It’s Poetry Day , at least here in the UK and thought I’d post a couple of older playlists based on the connections between sound and poetry –
Category Archives: Poetry
Reblog – We Need No Swords podcast 27: Elizabeth Veldon
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With a new work released on her Bandcamp almost every day, the Scottish sound artist and poet Elizabeth Veldon has amassed a vast and almost overwhelming discography. But those releases, ranging from immersive drones, free improvised piano jags and tough scrubs of noise, are rarely less than compelling. In this episode, Elizabeth and I discuss creativity, political music and a whole lot of other stuff. We also premier two new works – a series of piano improvisations and a long-form slice of ominous drone.
Tracklist
Elizabeth Veldon interview runs throughout
Three drum machine improvisations, 1 (self-released, 2015)
At low tide the witches grave pool is flooded with the song of herons (self-released, 2017)
A reflection on the history of radio astronomy (self-released, 2015)
For those characters treated less sentimentally, the disease is viewed as the occasion finally to behave well (unreleased, 2017)
In the plague-ridden England of the late 16th…
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SUNDAY MIX – ..it’s cold outside
Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.
Over the Wintry – Natsume Soseki (1867 – 1916)
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2015
Listen to the sounds…
SUNDAY MIXES – BIRDS
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,–
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings–
I know why the caged bird sings!
Sympathy – Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872 – 1906)
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
Hope is the Thing with Feathers – Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
When April bends above me
And finds me fast asleep,
Dust need not keep the secret
A live heart died to keep.
When April tells the thrushes,
The meadow-larks will know,
And pipe the three words lightly
To all the winds that blow.
Above his roof the swallows,
In notes like far-blown rain,
Will tell the little sparrow
Beside his window-pane.
O sparrow, little sparrow,
When I am fast asleep,
Then tell my love the secret
That I have died to keep
I Love You – Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933)
Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”
Answer to a Child’s Question – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1884)
SUNDAY MIX – SOMETHING DIFFERENT
So, I had a think about the Sunday Mixes…and I think to allow them to breathe and get some space, I am going to post one a month, starting with this month and this is a little different as I am highlighting a Poetry website and SoundCloud page from a Modern Pianist –
I have reblogged Lindy Karpestras’ poetry below but via her SoundCloud page I have discovered the ambient artist Madeleine Cocolas
THE SUNDAY MIX – THE SUN
Here is this weeks mix of music and poetry and the subject this week is the Sun –
Great is the sun, and wide he goes
Through empty heaven with repose;
And in the blue and glowing days
More thick than rain he showers his rays.
Though closer still the blinds we pull
To keep the shady parlour cool,
Yet he will find a chink or two
To slip his golden fingers through.
The dusty attic spider-clad
He, through the keyhole, maketh glad;
And through the broken edge of tiles
Into the laddered hay-loft smiles.
Meantime his golden face around
He bares to all the garden ground,
And sheds a warm and glittering look
Among the ivy’s inmost nook.
Above the hills, along the blue,
Round the bright air with footing true,
To please the child, to paint the rose,
The gardener of the World, he goes.
Summer Sun – Robert Louis Stephenson
The Sun—just touched the Morning—
The Morning—Happy thing—
Supposed that He had come to dwell—
And Life would all be Spring!
She felt herself supremer—
A Raised—Ethereal Thing!
Henceforth—for Her—What Holiday!
Meanwhile—Her wheeling King—
Trailed—slow—along the Orchards—
His haughty—spangled Hems—
Leaving a new necessity!
The want of Diadems!
The Morning—fluttered—staggered—
Felt feebly—for Her Crown—
Her unanointed forehead—
Henceforth—Her only One!
The Sun – Just touched the morning – Emily Dickinson
How valuable it is in these short days,
threading through empty maple branches,
the lacy-needled sugar pines.
Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story
of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold.
We can make do with so little, just the hint
of warmth, the slanted light.
The way we stand there, soaking in it,
mittened fingers reaching.
And how carefully we gather what we can
to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.
Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!
SUNDAY MIX – WALKING
Every Sunday I put together a mix loosely based around a theme, as I think that music and poetry go so well together and since today I went for a stroll along the seafront to blow the cobwebs away, todays theme is Walking
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)
Rain so dark I
can’t get through—
train going by
in a hurry. The voice
said walk or die, I
walked,—the train
and the voice all
blurry. I walked with
my bones and my heart
of chalk, not even
a splintered notion:
days of thought, nights
of worry,—lonesome
train in a hurry.
I will have been walking away:
no matter what direction I intended,
at that moment, I will have been walking
Away into the direction that you now say
I have always intended, no matter what my
intention was then, I will have been
Walking away, though it will not be clear
what it was that I was leaving or
even why, it seems that you will say
That always, I was walking away,
intending a direction that was not towards
you, but moving away with every step,
Or, even when I pretended to be walking
towards you, only making the place
for my feet to go backwards,
Away, where I will have been walking,
always away: intention and direction
unknown, but knowing you will always
say I will have been walking away.
A Kind of Villanelle
Poems courtesy of Poetry Foundation
Feminatronic 
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