"In This Way," a poetry score by Alan Semerdjian and Three Fried Men

Chloe Day's chalk improvisation, no longer extant,
on the concrete floor of The Skuntry Museum.

Poetry Scores will premiere a new work "Grandchildren of Genocide" at The Schlafly Tap Room at 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 21. Old Time favorites Dugout Canoe will open at 9 p.m., and indie rockers Accelerando will close at 11 p.m. It is a free show.

"Grandchildren of Genocide" is a new score of modern poetry from Armenia co-produced by Robert Goetz and Chris King to bear witness to the centennial of the 1915 onset of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Here is one demo from the project: Three Fried Men's score of Alan Semerdjian's poem "In This Way."

It is a cell phone voice app demo recorded in The Skuntry Museum with Chris King on vocal, David Melson on bass, and Elijah "Lij" Shaw on acoustic guitar. At 0:16 there is a text message squirble.




IN THIS WAY
By Alan Semerdjian

One wraps a hand around it
before sleep, one likes
to play forget, one casts
for forgiveness, a bible for his head.
One lies to children,
one doesn’t speak at all,
a morning upsets one,
another then another
and another night
without call, or hate
or enemy or in-
visibility or cash or voice enough
to yell into dissolve, and that
which won’t go away
is still a mountain
in a story on the other side
of a map with one line
separating the throat from
the neck, and the heart
that follows is one last
sad geography of evidence,
one that won’t go away,
and in this way,
they pass the time.
In this way, genocide
blows past the family’s eyes.

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Poetry (c) Alan Semerdjian, who reserves all rights
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Other composers of the scores for "Grandchildren of Genocide" include Nick Barbieri, Steve Carosello, Marc Chechik, Robert Goetz, Ann Hirschfeld, Tony Pupillo, Sherman S Sherman and Mark Stephens. The composers will perform the scores live at the Tap Room with a little help from their friends.

Other poets scored include Christopher Atamian, Peter Balakian, Gregory Djanikian, Adrian Oproiu and Marine Petrossian (self-translated from the Armenian). The poets have all endorsed the project, including co-publication of the resulting songs through Hollywood Recording Studio.

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PREVIOUS POSTS

Poetry Scores to premiere "Grandchilden of Genocide" Nov. 21 at Tap Room

"Dark Wings," a poetry score by Gregory Djanikian and Robert Goetz

Love for Armenian women leads to project to recognize Armenian genocide

Poetry Scores' ancestry traces back to a birthday party for an Armenian girl

Poetry Scores' ancestry traces back to a birthday party for an Armenian girl

 

Monica and Skoob at a recent high school reunion in Granite City.

Poetry Scores will premiere a new work "Grandchildren of Genocide" at The Schlafly Tap Room at 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 21. Old Time favorites Dugout Canoe will open at 9 p.m., and indie rockers Accelerando will close at 11 p.m. It is a free show.

"Grandchildren of Genocide" is a new score of modern poetry from Armenia co-produced by Robert Goetz and Chris King (that's me) to coincide with the centennial of the 1915 onset of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Robert brought the project to Poetry Scores to honor an Armenian woman. I took the idea to heart right away, because one of my best friends growing up was an Armenian girl, Monica Fanning. We were part of a large circle of best friends that also included her little sister, Leigh Ann, and their house was one of our safe havens, where our hostess was their Armenian mother, born Clara Takmajian.

This was in Granite City, Illinois, a steel town, where in our parents' generation "white people" was just starting to become synthesized out of more than a dozen fairer-skinned ethnicities drawn to the steel mill. In our generation, it still meant something if your parent was, say, Armenian (or half-Armenian, in the case of Clara). To me, it meant you were smart, outspoken, amazing looking, hilarious, and adventurous, like Monica and her sister (their mom, Clara, was pretty cool, too).

 

Leigh Ann and Monica with Jay, one of the other guys in our friendship circle

As Robert and I started to work on "Grandchildren of Genocide," it started to sink in how fitting it was for Poetry Scores to be doing an Armenian poetry project. Because, as a matter of fact, the earliest roots -- the seed, actually -- of Poetry Scores was our first, adolescent gig in an Armenian girl's basement.

For Monica's thirteenth birthday party, me and another guy from our friendship circle, known as Skoob, performed our first concert. Our band was called Superpig on Broadway. The instrumentation was Skoob on autoharp and harmonies with me on lead vocals. It was an all-original set. Heavy Billy Joel influence, a little McCartney and Doors (on autoharp, mind you). Monica remembers dousing the basement lights and the audience members illuminating Superpig on Broadway with flashlights.

We rehearsed hard for that set, perched on the window ledge of my upstairs apartment bedroom. We were so sure of our future success that we made coupons for a free copy of our first record, already pre-titled the eponymous "On Broadway," and handed them out to our friends at the basement birthday party. Monica somehow held onto hers.

Original Superpig on Broadway coupon (1979). Collection of Monica Fanning.

Nine years and a lifetime later, Skoob returned to Granite City after graduating from college on the East Coast. I was hanging around waiting to start graduate school at Washington University, and for summer kicks we started up the band again. Superpig on Broadway was reborn as Enormous Richard and the Love Turkeys, which got shortened to Enormous Richard by the time we finally reached the stage -- as an actual rock band; we left the autoharp behind and grew guitars and amps. Our very first gig was written up in the daily newspaper. We quickly built a local following, started to book shows out of town and then ended up on the road for five years, undergoing a name change to Eleanor Roosevelt along the way.

Skoob got out of the van to start a career, eventually, but I stayed on the road. The rest of our band, my friends from Washington University, transformed ourselves into a field recording collective called Hoobellatoo. We recorded oral narratives of elders, an African drummer's entire cultural repertoire, mountain fiddlers and banjo players, a one-man band in Boston, the neglected blues legend Rosco Gordon, and a bunch of poets at an independent publisher in Connecticut. One of the poets, Leo Connellan, stood out to us, and we decided to set his hitchhiking epic "Crossing America" to music. It was our first poetry score, and it was featured on the BBC. So we decided to focus on what was working. We became Poetry Scores. We're still doing it, setting poetry to music (and other media).

So Poetry Scores came from Hoobellatoo, which came from Eleanor Roosevelt, which came from Enormous Richard, which came from Superpig on Broadway, which had its debut at the thirteenth birthday party of an Armenian girl.


PREVIOUS POSTS

Poetry Scores to premiere "Grandchilden of Genocide" Nov. 21 at Tap Room

"Dark Wings," a poetry score by Gregory Djanikian and Robert Goetz

Love for Armenian women leads to project to recognize Armenian genocide

Monica (third from front) and Leigh Ann (front) kicking it
with a Takmajian cousin and another best friend of ours, Mush.

Love for Armenian women leads to project to recognize Armenian genocide

 

Leigh Ann and Monica Fanning, daughters of Clara Takmajian Waterson

Poetry Scores will premiere a new work "Grandchildren of Genocide" at The Schlafly Tap Room at 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 21. Old Time favorites Dugout Canoe will open at 9 p.m., and indie rockers Accelerando will close at 11 p.m. It is a free show.

"Grandchildren of Genocide" is a new score of modern poetry from Armenia co-produced by Robert Goetz and Chris King (that's me) to coincide with the centennial of the 1915 onset of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Robert brought the idea to Poetry Scores, initially, to honor an Armenian woman friend of his. That was amazing to me, because one of my closest friends growing up was an Armenian girl, who became an Armenian woman, Monica Fanning (her mother Clara was a Takmajian). Monica had an enormous influence on me growing up -- it's no exaggeration to say I would not be the same person today were it not for her.

I liked the idea of approaching a subject as supremely depressing as genocide from the angle of loving someone who is very much alive. Monica and I were in a best-friendship circle at the time we all began to discover ourselves as women and men, rather than girls and boys, and she and I made some of those precious early discoveries together. Monica was a blunt truth-teller, none more blunt nor truthful. She was also a gifted athlete who could compete with the guys in pretty much any sport, and we played them all together. Really, the unique kind of person Monica is and her quirky beauty -- a very Armenian beauty, as we knew even in middle school -- will always partly define for me what it means to be interesting and attractive.

So this project is not, for me, about genocide. It's about surviving and making love and having children who grow up to make love and have children. That's the beauty, anyway, of the Alan Semerdjian poem title that Robert and I adopted as the name for our project. We are talking about the "Grandchildren of Genocide," which implies that the people survived the genocide, and their children survived to have children. If for no other reason than Monica Fanning, her little sister Leigh Ann Fanning, and their mother Clara Takmajian Waterson, I thank God that the Armenian people survived.

PREVIOUS POSTS

Poetry Scores to premiere "Grandchilden of Genocide" Nov. 21 at Tap Room

"Dark Wings," a poetry score by Gregory Djanikian and Robert Goetz

Leigh Ann and Monica Fanning, daughters of Clara Takmajian Waterson

"Dark Wings," a poetry score by Gregory Djanikian and Robert Goetz

Poetry Scores will premiere a new work "Grandchildren of Genocide" at The Schlafly Tap Room at 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 21. Old Time favorites Dugout Canoe will open at 9 p.m., and indie rockers Accelerando will close at 11 p.m. It is a free show.

"Grandchildren of Genocide" is a new score of modern poetry from Armenia co-produced by Robert Goetz and Chris King to coincide with the centennial of the 1915 onset of the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Here is one demo from the project: Robert Goetz's score of Gregory Djanikian's poem "Dark Wings" from Gregory's poetic sequence about the Armenian genocide, "So I Will Till the Ground" (20007). It is a home demo, with Robert on acoustic guitar and vocal.






Other composers of the scores for "Grandchildren of Genocide" include Nick Barbieri, Steve Carosello, Marc Chechik, Chris King, David Melson, Ann Hirschfeld, Tony Pupillo, Sherman S Sherman and Mark Stephens. The composers will perform the scores live at the Tap Room with a little help from their friends.

Other poets scored include Christopher Atamian, Peter Balakian, Adrian Oproiu, Marine Petrossian (self-translated from the Armenian) and Alan Semerdjian. The poets have all endorsed the project, including co-publication of the resulting songs through Hollywood Recording Studio.

Previously posted: a more complete event announcement.

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Gregory Djanikian

"Dark Wings"
(Gregory Djanikian)


Now is the time to say
something for the animals

felled by gunshot and broadax
cluster bomb and bayonet

who have lain curled in their own blood
without succor or consolation

their flanks torn apart,
their fibulas shattered,

the muscles of their rippled
animal strengths untendoned,

horses in their heavy tranquility,
dogs snuffling the marshy grass

by river bank, by well-spring,
the sleek, undaunted cats, the goats

meandering by olive groves
without notion of bullet or

impending boom of artillery,
a hot sharp sting of pain

felt in the deepest folds
where nothing, neither claw, nor tooth,

nor talon, nor the brightest shoots
of light has ever reached


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"Dark Wings" is (c) 2007 by Gregory Djanikian "So I Will Till the Ground" (Carnegie-Mellon University Press)

Robert Goetz

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Image "Black Wing" be Sergey Nivens borrowed from All Posters.