the Baroque voice
Francis Barraud: "here's one I created earlier"
Well. This is just to alert any of you who may have been yearning to hear the Baroque voice, or a slightly stylised version of it, that your chance has arrived! I can barely listen to it, to be honest, my lame transatlantic accent;* but it might please you. These things can happen.
You can hear me reading four poems, on a website called Poetcasting - a fantastic resource which was set up last year by a very enterprising student and poet called Alex Pryce.
All the featured poems will appear in Me and the Dead (Salt, July 2008), although "The Source" will have a new and much better title.
* Being recorded has pretty much the same effect on me as having my picture taken. There's also a picture on it.
6 comments:
So cool, Ms. B! Am presently at work and so can't hear your Heinz 57 accent quite yet, BUT am sure it's terrific. Cute pic, too.
At last Bush, you talented crafty git, such a revelation, katy evans, current in a long line of historical personages, ministers of the cloth, connected at source to:
"On Coimgne. A spiritual term, whose etymology is unknowable, but which stretches back and connects to flitting shadows in the cave Plato talks of as being the poetic omphalos of all verse."...and i like it B, the readings did not fail, they are a success, and your new found confidence with the cat-voice, testament to the fact you are pleased with this reading, and it has been very instructive to me personally as a bore, to listen to the closed, you alone with a microphone reading, work so well. Often, emerging verse people release rubbish in the rush to be heard, but you didn't and i am certainly green with love and insincerity..ha ha..only jokin B yer've gorrit, findin' self'ish fings int rocket science, but printed expoloration of the inner realm, and now we are nearly rocketing to jupiter for weekend breaks, the reversed fertilisation of a speck breaking the film of gravity, chain of time severed and so much out there, maybe we are searching for clues to who we are, within and without you, Imagine there's a placeless heaven, where only good things occur, a fictional world within each of us, a territory to be inhabited, populated with the impossible and the only rule is, the iomagination has no lore but that we as god move to be, probability of goodness here is 100%, and bitter fictions if we want, listening for clues to summat feline, natural trace, poetic attainment, being genuinely human, wanting to share, be happy in a kip in 'ackney, oonlies living B, street life on the circuit of buses and trams this end, a moasiac-life of cheek by jowel hate and happiness, love and misery, practicing to do what we are moved to by the heavens, fan, fate, poetry is written, reflecting what;s in, and what goes in our eyes, returns on the page, sound sought for no good reason other than talking as a cat, being a shape-shifter, forgetting our place, ascending in the abundance of goading, paranoia of seeming stupid, wrong, our dream contingent on what others think, until self anointing, just like the welsh priest, if irish might say:
Knowledge held in trust for the common mob, by the druids of Nemed (aristoi) status; the intellectual mandarins in an ancient culture, probably beyond the comprehension of modern wo/manity to grasp.
~
Part of my review already for your first collection, i will be publishing with the rest of the usual poetry critics and winning bitchers, gals in breathless charge of poetic decency, sean nos thought police, people like uz the literati of Now 4Kin Well B...
I must admit there were several individual words i instinctively cut, a simple one word fix, but this is high grade changes the casual reader would not halt upon, as the words on the page, which i imagine as i hear people read (if i put my mind to it) as i find i dream in langugae as it is, in the sense of a stream of printed words running across my unconscious eye, very vivid, and i have the opdd snatch, but am yet to catch one whole, and the strange thing is, they get more intense, the langugae and thought, words, in my dreams, are perfectly wrought and i usually wake with it fresh but i have stopped keeping the book by the bed and it is gone within 20 secnds. Last night's was quite a long piece which dealt with summat, expressed it beautifully in print and purring the immages of this print were, but like footprints on a tide washed beach, vanish twice, 24 pillars of time stood there, a sphinx of minutes, making it up'ness, a fulll time condition, a joker, i wanna tell the world how good you are B, and will be saying very good things about you, to myself at least..
Strange and now the change hamilton emery kept faith would come, the first swell, poets heard, the live voice taking a huge leap forward in the way poetry happens here in the initial stage of mass individual expression via the internet, images, voice, print, it all whirrs and when listening to the argument of others (in my mind) it often strikes how unimportant we all are really, our dream of poetry is a modest thing and we should begin by allowing all to have a dream and treat it as valid, rather than start a church beginning with a huge list of pre-requsite qualities, like an arts councill inclusional state of ticked boxes, everything measured, poetry being co-erced as an arm of the right wing PC fatchinistazi imposing from the high alter of standards and conducting with hunts on behalf of uz winners spreading
Love and peace,
Clay, thanks for that - of course "cute pic" is always a winning comment! And having read your email now I will say thanks again and I'm glad you like the poems. "Gave a mighty POP!" is one of my favourite lines I've ever written. As I say, it draws heavily on my childhood reading of Seuss and Sendak.
Des, you're a star - thanks for that too! You've said a lot of good things in that comment, not least about poetry being a modest dream really. And about Hemilton-Emery keeping faith. I think his faith, and imagination and hard work, are going to change British poetry.
Hope you're well and it;s not all buses & trams...
xx
Had already discovered it, Ms B, being signed up to the Poetcasting RSS feed. Haven't managed to listen properly yet, but am looking forward to it and will post something on Tonguefire. Alex is great and I love her site.
I know, isn't she? I was so impressed when I first saw the site - I was the one who contacted her, in fact. I think it's fantastic to put all that together when you're still a student. I'd never have had the initiaitve or even known HOW.
Transatlantic accent? I may have remarked on this before. After 20-odd years of living in London, the only concession your accent appears to have made to the local lingo is what I take to be a slight contraction in vowel sounds over what is typical of north eastern US speech.
Nice voice. Not lame at all.
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