us to dance our deepest question. I was working with a concept of a personal ‘life review’ at that time, and danced my question from angstful depths. Then we drew our dance on paper, and that drawing is now a choreography of the piece. We got up and danced again, this time guided by our drawing. After that, we sat and wrote about our question in the dance that transpired. Again we rose, danced, and after, noted shifts that occurred in the writing and the dance through the successive iterations. From this whole process, I later composed my poem and, because it has a choreography, can dance it anytime I read or recite it.
If I dance The Unanswering at an event again, the poem needs to be memorized! I put this video together quickly so that what I submitted to the show would have a visual component. It's kind of a fun reading, though, especially as good friends were in the audience.
The drawing of the original dance and that has become a choreography for dancing the poem:
Woman Walking In-Verse, 2022, 17" x 10", deAtramantis inks on Strathmore drawing paper.
Music from Audiio.com: Arms and Sleepers - Cinemas For Marseille (Instrumental) Primo Levi - Violin Piano Floating II (Instrumental) Center Of The Sea - Bending Gravity (Instrumental)
