Audio
A catch-all for all audio posts, including the Woodrat Podcast.
January 25th, 2009
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Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
Slow destroyer,
do you ever pass
those bleached roads in the air
& long for salt?
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September 14th, 2008
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Brother Cole,
If I were to pray, I would start low
in the belly, among the slick viscera –
don’t call them tripe, those amulets,
that conjurer’s bag, the wine-dark
apotrope where I live, & a road
more convoluted than the tube of a tuba,
that’s where I’d start, there where medicine
(always the best laughter) bubbles up
like smoke through a hookah
into the vicinity of my underachieving heart
& the lungs’ bladderwrack, that’s
how I’d begin, letting the first note
climb of its own volition, gathering
strength in the chest before the voice box
warps it into sound & it joins the others,
which were also somehow there already
in the darkness just beyond the fire,
eyes aglint, our unfamiliar better natures,
so unlike the beast that once leapt for my throat
before its too-small owner — our neighbor–
could drag it away, & I walked into the house
holding my bloodied hand before me
like a waiter with a choice dish
(the zig-zag track of the stitches still marks
my ring-finger) but that was the savagery
of an untamed thing confined;
its muffled roars & strangled yelps
as it flung itself all night against the pen
were nothing like the call or response
of an untrammeled spirit, half-laugh, half-sob —
the way I would hope to sound
if ever I were to join the pack & pray.
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(N.B.: The audio is more important to this post than the text!)
September 9th, 2008
Another poem from Teju Cole, in response to this.
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For you shall be in league with the stones of the field
and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.
—Job 5:23
The hand emerges
from the pocket
on its own, its splodge
of low brown hills
a keloid map of how
I’d failed to heal.
Gnarled, tidal wind:
a leaf storm hassles the air.
Argumentative clouds.
This hand is strange to me.
I’d stretched it out
as makeshift landing gear,
like one reaching out
for help, or to bless,
and badged it instead
with dirt and blood,
red archipelago
from base of thumb to wrist.
The dog had stopped
and looked at me
with his mangy face,
and slowly turned away.
I left a part of myself there;
the road rehearsed itself in me.
“They can smell
your fear, you know.”
Yes, I’d thought of that.
This gift of theirs
was what I feared,
dull humanity unmoored
from the strangeness of a dog.
Cousin, I’ll go chasing trees,
wade ankle deep
in the soft coin they mint,
spend hours tailing memory,
a dog on scent,
a child in the creek
of full human being,
trampling prodigal bounty:
hand-sized leaves
—burlap, silk, damask—
weeping off the branch like sails,
blush-hued, wine-hued, gold:
healing scars that
protect the stones,
eyelids for their perfect eyes.
Let us agree to pray
for each other:
that the tidal wind
settle us into a rightness
and recreate from these faults
and fears, fitter selves,
as lean years follow fat.
© Teju Cole 2008
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June 20th, 2008
(click on image to enlarge)
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Some people don’t “get” poetry because they’re exclusively visual thinkers. For many others of a more practical frame of mind, the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of words into lines, stanzas, and units of meaning constitutes the main stumbling-block. Debates about how to reach those kinds of folks are anything but academic if you’re on a committee charged with selecting and presenting poetry to an indifferent public.
Well, I’m here to help. I’ve taken the complete texts of the first ten poems in my Public Poems series and run them through Wordle (thanks, John) which discards the most common words (a, on, the, etc.) and puts all the others into a configurable word cloud, a variation on the tag clouds familiar to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time online. I then made an audio recording of the cloud (here’s a download link for those who can’t see the Flash player above). This sort of thing could be broadcast over a public address system at regular intervals wherever the poetry clouds are displayed, with results perhaps comparable to the well-known consequences of backmasking on vinyl records of heavy metal music back in the 1980s, only without the sacrifices of family pets. From these dense clouds a kind of condensation would take place, poetry falling like rain on the parched soil of the imagination. Or not.
June 12th, 2008
Comma, apostrophe, back-
slash, cursive flourish —
an all-purpose divider
that only accidentally resembles
a question mark in search
of its dot-like perch.
No self-respecting crow, beak
clever at leverage, ever
departed from
the declarative mode.
Male & female
hand & handle,
heavy as Wednesday.
What iron tree might ramify
if you insinuated yourself
into some sidewalk crack?
I know that curl
from watching seeds sprout:
cotyledon at the point
of pulling apart.
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May 15th, 2008
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The caterpillar tents start appearing
just as the leaves burst their buds,
as if someone with a white marker
were doodling in every crotch of limbs.
My dad goes into the hospital to have
a large, non-malignant tumor
removed from his lower spine,
& I picture a white knot swelling
with caterpillars of pain.
A day after the surgery he’s taking
his first steps without it, this thing
that has made almost every position
of repose impossible for weeks,
forcing him to stand or to walk
slowly for hours each day.
Now it has been thoroughly cast out
through the surgeon’s art,
excised, exposed: bulb that burned
but gave off no light.
Sexless flower. Empty tent.
Be gone. Be gone. Be gone.
Here in the woods where my father returns
in a couple days to resume his walking –
this time to heal rather than assuage —
flashes of scarlet as a tanager
snatches gnats & caterpillars from
the not quite fully opened leaves,
singing a line of his hoarse song
between each mouthful of wings,
each mouthful of spines.
March 5th, 2008
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I wasn’t terribly keen on yesterday’s poem, but then I listened to this reading of it and almost started to like it. The recording was completely unsolicited, and is by someone who wishes to be identified only as “a nameless friend.” In response to my grumpy comments about the poem, A.N.F. wrote:
No, it’s not a perfect poem — for one thing, I thought the penultimate lines were amazing, but not the final one. And you probably overdid the repetitions just a bit.
But I like it, and I liked it even more as I read it aloud. Praise Whomever for imperfect things.
January 19th, 2008
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She was clothed in a shift of worms and whispers.
I circled once & crept away, four-footed —
no hands for anything but the road.
That was one dream. And the night before,
a minor lord of the underworld saying,
Of course we take them down with us.
How else do you suppose they taste
eternal youth? Grinning like one of those
candied skulls from the Day of the Dead.
Such melodramatic dreams, I said,
& wrote one yellow word upon the snow.
__________
Don’t forget that the deadline for submissions to qarrtsiluni for the Hidden Messages issue is January 31.
January 4th, 2008
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Download the MP3 (546k)
Thursday was only my second time to ride on the newly opened section of I-99, central Pennsylvania’s infamous “road to nowhere.” This time I remembered to bring a camera, though the Bald Eagle Ridge portion was still in shadow. It’s amazing how quickly we can get from Tyrone to State College now.
I suppose a lot of people who had opposed this highway as passionately as we did might have a hard time using it, but we’re pragmatists, I guess. It’s kind of like voting even when you think the whole system is corrupt. Actually, the way this highway got pushed through is quite similar to the way candidates get pushed on voters: the local media presented it as a stark choice between an interstate highway on the ridgetop and continued carnage on the old, dangerous road up the valley — the “highway of death.” Any attempt to advocate for another position was drowned out by the baying of the interstate boosters. The sadly ironic outcome is that the new highway will result in far more deaths than the old one did, but the deaths will be largely of non-humans: increased roadkill of all kinds, with certain species of reptiles and amphibians probably suffering local extinctions in the long run due to inbreeding depression. And the highly acidic rock exposed by the removal of the mountaintop where the new highway goes over will undoubtedly be releasing some level of pollution into two different watersheds for centuries. From the perspective of wildlife and wildlife habitat, every highway is a highway of death.
As for “road to nowhere,” I see that even one of the biggest boosters of the project, the Altoona Mirror, has adopted the term. What does it mean when a leading local newspaper, the mouthpiece of the local chambers of commerce, asserts that this is Nowhere? Somehow, I doubt that they had the etymology of “utopia” in mind. With the completion of I-99 later on this year, the area will lose a bit more of its distictinctive character and come that much closer to generic Anytown, USA. And the elites will cheer and tell us how lucky we are, and assure us that prosperity is just around the corner. Sound familiar?
October 17th, 2007
Remember this?
The fine craftsmanship of Mike Nicely, general contractor. These particular bookshelves will soon house my poetry collection, but first I have one day more of touch-up work, including a final coat of varnish on the floor. And I must admit a certain reluctance to move all my stuff back in — or even the bare minimum of stuff necessary to make it habitable: chair, table, footstool… The room will never again seem as starkly beautiful and as full of possibilities as it does right now. Or as echoey.
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Direct link to the MP3
September 15th, 2007
This is so cool, it deserves its own post rather than simply an update. I just realized that the Feedblitzed email version of my last post — and I presume all other Via Negativa posts from here on — contained an audio link at the end. Clicking it generated the following creepy yet delightful rendering, via Talkr.
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Email subscribers will not see the above player, however. They can click on this link instead.
June 6th, 2007
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Geez, I don’t know. That might be too weird even for me. Here’s what it sounded like before I dubbed in the vocals:
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Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly come take a walk with me
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly come take a walk with me
When we get married some pleasure to see
He led her over hills and valleys so deep
He led her over hills and valleys so deep
At last Pretty Polly, she began to weep
Oh Willie oh Willie I’m ‘fraid of your way
Willie oh Willie I’m ‘fraid of your way
All minding to ramble and lead me astray
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly you guessin’ about right
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly you guessin’ about right
I dug on your grave two-thirds of last night
She threw her arms around him and began for to weep
She threw her arms around him and began for to weep
At last Pretty Polly, she fell asleep
He threw the dirt over her, and turned away to go
Threw the dirt over her, and turned away to go
Down to the river where the deep water flow
(Lyrics from the Dock Boggs version, recorded in 1927 in New York City.)
May 25th, 2007
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Has it really been a month since I last posted a song? Here’s my not-too-polished take on the Carter Family’s first big hit, “Single Girl,” recorded by Sara and Maybelle in 1927. The lyrics are a reminder of the bad old days before widely available contraception, and obviously struck a nerve with their rural audience.
It may seem surprising that the “First Family of Country Music” should’ve found fame with a song so contrary to so-called family values. But Sara (on the left in the above photo, which I found here) might’ve been singing from experience; her marriage to bandmate A.P. Carter would founder a few years later, as the text from a PBS documentary makes clear:
A.P. was a natural born rambler, and collecting songs gave him an excuse to spend days and weeks at a time on the road. When he was home, he did precious little to help around the house, and when he went, he seldom left enough money to provide for Sara and the children. “She’d be cutting down wood, pulling mining timbers out of the mountains — and Daddy out somewhere trying to learn a song,” their son Joe recalls. “He never stopped to think what effect it might have on his family.”
Yet A.P. was not totally oblivious to the hardships that Sara endured while he was on the road, and he asked his cousin Coy Bays to help out by driving Sara around while he was away. Sara and Coy became close, and eventually they fell in love with each other. When the affair became known, Coy’s parents, Charlie and Mary Bays, decided that it would be best if they got Coy out of the valley, and the Bays family set out for California.
Crushed by Coy’s departure, Sara left A.P.’s house and moved back to Rich Valley, leaving the children with their father. In September 1936, after three years of trying to reconcile with her husband, she finally sued A.P. for divorce. He did not even show up at court to defend himself. Ralph Peer and his wife, Anita, convinced the estranged couple that while their domestic life might be in shambles, there was no reason they should not continue to play music together on a professional basis, and so the Original Carter Family continued to record new songs.
The Carters defied convention in other ways, as well. A good deal of A.P.’s “rambling” through the rural south was in the company of an African-American musical mentor named Lesley Riddle. Together they collected songs at the height of the Jim Crow era, including blues songs and black church music that the Carters would add to the county music repertoire. At the very same time, of course, street musicians whom we now think of as bluesmen were playing — and sometimes recording — tons of white dance tunes. The audiences might have been rigidly segregated, but the musicians, thank god, were not.
May 17th, 2007
Welcome to the 49th edition of I and the Bird, the carnival for bloggers who love birds. I’m calling this edition — with a nod to my fellow Pennsylvanian Rob Fergus — the Wordchaser. I’m less of a birder than a bird appreciator (for street cred, I can only point to my vice-presidency in the local Audubon chapter), but I chase down poems the way a life-lister chases birds.
Past editions of I and the Bird have showcased the host’s own creativity, with sometimes extraordinary results. But this time I want to turn it around and focus on the linguistic creativity of the contributors themselves. Poems, like birds, are everywhere; it’s just a matter of training ourselves to recognize them — a metaphor here, an alliterative passage there, and something lovely dark and deep lurking just beyond. And with a little bit of editing, the English language naturally resolves into a rough iambic pentameter…
Each line in the “found poem” below is a link to the post I lifted it from. I’ve altered nothing but the punctuation, and I’ve included an audio version for those who may have trouble hearing the poetry at first. I’m hoping the excerpts will read like riddles, enticing you to click through and discover their original contexts.
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Lots of good things happen unbidden. Sure they do:
A Golden-winged singing in the far field;
A chance encounter with a small flock of Cockatoos,
Little cotton balls above their legs;
Fallouts of migrants at coastal “fire-escapes;”
Antshrikes, antwrens and antbirds churring and flitting.
A Bobolink flew up out of the field and circled me,
The super nova of the forest, the gaudy Prothonotary.
I knew instantly what it was! There was no mistaking
An immature Bald Eagle in January with a broken wing.
They make the most amazing murbling noises
(Audubon would have said something like that).
The afternoon lull had set in, but we pressed on.
We spotted the lapwings again, out in the glasswort–
How high above the water the white flashes!
Who knows how they knew they were there,
Bird with bird, birds with the very air.
Red Knot, that salmon sensation, doesn’t persist;
I can’t pry them from their hidden nest.
Tomorrow perhaps. Perhaps the day after,
I will spot snipe both close and in good light,
Hundreds of ruddy turnstones, a least sandpiper,
Dendroica cerulea by sound as well as sight.
In their minds, they’re following the food,
Catching arthropods as they attempt to flee
In dewy grass, or ground on the sole of my boot.
I wanted to see the Gray-crowned Yellowthroat;
How it arrived on the window sill I know not.
It was dusk by that time and no hope of a decent photo.
The bird stretches its wings and simply lets go.
Sources: Julie Zickefoose, Thomasburg Walks, Trevor’s Birding, Living the Scientific Life, Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, Drawing the Motmot, The Birdchaser, Bell Tower Birding, Richard Guthrie, Bird Treatment and Learning Center, The Egret’s Nest, Birds Etcetera, The Hawk Owl’s Nest, Ben Cruachan Blog, The Nemesis Bird, The Flatbush Gardener, Fragments from Floyd, 10,000 Birds, Marcia Bonta, The House and other Arctic musings, lovely dark and deep, A DC Birding Blog, Cup O’ Books, Gavan Central, Tick Magnet, Antshrike’s Bird Blog, Bird Ecology Study Group, Wrenaissance Reflections, Dzonoqua’s Whistle.
The next edition of I and the Bird will appear in two weeks at A Blog Around the Clock. Send submissions to Bora: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.
April 20th, 2007
Spring is back! And they tell me that Sunday is the Earth’s birthday, too. So here’s a song for that.
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