direct link: Starfire

On the day of love an album of love poetry.

My poems, overall, are about a poetics of love... the spirit in our loving.

Though I am a lyrical poet who writes love poems, usually in the first person with an I and thou, an other, a lover, with whom the narrator of the poem speaks. I have accepted this about my writing. It's my natural gesture, the way I think, how my heart beats.





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Every day is a love day, of course, but Valentine's celebrates romantic love.

Perhaps to be contrary to the sugar-coating edges of Valentine's, and to remind us of the beauty of friendship, Dave Bonta put out a call for, and created a podcast celebrating Platonic love. Listening to it, and there is a full range of poetry expressing many aspects of non-sexual love, I'd say, in summation, Platonic love is going through a bit of a crisis in these viagra-driven times. In some regards, our culture is characterized by highly sexed media productions where profligacy is rampant. The simple joys of friendship are over-looked - though, often, as the poems in this collection attest, there are difficulties and pain here too.

While I support the vibrancy and energy of eros, there has to be feeling, intimacy. Unless we are unique individuals to each other, affirmative, inspiring, fulfilling love cannot happen.

What holds our heart? Often deep and life-long friendships are dearer to us because they are comfortable, stable and constant, which is in contrast to the rather bumpy serial monogamies that are the stories of many of our lives.

Whether the beauties of Platonic love can call our muses to their heights of expression, I don't know. These attachments are safe, easy, uncomplicated. And, really, the story of love in most of our lives in most of the world is the bulwark of friendship.

Veils to Clothe Venus is included in Dave's podcast.

Woodrat Podcast 34: Platonic Love.

direct link: Ink Ocean (version 1)

Ink Ocean (9:47min), a poem I've been working on since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the year, a darker, more troubled piece on love. Is it a good ending for my album of love poems? Not sure, though it is a love poem - loving amidst the pollution, with our wounds, whatever they may be. The reading was difficult since I live over a subway, and kept stopping the speaking every time a subway ran through because the muse beckoned the voice at rush hour this morning, O muse! Those sections were clipped out. I've been at my computer working on this recording for 12 hours I guess. May be too close to it to 'hear' it?

It's layered, of course, multiplicities seem what I like to do. You can read the words here if you like (though it looks more like a play of approaches and voices than a poem proper).

Spent days looking for music, too. I already had a small collection of 'possibilites' that I had collected through the year. Nothing was quite right. So I went searching at Jamendo. I found two tracks that each offered something substantial, and did something I had hoped never to have to do - I mixed them! Oh! I should give up these poetry performance pieces, or learn an instrument!

The tracks are a combination of that brilliant musician of experimental, midi, ruby texts that become sonic masterpieces, Alphacore's (Gabriel Garrod) side_project in his album Side Projects, and a new musician for me at Jamendo, Extra (Michael Erickson), and the beautiful track, The Quickest Vessel to a Distant Future, is from his album, Water Every Full Moon.

Three Mugshots:
            

Should I ever show the workings of my 'mad' mind? Ok, ok. I'm self-taught. From these mugshots you can get some idea why my poetry recordings take so long! Files get recorded and taken from here to there, and then there to here, and back again. Can you hear all those tracks in the final version? Who knows. But, like wearing beautiful lingerie, I know they're there.

Though with this last project - an album of poetry readings with the music of Jamendo musicians - has taken nearly a year, and with 11 tracks, it's only 33 minutes long!!

I may give up poetry recordings, and lingerie too.



mixed media on canvas

From Ocean Words

Where the poem began...


                                          

Here is the recording I will include in my upcoming album, 'Starfire, a collection of love poems,' which I'll release on Jamendo when it's finished:


direct link to Veils to Clothe Venus with music (2:33min)

Buz Hendricks created an original track for the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. I have used a section of the ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual track he sent me for this particular poem. You can hear the whole piece with poem and music (his mix) at Jamendo.

Veils to Clothe Venus is the 10th track in the album of poetry performance recordings I am working on. Music from a Jamendo musician accompanies each of the readings in the album. While I still have to write the poem for the last track, and the muse can be quirky, I am hoping to have the album available for listening and free download on Jamendo within a few weeks.

In the process of creating a listenable track, I recorded the little poem maybe a dozen times. Since I liked the reading alone and with Buz's music, I offer a shortened voice-only version of the same reading above. The simple, plain, unadorned voice:


direct link to voice-only version of Veils to Clothe Venus (1:48min)


Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                          

Veils To Clothe Botticelli's Venus by Brenda Clews


Music by Buz Hendricks: Somewhere Off Jazz Street.
Buz created beautiful ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual music for a poem I composed out of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. The original track is at Jamendo. I reworked a portion of that track of music with a new reading of the central poem of the Suite tonight:

Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                          

All I have to post is a little love poem inspired by some special music by a special musician who's beloved at Jamendo, Livio Amato, for my special, and secret, love:


Lyric of Love

-Sensitivity, Musa, Riela-

gently breaking on the waves
of our own oceans

seafoam of stars
falling over edges
pulling back in the underswell
of our desires

birds sweetly singing, ocean breezes, salt spray, morning light of gloss and glittering facets of cut gems

we cannot underestimate
the power of love

the ocean is driven by
inner forces as we are by love

wave patterns, oscillations of polished gems falling as notes of love from our Orphean songs

even as we approach the great mystery it recedes, ever pulling back and falling forwards, white foam melting into sand at our feet

-Dream opening-

then the grotto, magic, rock sanctuary, vision, a lover's cove

the dream of us opens

conch, periwinkle, nautilus, volva, cone, harp, trumpet shells, the music of the ocean at its shores

we are anchored in the swells, water
dance of love

or racing seaward, sails blooming
in the fast wind

-Suspended Animation-

sailing we are birds, osprey
sweeping over the waves
up to the clouds, joy, windsong
of strong wing

the wind who kisses the ocean,
or blows gales, passion

we dance on the beach framed by a disappearing red sun, burnished gong, palm tree fronds black with shadow as the dark washes over us carrying a full moon sailing through the night sky

-Yet, a moment-

we are the sky, the sun, moon and stars, the clouds drifting by, wind, the flying birds, dancing schools of bright fish, the diamond-covered expanse of
glittering

-Infinity-

one day we will wash away, drops in the ocean, no longer even a memory,

yet knowing
love loves
through us


-
Inspired by Livio Amato's album, Sensitivity: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/62537 (section titles are his song titles -I note the sections as I wrote while listening)

A poem on love in The Writer's Almanac this morning, coming from an extraordinary place of wisdom:

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Reprinted by The Writer's Almanac with permission.

Poetry recording site:
Aural Pleasure.

Imagine a love that cannot be tarnished,
not even by us.

We messed the beauty we had,
with our switchbacks.

I demonize you; you decry me as a crazed woman.
We wouldn't speak to each other; my fury unabated
fierce.

You were a sleazy cheat; I was self-righteous, indignant.

What is this love that continues despite our resistance?

Surely not modern love, with its questionings, choices.

But some ancient love, as old as the gold sun itself,
primal, spiritual, enfolding its mystery.

What is a love that cannot fail itself?

And how can we trust it?

It is strange not to be fighting you
like a bad obsession, like an addiction to street drugs.

To accept your irrefutable, irrevocable
presence in my life.

The forever clause,
it's caught us
darling.

This series of poems is about a love affair a few years ago. The gentleman and I haven't been in touch since. Enough time has passed for me to release this recording, made in March 2006. Most of these poems can be found in the archives at Rubies In Crystal.

I would add a Parental Warning Advisory, but only to the first poem.

A Love Affair (15:53min)




Broadband: A Love Affair

Dial-up: A Love Affair