I plan on creating a video to examine the effect of breath on vibration and resonant studies. I will attempt to portray the "physical" nature of breath; by this I mean I am going to capture breath in its different forms. I will recite the poem (which I have not yet chosen) in different environments and see how the breath changes in response, and how this change in breath alters how the poem is heard by the audience. Different environments in this study will include hot and cold, amount of breath used to read a stanza, and rate of reading. Check in soon to see the video.

A Piece of Coffee: Audio-Vis Response

A Google Notebook where I have started collecting ideas about the relationship between language and the body for the Arts & Bodies project. Email me if you have a Google account and would like to be added.

Bear with me...

The movement created in Howard Nemerov's "Style" is very similar to the movement created when traveling up and down a musical scale (I end where I started, and begin where I will end). Here I will refer to the pentatonic scale, as it is the one with which I am most familiar; though this movement could be represented using many different musical scales.

For me Howard Nemerov creates an aesthetic experience for his reader. We can argue here whether poetry itself is aesthetic, but for me, I consider this medium one with aesthetic capabilities. I make this claim based in the fact that while reading/hearing "Style" one experiences a transformation (a movement) of sorts leading to the rise of the aesthetic emotion. This aesthetic emotion being one, specific, unique inner movement capable of being experienced during a myriad of aesthetic exposures. That is, I can experience the same aesthetic emotion from looking at a two-dimensional piece of artwork as I can from listening to a four-movement symphony. Essentially, what I am pointing to is one feeling/movement -- one aesthetic emotion.

In a painting, image, line, and color are used, but the experience or emotion comes from the compilation of these parts, not from their formation or representation alone. With this, it is not the images, words, or metaphors Nemerov presents, it is the place I am taken, the movement that is caused. I could even argue that this poem compels one to movement, a movement created in non-action; this is what he represents in Style, non-action as power.

Flaubert’s novel was never written and it will never be taught in universities. We are better off for this. Who takes the time to read one’s spirit as the poem suggests? It is with this non-action (not writing the novel) that this alternate story (the story of one’s spirit) can be explored. Without these two novels, room is left for exploration, room is left on our bookshelves, in our classrooms, room is made from this lacking.

The confines of the poem (words, line, metaphor, image) allow us to reach for something truly unique: the story of our spirit, the unwritten, innate, the so often forgotten part of our whole that creates the existence wherein we read and experience these novels (is not this existence more important?). With this, I am reminded of my initial proposal. Though the mediums are different, the pentatonic scale offers the same confines, wherein a musical exploration is made, and an expression developed from basic theory. In this scale numerous possibilities exist, but there is a choice, much similar to the choice we make daily to live and work within the confines of society/university/humanity while still maintaining personal freedom. I do not doubt there is freedom in form.

that fire that eats what it illuminates - Mary Paul

All fire eats what it illuminates, but the illumination a single minute under 

water a headache and the holy ghost. A slight dip of your hand not 

a slight of hand simple past and past participle slighted. On the porch 

and slighted and squinting and squirrel shit without the plastic owl.

Forgetting in the morning and remembering at night and remembering

in the morning what was forgotten on the porch at night. The german book 

the lighter the basil plant is dry and drying outside. Sideways it sounds like

the radio is next door the radio is in the living room but the noise is

next door if I turn sideways so I don’t. 

The father and son and cat stevens are back in the living room 

but someone’s foot is in front of the television it can’t be the holy ghost

because he’s see thru. If I can turn sideways and look at the television

while the radio is next door and cat stevens is on the porch then maybe 

the squirrels will shit in the driveway without the basil plant drying 

I’ll forget to remember everything before falling asleep my headache 

will be gone a single minute under water.

A poem about nothing?

A poem about
Nothing.
Nothing, the absence of concrete meaning-
Nothing, the lack of a formal structure-
Nothing, the deprivation of matter that would seek to render the two preceding definitions—as well as this definition—obsolete.

Yet, isn’t a firm declaration in favor of nothing a suggestion of something, in and of itself? And isn’t a disavowal of all absolutes also an absolute?

For every action, an equal and opposite reaction. For every nothing, a something.

Consider the Prayer Before Birth:

I am not yet born; O hear me.
I am not yet born; console me.
I am not yet born; provide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me.
I am not yet born; O fill me.

--Louis Macniece

“I am not yet born” is a statement implying nothingness, yet it is followed by a powerful and definitive exhortation that directly conflicts with nothingness. Macniece is transporting nonexistence to the realm of existence, giving voice to that which has none. So, as you can see, “nothing” denies itself the right of the very nonexistence to which it alludes.

Style by Howard Nemerov

by Laine Stranahan

Nemerov wanted to write a poem about
Flaubert wanting to write a novel about
Nothing. It was to have the subject
Of having no subject, and be sustained
Upon the sustenance of style alone,
Like an aerial photographer cruising above
The Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like animators sketching
The little animals in Disney cartoons
Who stand upon a branch that breaks
But do not fall till they look down,
But do not erase. He never wrote
That poem, and neither did he write
Another one that would have been called Gloria,
Or Horses, in which Patti Smith was,
Or was not.

Even so, for these two poems,
We thank the master, who thanks himself,
Who thanks us and thanks us again,
For they will be read,
Despite his attempts to write them;
Are not so wholly lost as those works
Which are thrown into words
Like shoes at the king. Moreover,
They are not formed by style,
That fire that eats that fire
That eats what it illuminates.

Sailing- Ian Makowske

This summer we

went sailing in Long

Island Sound and we jibbed

and tacked and came about, but

mostly we sat and listened. And we

watched. And the wind caught and the

sail didn’t luff and we headed out to the

Open. Beam reach and we sliced through

waves like a Lazer, the port side waves cutting

to shore, the starboard breaking west on her side.

She dragged fingers in the water, leaving her mark on

the sea, just as she has left her Mark on me. Four years since

she cut across my path, forever changing my course, her every

word her every wind echoing in my mind and running through my

hair so that she has been a thought in my every turn of the tiller. Those

waves the hull cuts through could have broken in one line across the beach, the

wind now caught in my sail could have blown unimpeded past Montauk out to the

Atlantic. And I could be sailing alone. But I sliced the waves like a Lazer with the turn

of my tiller and I stepped the mast that held the sail that changed the wind’s direction.

And I sang come sail with me. And as the waves that the hull slices and alters begin (as

little ripples on a glassy calm far out and build and compound) we have grown and

diverged as if cut by the hulls of many sail boats and been pushed together by winds,

collided and colliding and converged once more. And as sunburned and salty we return,

having nearly capsized, and the sand scrapes and the daggerboard rises I see our port side

waves breaking around us and look at her and wonder where we shall break. And times I

know I know; I know the exact jetty in Southport where it will happen. And times I will

be sliced, or will slice with my own turn of the tiller and be turned and turn West, West

once more. I can no more read that than the amateur can read the wind or the waves

and so We and I sail on

And roll on