Sailing
A boat of lycra coated hunks
Shouting
Pineapple, Pineapple, Pineapple – Chunks!
Oars soar and silently splash, sink
And come back up again to gasp.
A gathering and a surge
So much like life.
A beat, a ripple,
A wave.
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c
Mercury: A Sonnet
Rows of roses, rose from the ground,
Each a heart’s content continent.
Worlds of words and words of worlds, whirl
The darling Girl, the buoyant Boy
Breaking upon the carousel.
In parting pittances alls spent,
The shaft is shot through priceless pearl –
Not forever, not now, not never, girl.
Life is hard, but harder stills the
Thought of that is all.
Poor remedy, yes down my throat,
It’s venom, verily, to love connote.
Such was I – to ends in wonder led:
The middle man, of all the things unsaid.
In the first poem, 'Sailing', I imagined I would record a reading on top of water sounds or, more specifically, the sound of rowing. This would be a simple way of reflecting the imagery of the poem. Another method I would be interested to try (with any poem, in fact) would be with a Loop Machine - that is a machine which plays you back to yourself, and on top of which you can build new sounds, often beatboxes use them to create a whole symphony of sounds. In this way I would be able to repeat lines to form an multi-voiced chorus, and even use sound distortions such as fade, echo or base for added effect.
ReplyDeleteThe second poem was written with sound predominantly in mind, but just as when working with other formal constraints a fairly coherent narrative and mood came as a result (of my own preoccupations perhaps). I later chose the sonnet form as an ironic and sceptical take of young romance/idealism. It's quite simple, but I hope the contrasting soft and hard sounds, such as early assonance, and later sibilance, reflect the move from wonder to scepticism.
I enjoyed hearing your work read aloud. I think the idea of recording loops is excellent and one I urge you to experiment with. At the least you should work on musicality in poetry as your work so far has shown a strong sound quality. I like the idea of performance sonnets.
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