Some months ago I created a Google Sites site, Poetry Recordings of Brenda Clews, to host .mp3s of recent poetry recordings. The poems are all available to read as well -that's important.

The hosting site was so that I could post the recordings here, at Rubies in Crystal, as I compose them, and when I have enough I will create an album at Jamendo. While I used to upload recordings-in-progress to SoundClick or SoundCloud, I tired of the limitations of those music sites, and created a website for this purpose instead.

Today I spent some hours creating a usable interface for these recordings of recent poetry at my hosting site. The site is unlisted, invisible to search engines, but is public- and findable, if you have the link.

Below is a screen shot of the site. Click to go to the site.

Why does it take like 8 different tries, and each of those tries, well I can't tell you how much work, before... the voice, the emotion, the content, the meaning, the whole gestalt of it comes together in a reading that's beyond the-me. Criteria? If I can stand to listen to it.

I know I have to strip myself bare. Be wholly vulnerable. Ouch...

Comments are rare, so I have no idea if it works for/on anyone else. Only occasionally, years after, I'll get a phenomenal response in a private email where the listener found the recording opened them and then they matched the intensity of the original with their own intensity - and their own interpretation that spilled into their own work.

Truthfully, I like a bit of emotion in a recording, even a little bit dramatic. This connects me to the poem in ways a cerebral reading doesn't. And I remember the recording and the poem better after.

Something to do with that amygdala's processing of memory through our emotional response to someone else's emotion? :)

But it has to hang by its shreds on the emotional, over the gaping void, and can never be too emotional, for that would ruin the quality of the poem.

See previous post for text. I wrote the words of the prose poem from what I was thinking about while drawing this drawing. I am hoping to create a short video of the drawing and some other moving images I have found on the NET with this reading.


whaleskin, 2011, 20cm x 25.5cm, 8" x 10", India ink, graphite, watercolour pencils, Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4. (Click on the images for a larger size.)

Thanks to an early Christmas present, my computer has a new hard drive -albiet a cheap Western Digital. After 6 months of constant freezing of programs, requiring turning off and waiting an hour, it's a phenomenal relief to be able to use my iMac again. No idea how I produced as much as I have with an ailing computer.

In celebration, I burned a CD today of Starfire - mostly the whole album of my love poems, though there are a few I haven't yet done... for a birthday present.

Now that everything is working again, hopefully I can finish the album and get it uploaded to Jamendo in the next few months.





                                          

Just checking out SoundClick widgets for my site there: Aural Pleasure. This is my favourite, I think.

I've been tossing around the idea of uploading some of these pieces to Jamendo... not sure how they'd be received in a music community... but, yes, I'd let you download them from Jamendo, yes I would.

I get a kick out of how SoundClick described my poetry recordings in the widget that other artists post at their sites:

rich text with
pleasing undulating
voice and music

I am truly amazed that you can open 'View "page source"' & swipe html & twiddle with it bending it to your purposes & post it. Like I've done here. Damn it, it works.

(No idea whose description of my readings that is... found it at SoundClick. Seems okay :-)

A Love Affair #2 in SoundClick's Poetry Charts?! You guys!!! Thanks. 16 min of too-rich poetry, no music, & a Summer weekend? Blow me away...

(Go here to read the poems, which I pasted into a comment.)

(Yes, I am a little out of place at SoundClick's Poetry section, but I've been posting there for a few years, before they even had a Talk/Poetry section, and it's where I keep my poetry recordings: Aural Pleasure.)

I'm tickled no end that something 16 minutes long and all poetry, an almost too-rich offering since there's some fairly complex stuff there too, and no music has made it to #5 on the charts at SoundClick! Thanks to you...

(note: only first poem is explicitly sexual, none of the others are)

A Love Affair (15:53min)

Light Catches Diamonds- DSL or Cable

Light Catches Diamonds- Dial-up



While I simply cannot record this again, won't tell you the story though you can surely guess, and I dearly hope the volume is high enough (I'm using Audacity on a PC rather than SoundStudio on my old iMac), it is a plain and slower reading, no echoes, promise!

The text for Light Catches Diamonds may be found at my art website.

Thank you, Sky, ydurp, vexations, Ashes_2_Ashes_Words_2_Words, and Richard Geer for your much appreciated feedback. xo

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People have asked if you are supposed to pay for the recording. While I surely appreciate it if you do, no, you don't have to pay for it. You can listen to any of my recordings at SoundClick anytime (streaming is free). I switched from free download to paid because Paintings in the Sand was downloaded about 1500 times and, well, you understand...

The silliness continues. Really, I've never followed anything like this in my life. No music, and not my best recording and the writing needs pruning perhaps though it does seem to build through a momentum, and so the rise on the charts is intriguing. Still #1 in Poetry; up to #9 in Talk. Hopefully by next year sometimes I'll have a new iMac or Mac Mini or something and be able to add some sound tracks. Since I don't play any musical instruments, it'll be interesting.

Voicings (2:49min)

Over at Ourmedia, you can download "On Paintings in the Sand," which has been downloaded 1,590 times, "In the Uncertainty of Every Moment" has 594 downloads, and why I decided to charge for the recordings on my poetry reading site: Aural Pleasure, where, naturally, no-one has bought anything.

How do artists make money? Ahhh, another topic...