New idea: Poetry Scores Travel Experiential Auction

The other night while dining on beef brisket and enjoying Hop Rod Rye at the home of John Eiler, I hit upon what I take it to be a good fundraising idea.

Every year Poetry Scores organizes an Experiential Auction as a fundraiser. We hit up our talented and locally famous friends to donate unique experiences, and then people bid on the privilege of having that experience with that person.

This year, I want to add a travel category. I want for our friends around the country, and indeed across the globe, the donate the experience of spending two or three nights on their couch or in their guest bedroom, with at least one homecooked meal thrown into the offer.

I think between the core Poetry Scores folks we can line up pro bono B&B experiences in many places where one would like to travel. Since a local host with knowledge of the landscape and downhome hospitality comes with the offer, I would say the value of the experience is slightly higher than the value of the lodging, which we could conservatively price at $75 a night.

So the experience would be worth $150-$225 plus the meal and the local host intangible, making each package worth, say, $250-$325.

If each travel experience went for, on average, $100 each on auction and we lined up, say, twenty choice destinations (which would be easy to do), then we could make $2,000 on the travel packages alone, while offering to our friends and donors a bunch of fun bargain travel experiences. That alone would pay to print our next project.

Since travelers and local hosts would, in most cases, then blossom into friends, we also would continue doing something we are pretty good at, which is introducing people to one another and to new experiences - helping facilitate and deepen intimacies - making good things happen.

So; all, ya'll in St. Louis - where do you want to go? And, all y'all elsewhere - want to host a couple of travelers for two or three nights? To help raise money for Poetry Scores? To help translate poetry into other media, and thereby help the ancient art survive in the age of digital multimedia?

Let us know! brodog[@]hotmail.com.

*

The image is of Poetry Scores cofounder Matt Fuller on our stretch limo golfcart at Four Seasons Scottsdale when we were composing our score to Go South for Animal Index. I don't have travel media hookups like that anymore, and I don't think Matt has anywhere to put you in his Hollywood bungalow, but I think the picture gets those travel juices flowing!

Translating an Indian mound into art and music

I saved a copy of this arresting photograph the day it first appeared on Thom Fletcher's Flickr site, figuring I would need it one day, and I was right.

Cindy Tower, who contributed to the 2008 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, is making this Indian mound the subject of a unique multi-media performance titled "Crescendo" as part of the July 25-26 Art Walk.

Her idea is to get a group of creative musicians, she suggested eleven, and pair them each with a painter. As the musicians improvised together on this compromised Indian mound (said to be the last standing in Mound City), the painters would paint them.

A recording would be made of the July 25 performance, which would be played on July 26 inside the house perched on the moundtop, where the paintings from day one would be displayed. There would then be a third event where all of the paintings would be exhibited and all of the music played.

Cindy has proposed making this third event a benefit for Poetry Scores, if I will help her round up the creative musicians and painters, since that is what we do - gather together creative people who like to hijack one medium and take a ride into another.

Sounds like a great idea to me, and I don't think I will have too much trouble persuading the Poetry Scores board to back me on this, since it is a win/win/win/win/win: We would get to be a part of a creative event, get our name out there a little more, midwife some music and art into being, see the art go to happy homes (for bargain prices, probably, knowing us), and pocket a few quid to help pay for our next project.

The event is being produced, I take it, by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Jennifer Gaby from The Contemporary made the connection is why I think this. We have started assembling a list of likely suspects to contribute; inquire within.

A do-over on Les Murray's primitivist self-translation

I have been accused of always looking on the bright side when things don't go my way (often, after a fit of pique and whining), and why not? Every setback is an opportunity to set forth in a different direction, where the going might be better.

St. Louis composer and multi-instrumentalist Frank Heyer balked, respectfully, at the use I had made of one of his fretless guitar improvisations in our score to The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray. He said he thought we would be adding spoken word only, not singing, and that the singing we had added didn't jibe with the way he modulated keys in his composition.

I promptly offered to scratch what I had assembled and start over on that part of the score, and though that wasn't what he was demanding (he wasn't demanding anything), he seemed grateful when I finally convinced him it was perfectly fine with me to let him off the hook.

It makes for an amusing story, as well as a minor setback, because what Frank took to be "singing" was the poet himself making what he described as "mouth music".

Les' biographer, Peter F. Alexander at The University of Sydney, reacted with genuine shock when I told him I had recorded Les Murray making a kind of music with his mouth. Les has a reputation, which he created for himself, of possessing no musicality at all. He may or may not be right about that. His "mouth music" isn't an indication either way, but it is a marvelous reponse - indeed, a primitivist self-translation - of Les' great poem of modernity and vertical space.

Whenever I go back to the beginning on a piece of music based on improvisation, I always inspect my Another Umbrella archive gifted to us so generously by Richard Derrick of San Pedro. I have been going back through the 29-disc archive, thinking about this part of the score, to be titled "In ambigious battle at length".

I think this AU piece just might work. I pair it here with Les' mouth music. Mix them in your mind. What do you think - do these two things belongs together?

Free mp3s

"Frozen Moment"
(Richard Derrick, Paul Roessler)

Another Umbrella

Richard Derrick * guitar
Paul Roessler * keyboard
Recorded at KXLU (Los Angeles), 21 August 1988
Mixed at home (San Pedro), 3 October 2007
Medium: two-track open-reel (soundboard)

"Mouth music"

(Les Murray)

Les Murray

Silly love songs from the days of Shakespeare

Poetry Scores will always be sweet on BBC Radio 3, since the organization was profiled on the Radio 3 poetry show The Verb when we released the first of our scores, Crossing America by Leo Connellan.

I have done my best to stay in touch with the busy folks at The Verb, with limited success. When I jumped onto the Twitter wagon a few weeks ago, I looked for the show and didn't find it, but did manage to add Radio 3 as a feed.

They use a service that simply announces what show is on at the moment, which is fine by me, especially when I am told - as I was told, first thing this morning - that I could be listening to an Early Music Show devoted to Thomas Campion.

You could call Campion a past master of poetry scores from the times of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Campion was one of those Elizabethan/Jacobean worldbeaters who took degrees in law and medicine, was a poet, composer and literary theorist, and even got tangled in the obligatory royal murder subplot.

The poems Campion wrote and scored tended to be lighter fare, the Early Modern equivalent of the "silly love songs" that Paul McCartney reportedly irritated John Lennon by writing, though I'm with Sir Paul by responding, rhetorically, "What's wrong with that?" And Campion coughed up a devotional song/poem with perhaps the most beautiful name for God I can remember having heard: "Author of light".

Sadly, Radio 3 does not archive audio of its shows, as I recall from when we were profiled (I had to charm and coax an assistant at The Verb to bootleg me a copy of the program we were on). I did a bit of searching on YouTube this morning, though, and found performances of three of the songs we heard on The BBC this morning. I like how they represent the wide range of contexts in which this lovely archaic music - the old poetry scores - survives.

*

"I care not for these ladies"

This is the folk revival setting, with the flair of The Renaissance Fair - Sweet Amaryllis performing live at the Hudson Valley Mayfaire in New Paltz, NY, on 4 May 2008. Looks like it was a party!

"Never weather-beaten saile"
The venerable church choir survival, in this case the choir at St. Hilary Church, located in a town better known for its ye olde pirates: Penzance, Cornwall.

"The peacefull westerne winde"
And then the art song survival, in this case a nervous lad named Tiago Martins toughing his way through what seems to be a student recital or faculty review. Tiago needs to go drink some mead with Sweet Amaryllis and loosen up, a bit.

*

I also turned up a couple of stirring performances of Campion poetry scores that didn't make the Radio 3 setlist this morning

"Fain would I wend"
Soparano Valeria Mignaco, leading Alfonso Marin on lute and Adrian Mantu playing the proverbial out of the baroque cello live at Galway Music Festival in September 2008. Note to self: Get your rear end to Galway Music Festival!

"When to her lute Corinna sings"
Soprano Olga Nazaykisnskaya busting it out with Vadim Krasnov on lute; I think Campion and the rowdy men who sang his songs back in the day would approve (wildly) of the bikini screen shot at the end of this photo montage!

*

Image from some French dude's music page.

Your brother, his hair, black coal, coal tar

The mission of Poetry Scores is to translate poetry into other media. Today I am thinking of other acts of translation - coal into tar, itch into prescription - but it all leads back to Poetry Scores.

This week my dermatologist diagnosed my itchy scalp as psoriasis and prescribed me a shampoo with the unlikely ingredient of coal tar. This made me think, naturally, about Turkish poetry.

Actually, about one Turkish poem, Blind Cat Black by Ece Ayhan; more specifically, one specific poem in its prose poetic sequence, which yokes the images of hair and coal.

Pharaoh

... grown. And you used to go to bed with a pharaoh
till the mornings. The rainy months of exile.

Hairpins in your mouth. A bird, it liked to land; stood on his arm
tattooed with monsters.

And your brother used to hold your hair, black coal. A town is visible
when you smile.

Then you ran to a gun "I love you" etched on its muzzle. Ready to bear
this monstrous traveler in hashish.

- Ece Ayhan
- Trans. from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat

So many lines that amaze me, here, but I got an entire winsome country song out of that one line, "And your brother used to hold your hair, black coal."

Free mp3

"Black Coal"
(Ece Ayhan, Chris King, Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Three Fried Men

I made a movie to our poetry score to Blind Cat Black. Kevin Belford has been kind enough to post the clip to the "Black Coal" segment up on that there YouTube. Starring Toyy Davis and Jason Wallace Triefenbach.

*

The image by Odilon Redon was drawn with coal and is lifted from Ibiblio.

Social networking medium nets me free beer

Last night was supposed to be a night for Poetry Scores - a board meeting and a strategy session - but instead it became a milestone, for me, in social media.

As the 42-year-old father of a 6-year-old who also has a demanding, absorbing dayjob, I - appropriately and electively - have no adult social life to speak of. Or, at least, speaking of it wouldn't take up much time (about a "tweet").

For me and a lot of people like me, social media have become, largely, a simulation of a social life, rather than a meaningul contributor to an actual, third-dimensional social life.

Not for us the cryptic status updates about what we are eating or where we are drinking, because "what my wife cooked for the family" or "cranberry juice in the kitchen while the kid watches iCarly" just isn't something anyone else should be asked to "follow".

So, imagine my surprise, last night, when an abruptly cancelled arts org board meeting and a new songwriting partner who wasn't returning my call (using the archaic social networking medium of the cell phone) left me in an unfamilar place: in an adult social setting, at a tavern, with a laptop connected to the internet, and the intention of leaving that social setting for a similar one that was nearby.

Gazillions of 20-somethings and 30-somethings would shield their eyes in shame at me, at this point, with little more than an "OMG!" that I was even talking about an experience that is, to them, as common as brushing their teeth. But there I was, all set up to issue the status update of a person half my age with a whole lot more on the ball, socially:

Impersonating footloose 20- and 30-somethings, I report my departure from Royale intent for CBGB. Detonating laptop and disappearing from public record at this time.

And guess what! OMG! I walked into the next adult social setting, the South Grand dive bar CBGB (where I love the bartender on Monday nights and the music he plays), and I actually run into somebody who was there because he read my status update and he wanted to see me!

Shazam! This social networking media thing can actually, like, help you network, socially! And there is more! This person who read my status update and walked to the tavern to see me - the talented artist and mensch Bradley Bowers - bought me a beer! OMG! This social networking thing can actually get me drinking free beers!

I don't want to be any younger, really, and I don't want to have a busier adult social life, because that would mean I was less married and less engaged as father. But, still, this is so cool!

>3!

*

Image by Simon Pericich.

Les Murray reading from unpublished work in Sydney

Bolstering my newfound belief in the value of Twitter, a search on the site just turned up video of our man Les Murray reading in the University of Sydney's Fisher Library. The quality of the video and audio are both exemplary.

Les says he is reading "from a book that doesn't exist" and that should appear next year. Many of the new poems are briefer, like his recent series of Poems the Size of Postcards, though a few - including one that is a kind of compendium of trivia - are a bit longer.

The themes are in keeping with the work that has come before. "The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864" goes into Les' thirst for Australian history, a passion that also underlies his long poem that we are currently scoring, The Sydney Highrise Variations. Another essays his chronic topic of animals, in this case a pet cat.

Les looks a bit tired or unwell and stumbles over a number of lines. His wit is sharp as ever, though. Wrapping up a poem about an historical figure with a very strange name, he quips, "I like 'Sexburger'. A name you can conjure with."

Before Les on the program is Judith Beveridge, billed as a "poet, editor and teacher of poetry writing (also at the University of Sydney)". I liked her stuff quite a bit.

She has a number of grisly poems about sea life and fisherfolk. "The subject matter of some of these poems is a bit brutal and nasty, I must admit," she says. Interestingly, she says she finds writing from experience "tedious" and prefers to invent characters and situations for her poems - quite unlike Les Murray.

In fact, his introduction to the most personal poem he read that night tied together the two poets on the bill. He told an anecdote about his mother losing her memory. After one visit with his mother, Les said, he told his wife, "Never outlive for yourself". He said she challenged him to translate that into Latin.

Les - who knows many languages - said he sought help in doing so and found it in Steven Edgar, "the husband of the previous poet": Judith Beveridge .

The video was produced by University of Sydney and posted by SlowTV, an online multimedia component of an Australian print magazine titled The Monthly.

*

Image of Les reading (published work, at a completely different event) from somebody's Flickr.