What Is Underground Is What Holds Us

I

You rise out of flat stone
the shield
of your heart.
The moon crosses the sun.
Do we
become light
when we dream?

The folds of your corduroy
like ridges and hollows
furrows where the Spring runoff
sculpts a geology
in a landscape of tundra.

"passageways and connections that
happen deep within us when in relation
to another..." Nancy Otto

In our Klondike, cross and beams
hold the tunnels we dig through
to find the gold in each other,
rich veins tracing through the rock
like sunlight.

II

Spring is a tendril
of green;
the leaves a papery mass of veins unfolding.

Cliffs of grass by the old mine ripple
in the wind.

We are like those two trees
ancient, weathered, yet
our roots thoroughly
intertwined.

What is
underground
is what holds us.

The deeper passageways
and connections.

III

I wear the crescent moon in my hair,
the cold northern air;
you are the sun buried in the land,
illumined from within.

The sharp edges
in each moment
bind us.

My Adoni, my Aholi,

even in this harsh typography
you are a landscape of love,
a cartography of desire.

©Brenda Clews 2006




>





Photographs were taken by me.

Poem and commentary written in April, 2006:


The title that I had thought of is a line from a poem by Hafiz, the 14th c Sufi master:
Our Destiny Is To Turn Into Light.

Here's the poem:

Faithful Lover

The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,

"The sun has been my faithful lover
For millions of years.

Whenever I offer my body to him
Brilliant light pours from his heart.

Thousands then notice my happiness
And delight in pointing
Towards my beauty.

Hafiz,
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
itself?"

Hafiz, The Gift, trans. Daniel Ladinsky (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), p.159.


While my poem is about light, it's really about roots, and works off Nancy Otto's lines (she's an artist who creates small, stunning glass sculptures where she explores our inner consciousnesses, our inner lives, the deep channels and underground ways that we connect).

Adoni and Aholi are both gods of nature: one ancient Phoenician; the other, ruler of the Pikya clan of Native Americans. Nature is usually imaged as a woman, but sometimes as a man - the dying & resurrected god.

Also I'm currently not just crazy about Hafiz, but also Pablo Neruda, his love poems, and Juan O'Neill's translation of Macchu Picchu.

Drumbeat

direct link: Drumbeat

I wrote this poem at the end of January in 2008, and have always wished to record it. Perhaps a year ago I found Chriss Onac's track, TRANSE, a drumming solo, on his album, Tribal, at Jamendo. But until yesterday I lacked the courage to try a recording. It took all day and most of the evening, with one upload and an immediate delete too!

As I push further into experimentation, tweeking, playing, exploring sonic possibilities, I find I am moving from straight poetry readings to more of a performance piece, adding filters to each of the vocal recordings. While I usually layer the same takes with different filters, I also include other takes, which might sound like echoes but actually aren't. Whether this adds a richness to the sonic scape of the piece, I don't know, but that's what I'd like to aim towards. Multiplicities, oh yeah!

In this recording, I did not want a cerebral reading, as is so often the case with poetry, but something primal, with emotion.

Recording it over and over, my window shut tight against the outdoor noise, fans turned off, in the Summer heat I began to sweat, and then let go, shimmying, shaking, drumming with my hands, fast in the air, reciting the poem. There is an emotional pitch in this recording  that I am not sure works, though it does incline towards an element of rock music, somehow (laughing).


Drumbeat

The palm drops
on the inside
of the skin
animal drumming
beating on the drum
drumbeating the night
beating on the eardrum
drum drumming deeply
drawing the heartbeat drumbeat.

My body is the drumbeat
drumbeating my skin
sweating, hot,
drumbeating my body's
percussion, rub, snare,
pounding, colliding of
musical pulses
lyrical sinewy
or staccato modern
or wild shamanic
hair flying
free.

Red shiny satin clinging,
wet
sweat.

The djembe hip bag that I scrubbed, suede dyed to emulate Holstein cow naugahyde, in black and cream, with a wild boar bristle brush and saddle soap because of the dark streaks, smells of animal hide.

I hold it to my nose, and smell. Animal. Hide.
The drumming of the jungle.
An animal skin.

Taut.

Primal beat bounding
resonating, resounding.

You gaze at me, though you haven't looked at me.

I am in your gaze without your seeing me.

It is my hunger you remember feeding,
that you want to feed.
Our heat burns hotly.

Drumbeating
the rhythms beating in us,
the African djembes
dance us.




(click for larger size)

Some of the layers in Drumbeat recording...

Addendum. July 29, 2010: Was up till 4am compressing and panning tracks in Drumbeat, with thanks to Robert A on Gather for his invaluable musical advice (read in comments below). Below is a photo of the 'new' waveforms:

Also, Jan wrote that my reading in Drumbeat is "natural force" rather than a "forced oratory in the rendition"... wow, thank you. Love you guys, your generosity is so beautiful. xo♡

_________________
Robert A writes, at Gather: "Brenda - Spikey; meaning very sharp edges where some frequencies really jump out and overwhelm and distract from the other tracks. Looking at the waveform chart, I'm not sure what system you recorded this on, but in most systems (ProTools, Ableton, Cubase, etc) you have the options of using plug-ins, like compression to run over the selected track when you're cleaning up your production at the end. Looking at the waveforms, it looks like you could also get some benefit from keeping some of your levels lower to prevent distortion and that way you can keep some headroom to decide how you want to make the relative tracks work together when you're done. Also, it looks like your panning is all in the same place except one track. If you move your panning to different locations you'll end up with a larger more 3D sound that will make your poetry and presentation more epic.

I'm not the greatest production expert in the world, but you can hear some of my recordings featured on my profile page.

And yes, Annette Peacock is very cool. I got into her when she worked with Bill Bruford."

So, back to the audio programs to see if I can clean up my recording a bit. :)

My response to his comment: "I will study what you've written like an arcane text of magical spells! I use Garage Band... lately into the various filters. I layer recordings, sometimes the same one, usually at least one other, too. I pull track by track into Audacity and work on the levels. Beyond that, I'd be lost.

Compression - meaning normalize? I've used levelator for the voice often, but didn't this time. It certainly boosts the inner, central sound and removes the spikes. And I've run Audacity's normalize too, only not on this recording.

I'll go back to it. Try Levelator on the voice, to see. I find it normalizes too much, and so nowadays I use it, while also layering with an original with its highs and lows. Emotion resides in the highs and lows, at least to my ears.

I've never used panning, ever. Scared to go near it, in other words.

Though delightedly I did use a 'Wandering Voice' filter on one of the tracks, which I really enjoyed. :-)"

Will work on it again over the next few days. What's nice about SoundClick is that you can upload edited versions into the same spot.

                                                        

'from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems': a collaboration

Free music for professional licensing

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

a love story...

...where Botticelli's Venus, ideal of beauty, the goddess who ushered in the Renaissance, bucks her scallop shell and in pursuit of erotic passion, experiences love in the world with its betrayals, deceptions, rejections... how our hearts of purity suffer like Venus pursuing the intrigues of passion, its tempests, for the love in her life...

...how the poetry of our life is our love...

...this love story interweaves the purity of Botticelli's Venus, and Venus Pandemos of myth, her lover Mars, the story of Psyche and Eros, a personal story, and how we clothe ourselves with shimmering presence,  'translucent robes' of poetry:

beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, scented, fragrant and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Botticelli, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

...

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

__

This recording is a collaboration.

I recorded a poem drawn from my manuscript-in-progress, The Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and sent it to Buz Hendricks (whose track, 'Because' I had paired with my prosepoem, 'Light Catches Diamonds').

Buz composed a beautiful jazz/orchestral score. I listened in wonder- he is very gifted. He writes: "I started with a piano and just improvised while listening to the poem. The same for all the other tracks, just played to your voice. That's why it was able to ebb and flow with your voice."

I have a videopoem planned for this piece, too.

Buz Hendricks' website: www.somewhereoffjazzstreet.com

Buz on Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Somewhere_off_Jazz_Street

The cover is a detail of a painting of mine.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                                        

Glint

(watch at fullscreen in hd, if you can -quality is excellent) direct link: Glint

He indicated that the video was ok, but uploading to YouTube? I said there are lots of CATS on YouTube. (Featuring our 13 year old family cat, Tiggy. I told him he was going to be a YouTube cat - that's status.) :-)

In writing this minimalist poem, I thought to present it in the video as the murmur you overhear that is a poem. I wanted an 'art film,' something composed of shapes and sounds open to interpretation. Ghostly, sensual, colours and light and shadows in a flux in a landscape that's a little ambiguous, a bit Surreal. The music that I found for this piece was so perfect I edited the video's rhythms to the song.

This writing is drawn from a much larger manuscript which interweaves science and poetry. Three quarters of the energy of the universe is dark energy. 'Glint' calls on the metaphor of dark energy to shape a love poem. Words rise and sink in the marvelous soundtrack, which I didn't want to disturb above a murmur.

The music is "Madrox, in my head," by Arena of Electronic Music at Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/track/477297

___

My dear and long-time friend, Stephen Hatfield wrote a beautiful comment in an email (posted here with his permission):

For my taste I thought "Glint" was one of your most successful video pieces, in part because the text grew out of the visual textures in a very pleasing and enticing way, as opposed to setting a pre-existing poem to a video accompaniment.

I thought that it was very sensuous, but in a very polymorphously perverse way. I did get some suggestions of skin-like textures, but nothing in the way of specific organs or body parts. Instead the textures I saw made me think more of giant underwater anemones, brains, sea sponges, that sort of thing. It was sexy, but in a completely indirect way that stimulated all sorts of associations of ideas and sensations.

I liked the ritual slashes - cat claws - across the canvas of the screen - which also suggested the slots through which one watched those early forms of moving pictures - which also suggested a kind of connect/disconnect that was the overall ethos of the piece.

I also thought the way you read your text worked. That character pulled me into the video more than the tone of voice with which you have "incantated" some of your other videos. This is entirely a matter of taste, and I do not use "incantated" in any ironic or denigrating manner.