Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 8

art ± language

I was a panelist in a class led by poet Adam Sol at University of Toronto as part of a discussion about the relation between art and language. It was a fantastic event, with cartoonist Rebecca Roher, artist Hiba Abdullah and visual poet Dona Mayoora. I prepared a text to present for which I also made a video, thinking that demonstrating some of my thoughts would be more effect than just reccounting them. 

The video is above and the text is below.

art ± language

the language

the language

the language of words

the language of letters

the language of colours

the language of shapes

the language of sound

repetition

repetition

patterning

patterning

repetition

the language of bones

a skeleton is a tall white paragraph

covered in sound

and oh yeah, tone, texture, taste

um

what is the dictionary definition of a sound?

what if a word has no sound?

and anyway, what if a word has a colour?

and what is the weight of that colour?

what is the weight of a letter?

how long is a semi-colon?

what does a semi-colon feel like in the hands?

on the tongue?

what does a semi-colon sound like?

is it possible to make a hyphen reach to the Kuiper Belt?

what if you took off your skin and made a word out of it?

would there be silent letters?

how would you pronounce the freckles?

can you tell the personality of the letter H just by looking at it?

how is it that a letter has a shape AND a sound?

does a square have a sound? 

how do you pronounce the shape of a triangle?

how are your lungs like a capital H?

a book is just choreography for words

which is to say

language as a second English or Double Dutch

if all you have is subject object verb, everything is a sentence

that swimming pool, that dog, the forest which is all adjective except for the trees

once I dreamt that there were letters even more capital than the capital letters we have, letters even more lowercase than the lowercase letters that already exist.

my favourite grammatical fact is—dot dot dot—you have to put an ellipsis back in to show that you’ve taken it out. 

 

 

 

over-the-shoulder beholder: SOMETHING ORPHEUS SAID

I've been working away on a new novel, called, right now, DEATH WRITES A NOVEL. As I wrote in a recent grant application, the novel is about "A washed-up, grief-stricken comedian is approached by Death to do an Orpheus and venture into the Underworld to win back Death's son." The novel is written by Death, as the title implies. I'm about 50k words in (I was already this far but scrapped most of it sometime last year.)

Here's a little passage—kind of a prose poem—that is written in the voice of Orpheus. I've often wondered about him. The greatest poet/singer in all the ancient world. Why did he look back? You were SO close. Why didn't he just go with Euridice if he loved her so much? Why was there the constrant that he look back? Couldn't he just have said, "You there, E?" I know that's not how hubristic fatalististic irony works in these stories, but still. 

SOMETHING ORPHEUS SAID 

They call me the over-the-shoulder beholder. Because, well, you know. 

Euridice’s footfalls so quiet on the rocky path. We should have sung together. I could have listened. What singer needs sight to know?

My Euridice. Dew on early morning lawn. Sandwich meat in the ancient world’s most beloved deli. Lips like an asp bite. Joke maker. It was she who charmed them, though I was a good opener, with my lyre, sweet rhymes, my boy pretty face.

Her ironic bright-light grace. Even when alive she seemed a beam, glinting, as if she’d passed between Lucretius’s atoms as through a beaded curtain or the rain. Euridice, bioluminescent in the dark deep sea.

She could have farted, yes, so I, just for a moment, could forget about the fabled Orpheus, my every step a beautiful song. Her scent a reassurance. A tiny herald. Here I am, a real human, a non-spectral body. I follow you.

Or we could have entwined hands, I reaching behind for those almost ghost fingers. Could I have followed?

I should have fallen on my own asp and lived dead in Hades’ kingdom. But me and my easily severed head wanted to sing if only of regret in seven colours, the melismatic flight of the passerine.  

I imagine us at the border, she puckering in the land of the dead, me, in a living field of asphodels, puckering too, and our lips almost against each other, we—or I alone—would breathe, would breathe, the one into the other until it was my time and then I would follow, our naked toes bumping against the real dead asphodels, releasing their pollen and exciting the bees.   

Fox Fable (from a MS of Fables)

 

Once a fox, feeling sad, looked up at the sky and waned to be a cloud, distant from the concerns of foxes  and casting only immaterial shadow over chickens. Then it began to rain and his small fox heart, no larger than a tulip, squirted water everywhere. The fox, his suffering now intense, ate a chicken and so was sad no more. 

COUNTRY & EASTERN: SONGS FOR NOTHING THE SAME, EVERY HAUNTED: THE BALLAD OF MOTL THE COWBOY

Contact for details: himself {at} garybarwin {dot} com 

After Hopkins

  

This is quickly becoming one of my favourite techniques: running a poem multiple times through Google Translate in a variety of languages -- sometimes chosen by their first letter, their region, jumping around to unrelated languages, or randomly. What comes out is often very interesting. I then sculpt the results, tinkering with phrasing and images, but usually there are several surprising and arresting images that have turned up and my job is to highlight them, or get the less interesting stuff out of the way. Sometimes I do a little associational thinking,such as changing the line to a line that has some of the same sounds through a kind of homophonic translation, or else changing images so that they rhyme with each other. In the poem below, there were some lines about olive oil and some word beginning with M. I cut out the olive oil line and changed the M word to "Merlot."

I find this technique very generative. It jumps me into a place where I am exploring and playing and also, feeling this kind of creative looseness. This enables some interesting and surprising form and content but also opens me up to putting in things that are hanging around in my mind or in the zeitgeist. I guess because my role is to "find" the poem in the text that I've generated, I'm open to what that might be—what it might refer to and what it might look like. Also, I'm piggybacking on the backs of giants, or at least their word choices and their forms and structure. I'm not tied to either but all of a sudden I'm in conversation with them. And my sense of the original, the sense of the writer, the sense of moment all get folded into it.  I find this a very fruitful place to be.

BTW the original poem is God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's here.

AFTER HOPKINS


The movies are on fire with fire. With movies. The world is 

            responsible. Why Don't People Want to Move?

Because of pants. BTW belts were worn.

              Everything is full of advertising; problems explode.

              Remove human dust.

naked & barefoot, now!

 

[not yet completed]

               The source of life is new life

In the west, the lights are on but also off

                Morning teaches that morning teaches

The spirit of Merlot heals

                I feel chickens all over the world with a strong hand

REVIEW: NOTHING THE SAME, EVERYTHING HAUNTED

 

As the novel tells us, the Jews invented one-liners because they were easier to carry while fleeing. 

Just in time for the paperback edition of NOTHING THE SAME, EVERYTHING HAUNTED, this nice new review of the book from Ordinary Times. It's here. 

A Singer's Hands

Of course, Ukraine has been on my mind lately, like it has been on everyone's mind. Yesterday, someone on my Facebook feed posted a field recording of an old Ukrainian woman singing. I was very struck by the song and her haunting voice as well as by her powerful presence. However, the thing that struck me the most was her hands: strong, thick and always moving as she sang. They were very expressive: a life, emotions, age, strength. So, I made this video using two of my poems which I feel relate to loss, strength, war,  grief and love; I feel like they connect to a sense of what is happening now.

I used a close-up of this singer's hands in this video as well as introducing other visual elements. The music is a remix that I did (adding various clarinets and saxophones plus a bunch of electronics) to a recording of a rehearsal which my sister-in-law Pam Campbell sent me of her singing with her group Tupan. 

 Blue Train

  

so many accordions on the roof of the blue train. 

What is history?

The tracks travel to the horizon.

Quick! Let’s travel faster than memory.

Now a song. 

“so many accordions on the roof of the blue train.

What is history?

The tracks travel to the horizon.

Quick! Let’s travel faster than memory.”

*

life is long

life is long

(don’t worry)

 

except for its sudden end

(I mean it)

here we say something about love

 

life is long

foot falls

the war

 

but like I said

I said

except for its end

 

life is long

(don’t worry)

(don’t)

 

a sudden end means

it was a rocket

a rocket

 

like a foot fall 

a foot fall

landing on the ground 

 

like maybe when you were running

running

until the end

 

but of course I miss you

I miss you

you’re not here

 

not here

and all I can do

is walk

THANK YOU, a poem based on a rejection letter from a literary journal

I was rejected by a poetry journal & found the language of their letter kind of amazing & so I wrote a poem based on it. The poem will appear in a forthcoming book THE MOST CHARMING CREATURES (Fall 2022, ECW Press)

THANK YOU

 

 

We are unable to accept 

these poems 

 

We are on fire and possibly

infected. The Poetry Editorial Board responded 

 

strongly, admiring your craft and total rage

but disagreed about how to extinguish

 

fire or end infection.

Eat the rich. 

 

They’re not infected. The poems struck 

like bowling balls in a flu

 

knocking readers down.

We coughed. Our flesh burned. 

Yet our eyes are the same old eyes. 

Other readers may respond 

 

differently if they’re in quarantine

or underwater.

 

Maybe in time 

the poems will find good homes 

 

far from shrieking coastlines. 

We hear the shrink of birds

 

forests denuding foxes. Our offices have returned

to nature. Moss grows on our managing 

 

editor. Our tweed unravels 

an economy of entropy.

 

Like trees our inbox 

warps time.

 

And like time, our out boxes 

are on fire and like your blood

 

you should certainly keep 

these poems in circulation.

 

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but 

while we watch.

BIG SAD: a video and notes about collaboration, influence and process

 

It fascinates me how inherently collaborative and interconnected creation almost always is, even if it is not explicitly shown. We don't only stand on the shoulders of giants, we get a boost from everyone.
Big Sad

for A.H. Reaume Napoleon reaches inside his shirt for a kayak  Napoleon reaches inside his shirt for a river Napoleon puts the kayak in the river  someone—Jacob Wren maybe?—saidthe difference between depression and a paddle isthe paddle

Here's an example. I wrote this poem for A.H. Reaume, a writer I know from Twitter. She was having a hard day, so I wrote a poem and DM'd it to her. You know, as one does. Subsequently, I edited it substantially. It appears in a book that is coming out in Fall 2022 with ECW Press. I engaged my friend Donato Mancini to help me edit the MS and there were edits to this poem that we did together. Michael Holmes (editor at ECW) and Emily Schultz (copyeditor there) also contributed.

And the quote which I've attributed to Jacob Wren. He'd written something on Twitter about the difference between melancholy and depression (something to the effect of still liking life when you're melancholy.) So I misquoted him. As one does.
Ok, so that's the poem.
The music? My sister, Kat Palmer, invited me to contribute to a TikTok video that she sang on of the folk song Tumbalalaika. Instead of just singing, I did a kind of algorhithmic accompaniment based on the scale (it was a pitch to MIDI thing, massaged.) As one does.  
To the generated MIDI guitar, drums, and electric piano, I improvised some bass clarinet over top. And I edited it. So the audio track.
My daughter and I had taken some photos and videos in a local field when we were walking the dog. I took these and blurred them and played around with them until they became only strips of slowly moving colour. That's the two stripes of the video. 
Finally, I added the animated text. 
I hadn't planned on doing any of this, but liked how the Tumbalalaika accompaniment sounded. And then I wanted to make some visuals. So the idea of using the dogwalk field videos occured to me. And playing around with the shape of colour of them, I arrived at the two stripes. But though I liked it as abstract colours only, something seemed missing. I searched around for some appropriate text. I liked the idea of the very abstract aesthetized text having this odd and ironic text about Napoleon--it seemed to play against it in a satisfyingly interesting way. 

So that's the story of this video and how a multiplicity of direct collaborations, assistance and influences affected both the process and the outcome of its creation.
Also, thank you Napoleon!

On Fishes: a video setting of a poem by RIlke and another guy

you did not expect me to live 
I have said it
I will live

Some years back my old high school friend Hilary McDaniels Douglas invited me to write some music for her aerial dance company Project in Motion, based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She requested that I set a poem by Rilke and of course I couldn't resist. I also included a poem whih appeared in my book Moon Baboon Canoe that I'd written and that felt appropriate. The overall theme of the piece was to be about water. 

Last night I began exploring a video clip of moving letters. (Full disclosure: I stole it off the Internet.) I transformed it: I layered it, expanded and contracted it, changed the colours and the movement and generally played around with it. It was riverine. It reminded me of the flowing letters in Justin Stephenson's spectucular film about bpNichol, The Complete Works. 

I loved how the letters moved and replaced a poem that I'd stuck over top with an audiotrack of a funky distorted saxophone-based track that I'd made with a video of my hands moving. I realized that I'd need a much more flowing audio track and remembered the Rilke track that I'd made for Hilary. It was all about flowing, movement, and in my poem, it mentions hands. The whole thing worked so well together. I began transforming the video to be all about the Rilke track. I'm really thrilled with how it turned out. From a series of associations and accidents, this lovely thing that I stumbled on.

song

old mother
do you know me?
I have not swum with you for years

I have been silent
these words I have learned 
they are not words to trust

we were together when the moon rose 
when my fists were soft as my tongue

old mother
here there are stars on the sky’s wall

you did not expect me to live 
I have said it
I will live

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

that I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my sense, as with birds, I climb

into the windy heaven, out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Robert Bly)