Richard Harrison had some interesting takes on technology last night at the opening event of the Calgary festival. In a poem about skype, he observed the window through distance that technology creates.
The idea of technology abstracting communications while we are still emotionally engaged has been something that continues to blow my mind. I thought I’d share with you some words on that.
Going through Quincy Troupe’s section in the work book I bumped into his “Seven/Elevens” form. Seven lines, alternating seven and eleven syllables. He was influenced by the game of dice that was part of the backdrop of his youth, and fascinated by the randomness and risk.
He also found it fascinating to see what an artist would come up with on the fly using these rules, as if they were musicians jamming together.
It’s been a year since I was first invited to come and sit down with this community and discover spoken word. To be honest, I was a completely blank slate walking in. I knew of the event, I knew of spoken word, but I was simply unintroduced.
Last year ended with glorious late night snowflakes. I was fixated on a girls boots and the girl wearing them. I was riding a joy wave of late night partying and a week of words at the Auburn. The snow at three am was falling so heavily you hear it. And I walked away the next morning still digesting a community of passion.
And I can’t wait to get back at it.
I’ve been thumbing through the workbook. As as artist who works with creative ensembles and words for performance there is bleed and play between the paper work here.
I’ll be posting some exercises and experiments here as last year, and we’ll be doing some community contests in this space as well. And in about a week we’ll all be live back at The Auburn.
Donald W. C. Harris, who frequents the slams, has passed along his love letter to a stranger for us all to enjoy. So, enjoy.
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LETTER OF LOVE
Dear sweet Kendra, your dimpled smiling face uplifts me;
I look into your sparkling eyes and I see
A beautiful mind that’s meant to write poetry;
True feelings from your heart will surely be!
Expressions of integrity, with purpose and good intent,
By all of your words will be kindly meant
Messages for all persons, whether child, lady or gent;
All will need your words just and straight, not bent!
You are where you need to be! March thirty-one
You stepped out on your own to hear spoken words for fun!
You sat with me and my wife and brought us sun-
Shine until the night of readings and recitations was done!
Kendra, you are pretty, young, and you exude inner beauty;
You say you’re learning business to prepare you for later duty
And success in any field you undertake for booty!
While studying, you earn your way as waitress and a cutie!
No matter what life brings your way through time,
You’ll find right words to give you calm sublime.
Loving thoughts will power you to keep you in your prime;
Helping out humanity will help get rid of crime!
By doing just, right things for all persons (All are part of you!),
No matter their backgrounds and no matter their hue,
And excluding not one from your overall view,
You will have peace of ONENESS’ soul true!
LET LOVE
BE YOUR PEACE DOVE!
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The above poem was written by Donald W. C. Harris 2011-04-01.
It was written for a new friend while at Calgary Spoken Word Festival.
So, inspired by the winter air that swept through and blanked my car with a huge shell of hardened sticky wet frozen ice, I posed up the exercise today as “Haiku. Snow. Go.”
Twitter seems perfectly formed for a haiku, and three came in right away.
In the order of appearance
@marbellaanne: This experiment was made for me @CiSWF
drinking hot cider
i know afternoons alone.
my heart is too young.
@dangercat60: a haiku attempt.
Snow. Let us mingle. Wrap your wet velvet arms round make warm skin tingle
@kateamarlow: Snow haiku for @CiSWF:
You hug the trees and
fall so gently. Sighs of love
and kept promises.
And probably my favourite, because of the progression of facial characteristics drawing me into thoughts of inner warmth.
snow collects in your eyelashes
lips raw with winter
slip your tongue around my marrow
A very special thank you to the loving individual who slipped this into my pocket last night. I didn’t discover it until this morning, as I was rushing for the door. My first thought was “That’s a huge schaff of receipts… I need to cut back. Wait, that’s like, thick cardboard. What the heck is what?”
And then I opened it up, and read it. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I got shivers. I felt a bit light headed. As I headed off into the rush hour I had to keep the radio off in the car as my mind ran over the words…
So today’s experiment was a challenge for you to go out and write your own love letter to a stranger, and slip it into their pocket without their knowing. I’m still going to write something up for that… but this really trumped the scene report from last night.
So here is the text of that gorgeous letter.
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I promise to love you until I don’t.
Until then, I want to take your hand and run as fast as we can, sleep for as long as we like, laugh until we cry and search until we find each other, search until we find something or search for the saske of searching.
I want to sit across from you and ask you silly questions like, “Where are you from?” or, “Do you have any siblings?” Not because the answers have any weight or relevance but because I’d like to watch your mouth open and close and imagine that I am made up of the consonts and vowels that know your lips so intimately.
If there were such a thing that is more than love, I would fold it in with this letter. Don’t ask me why. I have no answers. Just these words put in this order. Take them?
I get cold at movies, more from being surrounded by strangers then the temperature of the theatre.
I get cold at home, more from being alone then from the temperature of the room.
I get cold in the office, more from the worry of someone I don’t want to talk to talking to me, then the way the thermostat is set.
I rarely feel too warm.
I bite my nails incessantly, but it drives me crazy to hear someone trim their nails with a clipper.
I bite my tongue needlessly.
I chew with my lips closed because Mamma said that’s what polite girls do.
I sometimes wish “being a polite girl” would fuck off and die.
I sometimes wish “being a polite girl” was the simple way to my happiness.
I wish I could make a decision, left or right.
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I leaned towards this one because I had done similar exercise last year at One Yellow Rabbit’s Summer Lab Intensive. Today’s experement was “Make a list of 10 “I” statements. But write them for the next stranger you see wearing green. Create them as a character, then be specific.” You can follow the @CiSWF twitter feed to play along.
At the Summer Lab the experiment was different, but that’s for their blog, not ours, to explain. In both case’s I was forced to write as a female, but the women came out as completely different personalities. Both lonely, but for different reasons. Here is a portion of the character “Linda Grayson” that was created at the Summer Lab.
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I browse in toy stores in every city I visit, but I don’t get toys or even know if the girls play with them anymore.
I light candles when I eat dinner at home alone.
I bake grocery store frozen pizzas, I burn the roof of my mouth every time.
I dress straight off of the dryer rack and drying machine
I stare at couples and families in airports.
I phone the girls from every city I visit.
I sometimes think that I’ve made the right choices.
Doubt is an aisle seat.
Ok, if my experience is any indication, show up early. That’s it.
My parking spot, the loading area in front of the Aubrun Saloon, was completely filled up. @marabella, one of my favourite text experimentalists (who passes secret love notes to people), was unable to locate The Auburn completely, and ended up missing the night.
For the record, The Auburn is HERE.
After driving like a maniac listening to a news piece on Talk radio (I promised my soul I would listen to less 660 news and more to Phantograms this week) about the volume of speeding tickets jumping in the spring, I showed up to the front door of The Auburn slightly late. Ok, like a half hour late. I made it as far as the inside of the door frame and the place was packed. I couldn’t move. People were lined up into the foyer listening.
Well done Frontenac House.
It’s a beautiful thing watching a poetry reading. When I say watching a poetry reading you don’t really watch the poet, you watch the people. Serene faces everywhere. There’s a subset of people who let their eyes shine as they stare at the poet. Then there’s a subset of people who close their eyes, fold their hands, and drop their chins.
Heads nod on certain beats. Smiles form on certain words. When Rosemary Griebel says “the intimate smell of urine and lilac” talking about a life in hotel she was drawn to, it’s a combination. A woman in a sedate floral pattern with eyes closed raises her head to the left and tightens her closed eyes as a smile cracks her lips, teeth gleaming.
The Frontenac House Cabaret of the night were a well met group of artists, with a similar rhythm permeating them (actual poetry-heads will probably disagree with me, as they understand this landscape better than I do). Longer thoughts would set the scene, followed by sharp staccato realizations through details of environment. The way sunlight catches a feature of skin, or the way a smell permeates an environment.
If tonight was any indication of how the rest of the CiSWF is going to go down, then you need to buy your tickets now, and you need to show up on time. The Auburn was packed tonight for a free event, but the buzz from most people surrounding the event is that it’s only up from here.
Shantih.
when you took my hand I
wanted to weave my
fingers with yours
and stop and stand and
kiss and breathe you for
hours
your eyes catch light and
beam clear cool color
shining so bright when
you look
at me
we go silent now but I
think I might feel what you think you might feel
but never know unless
we find out. together.
until and if we ever do,
know that the sun on my skin
feels like you
As an introduction, Wil would like to offer you some of his own written words, some of which he has performed as part of the Summer Lab Intensive at One Yellow Rabbit in 2010. He’s a fan of e.e. cummings, but his sentence structure was lifted more heavily from William Gibson. So readers, Wil. Wil, readers.
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Spoken words. I thought I’d make it my life. I thought I would make myself a vessel for other’s words to live. I thought I would be good at it.
I thought a lot of things. Not all of them were good save the fact that they were thoughts and that alone is beautiful.
I thought a lot about how words moved, and were changed, and were asked to become many different things to become words again. That thought stuck in my mind.
And it caught me one night. And I wrote it. It was, and is, this:
After four years, we broke up standing in the middle of the street in front of my place. When she drove away, I couldn’t even make it back into my unit. I stat with my back against the wall in my hallway, staring at my door.
She called.
“ I’m home. I thought you should know that.”
I said “Thanks bab-.”. I had always called her babe. And then she wasn’t my babe anymore.
“There was an accident in-front of my house. I haven’t gone in yet. I’m still in my car.”
I said “ Is everyone alright?”.
But I was asking about her.
“I don’t know.”
There was a pause. We didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Do you want me to call you tomorrow?”
I asked “Do you want to call?”
Smarter men than I have asked if technology making us stupid? We have all this instant information, but do we have any applied knowledge? Are we forgetting how to speak? When did we stop looking each other in the eyes? How much of a relationship can you live through texts and phone calls.
“We never did do that go-karting date.”
Her heart breathed out her lungs, vocal chords vibrating, her soul moving air. Those waves of sound were collected by the mic in her cell phone, converted to levels of voltage, measured by a Digital Signal Processor, and encoded into a bitstream. Transmitted out the cellular radio of her phone as radiant energy, the electromagnetic waves propagate out until they intersect the antenna of a cell tower. Digital signals are converted from electrical to optical, photons screaming down fibre optics. Then converted back to electrical, beamed out from a cell site as radio waves, which are converted by my cellphone into voltages vibrating a speaker, which pushes the air, which pushes my tympanic membrane, which sends a signal to my brain, which sends a signal to my heart.
“I’ll miss you.”
Although her breath never touched me, something that was transmitted did. Some part of the message still gets through. Something in the sound of her voice. It’s real. It made my heart swell.
I said “I’ll miss you too.”
And I do.