Love on the Love Day

Royalty-free music for professional licensing

direct link: Starfire

On the day of love an album of love poetry.

My poems, overall, are about a poetics of love... the spirit in our loving.

Though I am a lyrical poet who writes love poems, usually in the first person with an I and thou, an other, a lover, with whom the narrator of the poem speaks. I have accepted this about my writing. It's my natural gesture, the way I think, how my heart beats.





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Every day is a love day, of course, but Valentine's celebrates romantic love.

Perhaps to be contrary to the sugar-coating edges of Valentine's, and to remind us of the beauty of friendship, Dave Bonta put out a call for, and created a podcast celebrating Platonic love. Listening to it, and there is a full range of poetry expressing many aspects of non-sexual love, I'd say, in summation, Platonic love is going through a bit of a crisis in these viagra-driven times. In some regards, our culture is characterized by highly sexed media productions where profligacy is rampant. The simple joys of friendship are over-looked - though, often, as the poems in this collection attest, there are difficulties and pain here too.

While I support the vibrancy and energy of eros, there has to be feeling, intimacy. Unless we are unique individuals to each other, affirmative, inspiring, fulfilling love cannot happen.

What holds our heart? Often deep and life-long friendships are dearer to us because they are comfortable, stable and constant, which is in contrast to the rather bumpy serial monogamies that are the stories of many of our lives.

Whether the beauties of Platonic love can call our muses to their heights of expression, I don't know. These attachments are safe, easy, uncomplicated. And, really, the story of love in most of our lives in most of the world is the bulwark of friendship.

Veils to Clothe Venus is included in Dave's podcast.

Woodrat Podcast 34: Platonic Love.

                                          

Ink Ocean

Royalty-free music for professional licensing

direct link: Ink Ocean (version 1)

Ink Ocean (9:47min), a poem I've been working on since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the year, a darker, more troubled piece on love. Is it a good ending for my album of love poems? Not sure, though it is a love poem - loving amidst the pollution, with our wounds, whatever they may be. The reading was difficult since I live over a subway, and kept stopping the speaking every time a subway ran through because the muse beckoned the voice at rush hour this morning, O muse! Those sections were clipped out. I've been at my computer working on this recording for 12 hours I guess. May be too close to it to 'hear' it?

It's layered, of course, multiplicities seem what I like to do. You can read the words here if you like (though it looks more like a play of approaches and voices than a poem proper).

Spent days looking for music, too. I already had a small collection of 'possibilites' that I had collected through the year. Nothing was quite right. So I went searching at Jamendo. I found two tracks that each offered something substantial, and did something I had hoped never to have to do - I mixed them! Oh! I should give up these poetry performance pieces, or learn an instrument!

The tracks are a combination of that brilliant musician of experimental, midi, ruby texts that become sonic masterpieces, Alphacore's (Gabriel Garrod) side_project in his album Side Projects, and a new musician for me at Jamendo, Extra (Michael Erickson), and the beautiful track, The Quickest Vessel to a Distant Future, is from his album, Water Every Full Moon.

Three Mugshots:
            

Should I ever show the workings of my 'mad' mind? Ok, ok. I'm self-taught. From these mugshots you can get some idea why my poetry recordings take so long! Files get recorded and taken from here to there, and then there to here, and back again. Can you hear all those tracks in the final version? Who knows. But, like wearing beautiful lingerie, I know they're there.

Though with this last project - an album of poetry readings with the music of Jamendo musicians - has taken nearly a year, and with 11 tracks, it's only 33 minutes long!!

I may give up poetry recordings, and lingerie too.

Gulf Oil Slick, 2010, 13" x 10", 33cm x 25.5cm, 

mixed media on canvas

From Ocean Words

Where the poem began...


                                          

Veils to Clothe Venus

Here is the recording I will include in my upcoming album, 'Starfire, a collection of love poems,' which I'll release on Jamendo when it's finished:

direct link to Veils to Clothe Venus with music (2:33min)

Buz Hendricks created an original track for the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. I have used a section of the ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual track he sent me for this particular poem. You can hear the whole piece with poem and music (his mix) at Jamendo.

Veils to Clothe Venus is the 10th track in the album of poetry performance recordings I am working on. Music from a Jamendo musician accompanies each of the readings in the album. While I still have to write the poem for the last track, and the muse can be quirky, I am hoping to have the album available for listening and free download on Jamendo within a few weeks.

In the process of creating a listenable track, I recorded the little poem maybe a dozen times. Since I liked the reading alone and with Buz's music, I offer a shortened voice-only version of the same reading above. The simple, plain, unadorned voice:

direct link to voice-only version of Veils to Clothe Venus (1:48min)


Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting