Some months ago I created a Google Sites site, Poetry Recordings of Brenda Clews, to host .mp3s of recent poetry recordings. The poems are all available to read as well -that's important.
The hosting site was so that I could post the recordings here, at Rubies in Crystal, as I compose them, and when I have enough I will create an album at Jamendo. While I used to upload recordings-in-progress to SoundClick or SoundCloud, I tired of the limitations of those music sites, and created a website for this purpose instead.
Today I spent some hours creating a usable interface for these recordings of recent poetry at my hosting site. The site is unlisted, invisible to search engines, but is public- and findable, if you have the link.
Below is a screen shot of the site. Click to go to the site.
Why does it take like 8 different tries, and each of those tries, well I can't tell you how much work, before... the voice, the emotion, the content, the meaning, the whole gestalt of it comes together in a reading that's beyond the-me. Criteria? If I can stand to listen to it.
I know I have to strip myself bare. Be wholly vulnerable. Ouch...
Comments are rare, so I have no idea if it works for/on anyone else. Only occasionally, years after, I'll get a phenomenal response in a private email where the listener found the recording opened them and then they matched the intensity of the original with their own intensity - and their own interpretation that spilled into their own work.
Truthfully, I like a bit of emotion in a recording, even a little bit dramatic. This connects me to the poem in ways a cerebral reading doesn't. And I remember the recording and the poem better after.
Something to do with that amygdala's processing of memory through our emotional response to someone else's emotion? :)
But it has to hang by its shreds on the emotional, over the gaping void, and can never be too emotional, for that would ruin the quality of the poem.
See previous post for text. I wrote the words of the prose poem from what I was thinking about while drawing this drawing. I am hoping to create a short video of the drawing and some other moving images I have found on the NET with this reading.
whaleskin, 2011, 20cm x 25.5cm, 8" x 10", India ink, graphite, watercolour pencils, Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4. (Click on the images for a larger size.)
Thanks to an early Christmas present, my computer has a new hard drive -albiet a cheap Western Digital. After 6 months of constant freezing of programs, requiring turning off and waiting an hour, it's a phenomenal relief to be able to use my iMac again. No idea how I produced as much as I have with an ailing computer.
In celebration, I burned a CD today of Starfire - mostly the whole album of my love poems, though there are a few I haven't yet done... for a birthday present.
Now that everything is working again, hopefully I can finish the album and get it uploaded to Jamendo in the next few months.
Just checking out SoundClick widgets for my site there: Aural Pleasure. This is my favourite, I think.
I've been tossing around the idea of uploading some of these pieces to Jamendo... not sure how they'd be received in a music community... but, yes, I'd let you download them from Jamendo, yes I would.
I get a kick out of how SoundClick described my poetry recordings in the widget that other artists post at their sites:
rich text with
pleasing undulating
voice and music
