Love Letters on Sand Manadalas (1:01min)

Added a background of ocean & shells to this older recording for the Photopoem page of my Art & Writings website. An improvement over the plain voice in this one. I worked on this recording (shells & distant tinkling bells are mine) because I thought this poem needed some 'pizzaz.'

(But, yes, I forgot to 'master fade out' & this version is gone because I continued fiddling in garageband & saved a later version... it bothers me, but, ahhhh, it's late... & I did manually 'fade out' each of the six tracks (yes, yes, there are that many)...


        
Love Letters on Sand Mandalas, 2005..............click to play
(click on this image
to enlarge)

I have to be formless to write; dissolved to paint; non-existent to create. It's always a risk.

But an aesthetic operates. The aesthetic, way of shaping, what negotiates the creative forces and the tools, the diverse & complex language structures, the brush of paint by a sable brush on canvas, how far the back will bend in the speed of the movement, offers structure to the emerging poem or painting or dance.

It's like trying to hold a sail in a high-force wind.

Sometimes we just can't make it.
Sometimes we do.

Rebirth, 1989

When I taught yoga in 1987, since I was following a theme of how to unite one's lifepath and soulforce, I used to bring "SoulCards," and we each picked one, and then spoke on what it reminded us of, or what message it might contain that would help us in our direction.

When I pulled this card, I knew, after my marriage had ended, that I had to open all the closed places within and re-find myself as an artist and poet, and continue on whatever strange and difficult but hopefully fruitful path that would take me.

I painted the image that you see above onto the large canvas I began working on, and from which I have posted an Angelic Whorl. She is a flying, whirling seed who has landed, who must begin the process of what would turn out to be a long, and painful rebirth, a process which still hasn't completed itself, ten years later.



Deborah Koff-Chapin

Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min) makes it to #2 of 1,929 on SoundClick poetry chart

Poetry recording site:
Aural Pleasure.

Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min)

A recording of a prosepoem. While I made the recording in 2007, I never posted it. This morning I played with it in Garageband, adding loops (actually, this is the first time I have ever done this - a new direction perhaps). Surprisingly, I like it. Not sure about the image, oh, not the sun, the sun is beautiful in its golden fields of fire, but, hey, I don't have a whole lot of images of myself.

Read the text here.

________________

DSL or Cable

Dial-up

Photopoems

A photopoem page is now up.

My kids are at their Dad's, but will my dog forgive me? It's nearly 11pm and she still hasn't had her walk!

The photopoem page is okay, I'm not crazy about it. I embedded a slideshow, and then a selection of photopoems in a hidden table below that open out to new windows if clicked on. The table that they are in is being sticky about its left margin and not giving me enough leeway to space the photographs as I'd like. It's not bad. Servicable, as they say.

It's nice to get the ones I liked best in one place. I've tried to embed the 'poem' in the photograph "info" and Picasa kindly unfolds that in text below the image at the album at Picasa's site, but centred, which is a bit weird.

Anyway, I've been at this since lunchtime (which I forgot to eat, though I did throw some eggs in a pan for dinner), between locating the images, updating info, resizing, saving into a new file, and then trying to figure out the html - yes, I pasted all of them in the table in the html box. Way easier that way. I use "Stickies" on my desktop and find it very handy to paste URLs and codes and stuff, and that's where I worked out the html for the images.

It's a matter of keeping organized, isn't it.

It feels like I'm organizing work mostly over the last 3 or 4 years, but am finding things that go further back than that.

A kind of scrapbook of my path to here, I suppose.

'Night all! Oh, oops, doggie walk first!

xo

Serpent Rising: "Promethea Un/Bound: The Thirty-Six Million Year Old Turtle"

A new webpage: Earth Rising.



I was looking for an image on my old hard drive, and found this writing, "Promethea Un/Bound." I'm glad this piece wasn't lost. It is the only time I have ever written about a temp job, and if you read it you will see that it is composed of an inner dialogue. It was in a protected post at another blog site for a month or so, in August 2004, and it's been completely private/hidden for nearly 5 years since then.

In the piece, I am in intense dialogue with Hélène Cixous', The Book of Promethea, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Nebraska Press, 1991), and a 36 million year old turtle.