Poetry Scores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’

Poetry Scores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’
Chamber orchestra will perform poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s elegy
Free concert Sunday, Oct. 30 at The Touhill
Lecture Oct. 27, Art Invitational Nov. 11

Poetry Scores will premiere Barbara Harbach’s poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theater, part of the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The concert, co-presented by Women in the Arts at UMSL, is free and open to the public, with plenty of free parking.

Harbach’s score to Incantata will be performed by an eight-member chamber orchestra (Flute, Clarinet in Bb, Bassoon, French Horn, Trumpet in Bb, Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello) conducted by James Richards. Sequenced around the four movements of the chamber piece, Eamonn Wall will perform Muldoon’s poem, an elegy for Mary Farl Powers and a celebration of the poet’s love and life shared with her. Chris King, creative director of Poetry Scores and producer of Incantata, will briefly introduce the performance. The entire program will run less than an hour with no intermission.

Poetry Scores is a St. Louis-based arts organization dedicated to translating poetry into other media; Incantata is its sixth poetry score. Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Ireland now based at Princeton University. Barbara Harbach is a St. Louis-based composer and publisher of many works, concertizing musician and professor of music at UMSL. Eamonn Wall is an Irish poet and professor of Irish literature at UMSL.

Paul Muldoon’s poem “Incantata” was published in The Annals of Chile (1994). It is often cited as one of the best poems written in English by anyone who currently is alive. Muldoon is collaborating on the poetry score, and his performance of the poem will appear on the Poetry Scores CD once Harbach’s composition is recorded. A live performance of the premiere will be recorded by Adam Long, the multiple Grammy-nominated sound engineer based in St. Louis.

“I was drawn to the many feelings and emotions in the poem, the cry of heartbreak, enduring love, humor, pathos, giddiness, allusions to music, literature, art, liquor and food,” Harbach said of her score.

The premiere of Harbach’s score will be prefaced a few days previously with a lecture on “Paul Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’ and its Sources” by Guinn Batten, a professor of English at Washington University. Batten will speak 12:30-1:45 p.m. Thursday, October 27 in Room 331 of the Social Sciences & Business Building at UMSL. The composer, Harbach, and producer, King, will join Batten for a discussion. The lecture is free and open to the public, though a parking permit is required; call 314-516-7299 or visit umsl.edu/cis and click REGISTER.

Poetry Scores’ work with Incantata will conclude 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11 with its 6^th annual Art Invitational at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12^th St. in Soulard. Some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Incantata. As always at a Poetry Scores Art Invitational, all work is titled by the artist after language taken directly from the poem, then the work is hung in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. “In that sense, the poem itself hangs the show,” said King, who is curating the invitational. All work will be for sale on silent and live auction (many payment forms accepted), with proceeds split evenly between artist, gallery, and Poetry Scores.

For more information on Poetry Scores, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call 314-265-1435. For more information on Barbara Harbach, visit http://www.barbaraharbach.com/. For directions to the Touhill, visit http://www.touhill.org/. For directions to Mad Art Gallery, visit www.madart.com.

"That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso"

So Poetry Scores' 6th annual Art Invitational is coming up 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11, at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard. This year, some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Paul Muldoon’s poem Incantata.
Muldoon's poem is an elegy for a girlfriend who died of cancer. The beloved, Mary Farl Powers, was a visual artist, and from the evidence of the poem, she and her poet boyfriend carried on an exciting artist-lover dialogue and journey. Not only creative art (in all media), but also food, liquor, history, politics, geography -- they seemed to share everything, and Incantata appears bent on remembering it all.

I'm not a visual artist, but I play one at our Art Invitationals. As creative director of Poetry Scores and curator of our Art Invitationals, I tend to slip myself quietly onto the artist list to pad out our numbers (and because I can). I'm a doodler desperately hoping to be taken for a sketch artist or caricaturist. I like to draw people's faces. Since a Poetry Scores Art Invitational requires that work be titled using a quote from the poem, I look for names in the poem we are scoring and pick a face to draw.

In Incantata, I have a lot of names and faces to choose from, because this is a serious name-dropper of a poem. It's as if the poet were desperate to write down one more time any name either he or his beloved ever spoke aloud to the other. Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, Camille Pissaro, Andre Derrain, John Field, Enrico Caruso, Spinoza, Amelia Earhart, Airey Neave, Mountbatten, Joseph Beuy, Van Morrison, Rembrandt -- these names are all direct quotes from the poem, and therefore usable titles for a work submitted to the Invitational.

Tonight I ate an ice cream and attempted to enter Dunaway Books, in search of a book about Airey Neave, or perhaps Pissaro; but the place was closed. I feel like I am still looking for my subject, though the other night I took my first stab at a sketch of Enrico Caruso. In addition to being one of history's great voices, Caruso was a very theatrical and photogenic ham, so there are many evocative images of him to sketch from. As an inside joke, I sketched Caruso sketching -- a caricature of the opera star drawing a caricature.

There is talk of adding a children's art component to this year's Invitational. I'm working this out with new Poetry Scores board member and South City Studio & Open Gallery (SCOSAG) honcho Amy VanDonsel. I am typing this out now, in part, so I have a list of those dropped names to draw from later. I plan to find and print good images of all of these people, and have fun drawing faces with SCOSAG kids.

You know the jail cell in Mad Art, on your way into the main gallery space? We're thinking to hang the SCOSAG kids' art in the jail cell, along with mine, their mentor as a sketch artist, a'hem. We plan to put the kids through the same process as the other Invitational artists, in terms of putting their work up for auction and splitting proceeds three ways: artist, gallery and Poetry Scores.

Fun!

Poetry Scores’ 6th Annual Art Invitational Nov. 11 at Mad Art

Poetry Scores’ 6th Annual Art Invitational

50 artists respond to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata Nov. 11 at Mad Art

From 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11, Poetry Scores will present its 6th annual Art Invitational at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard. This year, some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Paul Muldoon’s poem Incantata. As always at a Poetry Scores Art Invitational, all work is titled by the artist after language taken directly from the poem, then the work is hung in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. “In that sense, the poem itself hangs the show,” said Chris King, co-founder and creative director of Poetry Scores, who is curating the invitational.

All work will be on sale on silent and live auction, with bidding opening at 6 p.m. and sales starting to close at 8 p.m., with all art coming down off the walls and going home that night. Various payment options will be available. Proceeds from each sale will be split evenly three ways: artist, venue and Poetry Scores.

Poetry Scores is a St. Louis-based non-profit arts organization dedicated to translating poetry into other media, including music, visual art and digital cinema. The organization plans to use proceeds from the November 11 Art Invitational to fund a studio recording of the composer Barbara Harbach’s new poetry score to Incantata. A world premiere of her score, with eight of the area’s finest classical musicians, is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday October 30 at the Lee Theater in the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of UMSL. Both the October 30 premiere and the November 11 Art Invitational are free and open to the public.

Artists confirmed for the November 11 Art Invitational at Mad Art include:

Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Jenna Bauer
Michael Behle
Deanna Chafin
Grace Chung
Heather Corley
Gred Edmondson
Nancy Exarhu
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Alexa Hoyer
Claire Medol Hyman
Chris King
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
Meera Lee Patel
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Keek Richardson
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Daniel Shown
Derek Simmons
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Nita Turnage
Amy VanDonsel.

Incantata by Paul Muldoon and Barbara Harbach will be Poetry Scores’ sixth poetry score CD. The group previously has produced and released Jack Ruby’s America by Missouri Poet Laureate David Clewell (2010), The Sydney Highrise Variations by legendary Australian poet Les Murray (2009), Go South for Animal Index by Salt Lake City/St. Louis poet Stefene Russell (2008), Blind Cat Black by pioneering Turkish poet Ece Ayhan (2006) and Crossing America by Connecticut Poet Laureate Leo Connellan (2003). These records will be available for sale at the Lee Theater on October 30 and Mad Art Gallery on November 11.

Poetry Scores also has produced a feature movie to Blind Cat Black, which premiered at the 2007 St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase and went on to play three cities in Turkey with coverage on Turkish national television and in the national press. The first poetry score, Crossing America, was profiled on BBC Radio 3. Poetry Scores has received significant regional and national press coverage,

For more information on Poetry Scores or the Incantata events, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call314-265-1435. You may also follow Poetry Scores on Twitter (@poetryscores) and on Facebook.

My original Nation magazine review of "Blind Cat Black"

I recently joined a social media group aggregrated around my friend Murat Nemet-Nejat, the Turkish poet and translator. There is some interest in this group to read my original 1997 Nation magazine review of the Ece Ayhan books that Murat translated in a single English-language edition, Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies. My review was instantly translated into Turkish and published in Istanbul as a piece of (in essence) bootlegged literary criticism. I know this because when I met the eminent Turkish scholar, translator and poet Talat S. Halman, he knew of me from this review, which he had read in Turkish. I almost fell off my bench at the Waterfront Ale House, near Professor Halman's Murray Hill home in New York City! If anyone has a clipping of the Turkish translation of this review, please let me know (brodog@hotmail.com) -- I'd love to have a copy for my files.

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Gay in Istanbul (as The Nation headlined my review)

By Chris King

Murat Nemet-Nejat is a Turkish-born Jew who has lived for years in New York City, where he sells Oriental rugs. A section of his first book, The Bridge, a narrative poem written in English, created quite a stir in Turkey when it was translated. When Nemet-Nejat went to Turkey for his honeymoon, he found that many poets wanted to meet him. One was Ece Ayhan, the author of some of the most bizarre, anti-narrative verse written in Turkish.

Ayhan expressed interest in translating The Bridge. “I told him I was surprised,” Nemet-Nejat remembers, “because our work is so different.” Ayhan replied, “It is like I am walking the street at night alone, and I came upon this house. There is a wonderful feast inside this house. I can’t enter the house. But I enjoy looking at it.” Ayhan wanted to work with another Turkish poet whose English was better, but that man was imprisoned at the time. The translation never came to pass. Years later, grieving for the death of his mother, Nemet-Nejat picked up two of Ayhan’s books, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, and cast them brilliantly into English.

This exchange partakes of the strange world of these poems. It is full of dramatic transitions: first publication, first translation, marriage, death. But the transitions lead mostly to fragment and incompletion, and the point of view changes as poet and translator change places. Someone, unnamed, is imprisoned for unstated reasons. Crushing sadness, the death of a mother, gives way to inexplicable creativity – the translation of experimental gay Turkish poetry. Ayhan is alone in the night, excluded from warmth and family, watching the play of color and motion.

The literature of the outsider has become quite an inside thing, but I don’t think we’ve heard anything like this voice. The uniqueness of these English sentences (A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxes are both prose poem sequences) emerges from the collaboration (silent, distant and protracted, as befits the texts) of two strangely formed poets. Ayhan wrote A Blind Cat Black as a provincial official and Orthodoxes as an Istanbul archivist. Those biographical teasers – given the baroque character of the verse, cast in street slang and rich in armpit smells, intimations of torture and truncated gay sex – conjure Kafka as a queer Turk. In Nemet-Nejat this outsider finds an apt shadow. As a Persian Jew growing up in Turkey, Nemet-Nejat was born in exile, speaking between languages.

Nemet-Nejat struggled for years translating Ayhan and went through hell getting this slim book into print. Even someone as charmed by the work as I am can see why. God knows what the Turkish looks like (the translator assures us that it has puzzled most readers); the English is a bizarre movement through invisible dogs, curses, convulsed emotions, corpses, stolen kites, rats in sewers, blind black cats with dead babies in their sacks, Pharaoh tattoos, “cum water” and the ghosts of jokes. Nothing obvious connects the riot of images and tide-turns of emotion. Confronted by such a book, in a busy world already brutal and confusing, one could easily be repelled.

Nemet-Najat says the best audience Ayhan found in Turkey was musicians and composers. That makes sense. Anyone who loves dissonance or fragmented melodies played sweetly outside the chord changes should love these poems: “He ran away on a steamboat, a jalopy but quick. Playing, unknowable, the muddy music of the ink squid.” Once you half-detach that part of your brain trying to figure out what is going on, you hear the most haunting music everywhere: “Madness put on a porkpie hat”; “My Aunt Sadness drinks alcohol in the attic, embroiders”; “hallucinations full of clowns run in ruins.” Once you hear the music, you see brilliant pictures: “They came drowned in the afternoon to the blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafes”; “I went to Jerusalem in that exile of the flower vendors and got settled in the town clock.” Is that a queer Turk Chagall?

This book has a way of lulling the reader into reverie, so that you complete the picture with your own colors, whistle the rest of the warped tune. When your rational brain reattaches, it’s like returning to a book you fell asleep reading and dreamed things into. It reminds me of Asian musicians who claim that they discovered the polyphonic music of the Western symphony centuries ago, but realized that monophonic music is more satisfying because it allows the soul of the listener to sing the harmonies. Nemet-Najat believes that Ayhan speaks obliquely because his subject touches the secret gay street life of Istanbul, which the official culture has silenced.

He also suggests that A Blind Cat Black is the disguised coming-out narrative of an Istanbul boy prostitute. That is one way to assemble the music and pictures. There are “untellable swords” and male queens, and certain shades of love and regret I have seen in gay men. With this reading, A Blind Cat Black becomes a study of a beautiful boy you probably wouldn’t like if you weren’t madly in love with him, living a horrible life he can’t articulate and is forbidden to describe openly, told in turn by himself, by a man who loves him, and by a heartbreaking third-person songbird: “An absent-minded tightrope walker comes. From the sea of late hours. Blows out a lamp. Lies down next to my weeping side, for the sake of the prophet. A blind woman downstairs. Family. She raves in a language I don’t know.”

A nastiness edges these poems, the voice of a devastated childhood viewed from a compromised adulthood: “They stole my kite in my madness, a violet, child-dead Sunday.” Just when this voice verges on whining, we find juxtaposed a calm, parental point of view: “My son is a queen. Has spread his wings.” Flashes of compassion shooting through the nastiness conjure the haunted image of parents watching home movies of a child who grew up only to commit suicide, an awful feeling made worse because the parental voice and the voice of the older male lover overlap. These ghoulish experiments with point of view are warmed by honest, old-fashioned sadness. At moments the poem becomes a half-told account of a conversation that drifted off and changed everything for the worse: “The adventure in a pass. Chasm. We don’t talk at all.” Or: “Not only the tides of the sea, even the explanations were useless.” The last lines of A Blind Cat Black deliver an unbearably bleak conclusion: “But no one should look for each other. Passing one inevitable sea.”

This is more than another journal of disintegration in a gay-baiting world. It is a virtuosic study of what you can do with lyricism denied, besides choke on it. Like brilliant musicians who crave simple emotion, yet love dissonance and the technical complexities of their instruments, Ayhan and Nemet-Nejat play endlessly on our heartstrings and bow—worry, even break them. A simple emotional line is dropped: “He likes his loneliness.” Simple images get sad twists: “The bend in a child’s heart.” Lyricism goes belly up and turns into self-satire: “Why the sea rises, no one knows. Oh the black shimmers of exile. I am a weeping half breed.” Then the poets blind us with complexity still drenched in emotion, like Imrat Khan in a furious raga: “The tryst in the labyrinth is slaked and duped by the divinations in sand. He was my age and a veiled queen. How the horses, how the chugboats rotted in that depth.”

This book stirs powerful memories of the sea. Its sometimes maddening, sometimes sorrowful sea changes of images left me thinking about knowing people for a long time and seeing them, over the years, from so many distances, through so much suffering, in so many different moods. I think it is the saddest book I have ever read.

– This review first appeared in The Nation magazine, July 7, 1997.

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I went on to score Murat's translation of Blind Cat Black with the arts organization Poetry Scores, which then produced a silent movie to the score that I directed. This essay on this blog tells some, but not nearly all, of those stories.

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Image of Ece Ayhan from this wonderful fan site that also mentions our work.

Art Invitational for Paul Muldoon's "Incantata"

The Poetry Scores Art Invitational for Paul Muldoon's Incantata will be held Friday, November 11 (that's 11/11/11) at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard.

At our Art Invitationals, we invite 50 or so local artists to make new work in response to the poem we are scoring. We require that they title the work after a verbatim quote from the poem. We then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the langauge used for the title appears.

In this way, the poem hangs the show. It works, year after year. Incantata will be our 6th annual invitational, with no duds to date.

This year, I bugged the artists early to work early and finish early so we can promote early. This partly is financial in motive. Our invitationals are silent art auctions, with proceeds split evenly three ways, between artist, venue and Poetry Scores. We're hoping to whet some appetites for this work and get some eager buyers in the door at Mad Art -- maybe even field some opening bids in advance.

Anyway, this is the early work we have in as of now -- in the order in which it will appear in the show.

"Paul Muldoon"

Dana Smith

"In everything there is an order"

Michael Behle




"A pupa in swaddling clothes"

Cindy Royal

“Its tidal wave of army-worms into which you all but disappeared”

Tim McAvin

"all-too-cumbersome device
of a potato-mouth in a potato-face
speak out, unencumbered,"

 Claire Medol Hyman

"Or maybe a human caul"

Alexa Hoyer

"...as I watched the low swoop over the lawn today of a swallow..."

Jenna Bauer

 

"of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart"

Michael Hoffman

"You'd be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale of tears."

Janiece Senn

"The Shower of Rain"

Robin Street-Morris

Thus far confirmed for the invitational:



Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Jay Babcock
Jenna Bauer
Michael Behle
Kevin Belford
Deanna Chafin
Grace Chung
Heather Corley
Andrea Avery Durway
Greg Edmondson
Nancy Exarhu
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Michael Hoffman
Alexa Hoyer
Kim Humphries
Claire Medol Hyman
Chris King
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
John Minkoff
Michael Paradise
Meera Lee Patel
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Keek Richardson
Cindy Royal
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Daniel Shown
Derek Simmons
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Tunca Subasi
Nita Turnage
Robert Van Dillen
Amy VanDonsel
Eric Woods
More to come!

Before we get there, our score to Incantata will have been premiered. This year, we commissioned the great composer Barbara Harbach to do our work for us. Her score to Incantata will be premiered by musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theatre in the Touhill on the campus of UMSL. Be there!

How we came to shoot a zombie barber with a straight razor

Yesterday we shot on location at our prop shop in South St. Louis. Our landlady, a supporter of the arts (and paramour of a Poetry Scores contributing artist) is letting us take over her garage as a movie lot.

V. Elly Smith clambered up on the garage for the aerial view. In this scene, the wall of the garage that faces Toni's backyard is transformed into the entrace to the office at Lost Almost, our imaginary Los Alamos, birthplace of the bomb. (Signage by Paul Casey, who also plays the lead Lost Almost scientist.)



We need to shoot a series of intake scenes, where civilians report for duty at the secret scientific military installation. Yesterday we shot the first of these scenes that will appear in the movie. A hapless tramp, the vendor of stuffed animals, has been drafted into the Army and is reporting to duty as a grunt soldier. The vendor is a recurring character in our movies played and (as I recall) invented by Thom Fletcher.



Playing the soldier already on post was Chuck Reinhardt, a musician friend of mine doing his first acting ever. We are making a silent movie about the making of the atomic bomb. In a silent movie, the best way to say "covert heavily guarded scientific military post" is to have a soldier with a gun in almost every scene. This gun is a prop on loan from Andy's Toys.

For most of these, his first-ever scenes, Chuck had nothing to do but stand sentinal and look forbidding and menacing. Doing simple things "naturally" is the essence of good acting, and it turns out Chuck actually is a great actor.

To show the coded secrecy of Lost Almost, we have to shoot a lot of scenes with the issuing, checking and burning of secret papers. On the vintage typewriter loaned to us for the movie shoot by Bill Sawalich, I typed out for the vendor of stuffed animals his draft letter. It read "a beast," a quote from the poem at the basis of our movie, Go South for Animal Index.

This is where having Elly on the roof made a big difference. In most exchanges, you want to get reactions from both sides of the exchange. Elly was the only person in the crew positioned to get the vendor's reactions.

Our options for getting that reaction were otherwise nonexistent. Looking out at the vendor from the sentinel's point of view, you see the backs of houses in a Midwestern city. Those images utterly shatter the illusion we are trying hard to create: the illusion of being in a timeless place, the land of parables and folktales. My approach in conceiving and executing storylines and movie shoots is drawn from world folklore.

Laurent Torno III, our direct of photography on this movie, was very crafty in finding a way to shoot this scene from an extreme side angle. If he went over and primped up those vines on the neighbor's trellis and worked with his focus on a really tight shot, there is nothing behind the vendor on his frame but greenery. That's the primitive look, borrowed from the classic silent films as well as world folklore, that our movies aim for.

This is not Thom saying he nailed the take -- he is modest about his abilities to the point of self-doubt -- though it sure looks that way, and he did nail the takes. Thom is one of my very favorite actors to work with for his talent and his temperament. He'll be back as the vendor of stuffed animals in the next two movies in the production timeline: The Sydney Highrise Variations (no better place for a guy selling stuff on a tall stick than a cityscape in a movie about modernity and vertical space!) and Crossing America (no better place for a wandering merchant than a road movie!).

Then we moved inside the prop shop, to shoot the new recruit's intake from inside the office. I had nothing but obsctales, literally and figuratively, for my crew in shooting this scene. We absolutely must not see the apartment building across the yard in any of our shots, and our prop shop is full of ... props. Worse, among those props I don't yet have the desk I need for the Lost Almost office and I couldn't get the actors playing the office roles on really short notice, so we had to shoot tight from their point of view with most of the room behind the camera, because the room is supposed to be full of office furniture and people.

Also, the fool director (me) had the good sense to pop a flash while shooting stills. Uh, that's a "CUT!" Mr. Scorcese. I couldn't take many stills, though, because my arms were otherwise needed in this scene. I put on the shirt won by General Graves (Ray Brewer) and played his body double. In our movie, those will be my arms extending out from the General's body to hand the new recruit his uniform, rifle, and coded paper with new orders ("he that is lost," another quote from Go South). I have started praying that we will later be able to match this shot back to the scenes we shoot in the properly outfitted and populated office, with Ray Brewer in the General's shirt, not me.

What's the hurry? Why shoot this scene now, and not later, when we have the props and actors we need? Because I wanted to shoot a scene with Thom's soldier character later that day, and he would need to be shaved for that other scene. So we needed to shoot him getting his shave!

Of course, an armed soldier stands sentinel over the new recruit's cut and shave. Armed soldiers are omnipresent in Lost Almost. We even have an armed soldier standing over the confession scene we shot with General Graves and the military chaplain (George Malich). We go in for the absurd and comic like that.

Plenty of absurdity in a new recruit being shaved by someone far hairier than he us, and a woman on top of that. Joyce Pillow came to us through Elly. She has all sorts of skills on movie projects, including the boring managerial ones, but in Go South for Animal Index she is a "debased cog" (yet anmother phrase from the poem); a nameless, faceless zombie. The zombies in this movie are conceptual zombies with no gore; the zombie is all in the acting -- they are method zombies. The zombie actors play the miners and millers who produce and trundle the uranium and plutonium needed for the atomic bomb effort. Looks like they also cut heads!

I'll let the zombie scholars tell me for sure, but I'm going to suggest Poetry Scores is breaking new terrain here by casting the first-ever zombie barber. And if you wonder, how do you act undead while shaving a total stranger with a straight razor? Very carefully! Not one nick was put in Thom Fletcher's face in the making of this movie.

Why a zombie barber? I probably would have cast a soldier in this scene, had I been able to get another soldier actor on such short notice. And that probably would have been less cool, so in the end, I am happy that Thomas Crone -- whose soldier character has done most of the other harrowing things in the movie -- was busy working on his own digital cinema project yesterday.

Why a zombie at all? The first movie we made, Blind Cat Black, incorporated zombies to match the surrealist technique of the poem we were working from (written by Ece Ayhan, translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat). I noticed an enormous difference in people's reaction to being told "we make silent movies based on long poems" (which make most people flee for their lives, for fear they'll be forced to watch one) compared to being told "we make silent zombie movies" -- which makes people buy a round of drinks and offer to act in our next movie!

The movie we are making now will be edited to our score of the poem Go South for Animal Index by Stefene Russell, a genius of Salt Lake City who lives and works in St. Louis. That is her pretty hair to the left of this frame. Stefene also acts in our movies and co-produces our projects as an integral part of Poetry Scores. In fact, we owe her producer connections for Thom Fletcher, the man in the zombie barber chair: he's her spouse!

Like so many greatly talented artists who gravitate to a lower-keyed city like St. Louis, Stefene is humble and working-class. The poet herself chipped in on this shoot as a production assistant, reflecting light onto the scene to improve the shot Dan Cross was getting.

Dan Cross is new to the Poetry Scores movie unit. He is an experienced moviemaker and instructor of cinematic arts. He has taught a course on zombie movies, and in fact came to us first as a zombie actor. Dan tells me he is enjoying the improvisatory freedom of our approach to making movies. We don't work from shotlists we prepare in advance. I tend to know the outcome I want from a scene, with a general sense of where in the score (that is, in the movie) it will fit, and then encourage the crew to get the shots that look good to them as we go.

The zombie barber scene, for example, was completely transformed by the existence of this ashpit right outside our prop shop (behind Elly there). I loved this little dump when I first saw it, but didn't remember it was there when I pulled together this shoot. I expected we'd be shooting the shave tight up against the old Army green wooden doors on our prop shop, but when we pulled up to the location the ashpit immediately presented itself as the perfect zombie hair salon.

Laurent was way into the zombie hair salon. He tells me he likes working on our movies because I keep coming up with cool, unexpected places to shoot. Laurent enjoys stretching out in a more artistic direction, compared to all the public television and commercial video he shoots to feed his family.

Our shoot yesterday drew a crowd of our prop shop's neighbors, like these twittering birds, who greatly entertained Stefene while she was pointing the reflector at the zombie salon. One neighbor -- oddly, no longer a neighbor, as he was moving that exact day, yesterday! -- really soaked it in from across the alley. Volunteer movie crews scavenge to stay alive, so I invited this guy over. Turns out he loves zombie movies, makes very realistic gore makeup, is a carpenter and electician who'd like to help build sets, and would love to play a zombie! See what I am saying about the zombie movie thing?

The zombie barber scene was improvised because we needed to shave the vendor of stuffed animals and transform him into Thom's soldier character, Pfc. Sack, for some scenes I planned to shoot later that afternoon in a thatch of woods. At the very end of the movie, as the scientists are readying for the first real nucleur bomb test, Pfc. Sack goes AWOL. He melts into the woods, lays down his rifle, digs up his old hat and bindlestick, and saunters off to go sell some stuffed animals (before presumably getting incinerated, along with his inventory, by the Trinity Test's nucleur blast).

As these things happen in the amateur moviemaking business, we were delayed by a flash thunderstorm (that we rode out in the sturdy prop shop) and never got to that second location. We never shot the shaved soldier scenes. So we rushed the vendor's intake/shave scenes with Thom for nothing!

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Straight razor on loan from the actor, guitarist and barber Roy Gokenbach. Roy has an important role in the great ensemble cast directed by Daniel Bowers in A: Anonymous, the high-water mark in St. Louis indie cinama, never to be crested.