Robert King Interviews M. D. Friedman About His Digital Poetry
Interview about Digital Poetry with M. D. Friedman
by Robert King
1) You’re a photographer, musician, and digital artist as well as a poet. You do these things separately, of course, but you also blend them. For example, your digital poem, “Forever Trespass,” is constructed from reading a two-directional poem (one voice reading down the columns, another across the rows) and blending those sounds with animated photographs and digital art.
You’ve written about Dadaism and have said that “Dada poets opted for effect over articulation, for creating an experience over making sense.” Is this what you’re after, an “experience” that’s substantially different than a poem with, let’s say, added effects?
The ability of a digital poem to create a transformational experience, to take the viewer to that place where poetry comes from, a place of intense internal understanding, is greatly enhanced by appealing to the mind in multiple ways rather than with just text. The sound art behind the audio spoken word helps to disengage the logical side of the brain and allow the viewer’s emotive mind to respond to the poetic experience in a different way. The first time I heard a recording of Gertrude Stein reading her own work, I found that her barrage of vocal repetition confounded my efforts to understand what she was saying in any sort of literal context. Although this frustrated me at first, I soon surrendered to the rainfall of her words and found their tickling pin prick exhilarating. That is what I am after with much of what I create. I often want to create sensations that the logical use of words are inadequate to describe. I have recently discovered that there is a very significant synergistic effect when I can blend all of my creative pursuits into a single work toward the purpose of drawing the reader/viewer/listener into feeling the feelings I am trying to express. I want to recreate certain feelings I am feeling inside in someone else, to awaken their subconscious to the images we all dream together. I am trying to communicate as directly as I would be if I were there physically touching them.
2) Side-not maybe: Regarding Dada—I got the impression in my youth that the Dadaists wanted to ‘end’ art by taking things to extremes. Is this the wrong impression?
Dada was anti art establishment and anti art hierarchy. They were against the forces they saw destroying the world. I believe they saw themselves as true artists, free to express themselves without the societal constraints of commercially produced art.
3) Regarding your piece The Word,” you’ve described its origin this way: “The images along with artwork and photos flooded my mind while I was in the shower. I went downstairs and started free-styling the audio. The sounds then shaped the animation. Suddenly I arrived somewhere I had never been—somewhere in the middle of groans, flashing color & splintered text.” Most of us writers have experienced the flash of an idea in words, and I can imagine a visual artist getting such a sudden inspiration, but it sounds like you got it almost all at once. Is this unusual for you or do you often start with one specific thing (a word or image or photography or sound) and then layer other media with it?
This was indeed an unusual experience for me. It happened to me previously with my text based poetry only a couple of times, only after a long dry spell, like a thunder shower after a drought. In the case I was referring to, it was with the first digital poem I had ever tried to create, although the idea of doing something in an electronic medium combining my poetry, art, photography, animation and sound art had been nagging at me for several years.
4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the digital genre? What can you do in a visual mode than you can’t do with print? Could such combinations be distracting to the ‘reader’ or does it enhance the poem?
I think I have already spoken about many of the artistic advantages of this new genre. Another advantage is that it appeals strongly to many people who might not be interested in printed poetry. It seems to engaging especially to the highly stimulated younger generation. Also it is positioned to make excellent use of the rapidly growing market of digitally distributed media for hand held video devices like I-Phones. It’s most important weakness for me is that I have yet to figure out how to perform the work live. Another problem is the amount of time it takes to produce a 2 minute piece.
5) To take just one example from your work, and that of several others, a word or phrase is often repeated in a piece. This could be bothersome (or some other negative adjective) in print but it doesn’t seem to be in an aural mode. Can one work with language in a recognizable way (i. e. syntactically) and still develop an enhanced effect?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes Yes. Yes Yes. Yes Yes. Yes Yes Yes Yes. Yes Yes. Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes. Yes. I have seen poetry videos (that look like old MTV style music videos) do that well. I also find that song writers often get away with poetry that would not stand well alone on the printed page because they over rely on the power of the music to enhance their words. Personally, I find if what I want to communicate I am able to describe or argue well with syntactic language, then the simple written word is a most effective means.
6) How can/do you “publish” or perform visual poetry? Again, how is this different from traditional ‘written-only’ poetry?
Since my digital poetry is delivered in a video format, I can publish it on DVD or as a downloadable video file. I am actually using the same “print on demand” service to do this that I have already used to published a couple of my print manuscripts (www.lulu.com). Although my digital poetry could be projected on a big screen with surround sound at your local movie theatre, I have no idea how to perform it live. Wouldn’t it be cool if digital poetry took over the role cartoons used to play at movie theatres!
7) What’s next? What are the trends in the new genre? Is there any direction in the experimentation?
When I find the time to make another digital poem, I want to play some more with the “voicing” of the lines. By this, I mean I want experiment to with ways that create the effect of the reader/viewer/listener hearing some of the words in their head as if they were spoken in their own voice.
Know Where to Go Crazy – A Digital Poem by M. D. Friedman
Creation Stories Review
Amy Wray Irish, Creation Stories
Green Fuse Community Press, 2008
Review by M.D. Friedman
In Creation Stories, a collection of original art and poetry, Amy Wray Irish creates a song of magic for the modern world. Her work acts as a womb of skin, for the recurring themes of creation and birth, which transports us as readers to a place of primal connection where we see nothing but beauty. In this volume, Amy becomes a priestess of word and image whose incantations launch us toward the journey into ourselves that we each must take.
Creation Stories opens with ”Shed”, a piece in which the inner poet and artist, is itching to get out,/Ripping and twitching/to get out .” In Lady of Moths”, this inner poet reveals that she is ready to leave behind anyone or anything that would blacken her window or prevent her from creating the new world of light she needs. Like many creation stories, she starts in darkness:
Mother, tell me this is not my voice,
This air raid siren
Bringing him to his knees;
Not my anger
As she examines the corporal for answers, she simply finds more questions:
So determined are our empty
Shells. So how do we know when we
Are simply hunger in the belly how do we know
When we are something more?
Then, in the “Birth of Venus,” she answers her own question and finds the goddess within herself:
In the ebb of your own blood-red sea
You become more; you are truly
Born. Venus, taste of yourself,
Of your briny ocean
Mother. Aphrodite, become goddess
Of your own love.
In the second section of the collection, the speaker is consumed as she assumes her role as creator/mother/priestess/goddess/poet/artist. I swallowed this seed, and what I consumed/Consumes me whole, belly and all. It is a feeling with which poets and artists are all too familiar. It is in this role that she finds her magical powers:
When you feel heat sear from your fingertips,
The power to take hold, to explode
When you are reborn, purified,
An archangel rising on wings of light
Only then call me. Call me your mother,
Your lover, your twin. Matching flare
To fire, to flame. We will write
And set the world to blaze.
This call to set the world to blaze with poetry is at the heart of all the efforts of our Green Fuse Community. We must thank Amy Irish for this wonderful romp through “visionary states that flower /Beyond imagination”.
A Letter to the Delegates
Letter to the Delegates
by M. D. Friedman
We want America back!
We want America to follow the American Dream.
No more poor fighting rich men’s wars.
If someone really must go, send the big CEO’s.
Then leave them there. They’ll find someone to bring them coffee.
We don’t care about the Iranian bomb.
Too many have died in the crusade
against weapons of mass destruction.
We are not worried about a terrorist
following us home like a rabid dog.
We are not afraid of your boogie man bombers.
We only fear our mistakes,
we’re afraid the bombs we have dropped on babies
will hail back down on us like smoking guns.
We want to fight the good war,
the war against stupidity and cruelty.
There is never a justification for torture.
We want America back!
We want to see Obama face off McCain
in a nationally televised slam.
We want gays to run the military
and a lesbian marriage on the White House lawn.
We want to build homes for the homeless
that have not been marinated in formaldehyde,
to help disaster victims even if they are not rich and white.
We don’t want to hear people saying someone half black is racist,
when it’s the one that’s all white we should worry about.
What does George’s “W.” really stand for anyway?
We want America back! (We want it all back.)
We want our jobs to realize
we work to live not live to work.
We need time to play, and our kids
need time to just be kids.
We want it make it hard to get married and easy to get divorced.
We want to make blind patriotism illegal
and to legalize marijuana.
We want good music in the groceries stores
and art on the walls of Walmart.
We want a national holiday for Allen Ginsberg’s birthday.
We want schools that are not
brain numbing factories
where our kids can learn what they care about.
We want to pay our teachers like baseball players.
We want to give awards to parents
who both speak and listen to their teenagers.
We want free college and healthcare.
We want hospitals
that treat humans not just disease.
We want to retire early and securely.
We want Jimi Hendrix music
in our Senior Centers.
We want America back!
We want to live in community.
We want to understand and respect
our neighbors across the street
and all across the globe.
We want to tear down the walls on our border
and welcome the hard working immigrants
that have always made America great.
We want to learn new languages,
embrace new cultures
and be seen as a partner not a bully.
We want to feed the hungry
no matter where they live
or what color they are.
We believe in human rights
for all people
even if they don’t have oil.
We want America back!
We want all Exxon employees to walk to work,
Clear channel to never play the same song twice,
Procter & Gamble to worry more about cancer than profit,
General Mills to make their food sacred.
Take the money we pay farmers not to plant
and help them to learn sustainable farming
with respect for the earth.
We want to let the trees grow
and give land back to the animals.
We want our Native Americans to manage our national forests.
We don’t want to drill the last of our wilderness.
We want the power of the wind
and the sun and the oceans.
We want rivers we can drink out of
and cities we can walk in.
We want one rider SUVs banned from all public highways.
We want the oil companies to give back
the money they are stealing from us.
We want electric cars not tax rebates.
We want America back! (We want it all back.)
We want a real democracy,
where voters pick the candidates.
We want to elect our president
by national popular vote.
Ban all campaign ads.
Use the money to register more voters,
to run more candidates.
We need a president who leads
with hope instead of fear,
who can speak the truth
in complete sentences
and can pronounce words
longer than one syllable.
We need a president that understands we want America back!
Forever Trespass
“Forever Trespass” is a digital poem exploring the question, “Does the poem own the poet or the poet own poem?” The sound art for this piece was constructed from the 2D (2 directional) poem, “Forever Trespass“. The “normal” voice is reading the poem vertically (down the columns) and the “harmonized” voice is reading the same poem horizontally (across the rows). The video was made by animating my photographs and digital art and integrating it with the original sound art.
The Word, a digital poem
Well I did it. Never wrote anything down. The images along with artwork and photos flooded my mind while I was in the shower. I went downstairs and started freestyling the audio. The sounds then shaped the animation. Suddenly I arrive somewhere I had never been–somewhere in the middle of groans, flashing color & splintered text. It’s the dada fusion of all my creative pursuits at once. It’s a digital poem. I can’t really explain it, it’s like a digital art, experimental sound, moving text animation experience. It’s The Word
If you do like this kind of thing, you can go to my Lulu Store Front to download it for your i-Pod or Windows-based video player.
I need the encouragement. I feel like out there on the edge on this one. Show me some love.
~md
Digital poetry?
The concept of digital creation in terms of making art & music seems straight forward enough — you use software to manipulate and/or create sounds or images in ways not possible before we had computers. But what is digital poetry and what electronic tools beyond digital distribution are available to muse maniacs and word artists? How can a poet make words do more than they would if they were spoken or typed normally.
Perhaps the most common entry point for shaping poetry with new digital tools is through combining it with media formats already being redefined by the new forms of digital expression. Spoken word sampling can add new dimensions to experimental electronic music & avante garde video. Word and phrase forms can also be a powerfully integrated into Dadaistic digital collages. But how and when will word driven artists finally be able to enjoy the ease of digital creation and power of electronic expression now available to visua l and sound artists?
Dada poets opted for effect over articulation, for creating an experience over making sense. Recording technology advances over the last 50 years have allowed many new poets to experiment with using audio processing to create new forms of experience from their traditionally created poems. The work of Charles Amirkhanian is a great example. This is well illustrated with Charles Amirkhanian’s collaboration with Anthony Gnazzo to create William Panda with Back Mark to Martyre. In this piece, the 1960’s vintage echo effects with dual voices were used to bombard the listener with percussive word repetition. In his beat-dada Three Permutations, Brion Gysin repeats a single phrase several times. Words are deranged in differmenting orders swith each realiterations creating either an overtly relaxed or a drastically agitated state in the listener. With popularity of mp3’s we are just now starting to see many more poets publishing spoken word in digital audio formats. The web site, www.mp3poetry.com, boasts over 300 audio poems for free download. This, of course, is just the beginnings of the beginning. If new dada teaches us one lesson, it is that when it comes to experiential expression, nothing made is ever enough. The richer the experience, the more hedonistic the dream, the better. Why stop with just sound on sound? Give us something to touch, something to see, something to sink our subconscious fangs into.
There certainly have been attempts over the years to create word based multimedia experiences. The equipment and software is now affordable and available for home computers to do this and so much more; however, very few poets have created digital word experiences that have truly transcended what could be done with just the simple spoken voice. Web sites like www.flashpoetry.net that are dedicated to combining music, images, and poetry using flash that reveal certain exciting new possibilities for word driven experimentation, but as of yet I have seen very little there that pushes the boundaries of what could be done with the low tech old school multimedia slide shows, little that will revolutionize the way poets have created poetry for hundreds of years.
Other web sites like www.poemsthatgo.com definitely have paved the way for what is to come. Poems here range for interactive puzzles to moving letter patterns creating paradoxically a new kind of “fluid concrete” poetry. Others combine music, experimental video clips, images and spoken word with scrolling or flying text. As more poets begin creating works incorporating such rich media, the dream of digital dada everywhere will soon entrance the sleeping public. The boundaries between different forms of creative expression, between the visual, the cerebral and the audio is becoming ever more blurred as the new digitalogists begin exploring new ways to create provocative virtual experiences.
Spam Nation
(A deliberate arrangement of unwanted & unedited email subject lines)
Hi, net-veined.
Let me give you some advice.
Don’t be inadequate anymore!
Don’t you wanna fuck like a pornostar
in the movie you saw yesterday?
Take control over your male body image.
Better Life, wing truss.
HOT’N'NEW!
Multiple explosions.
Soldiers wounded.
Become stronger.
Smaller cuts.
Show your volume.
Today’s winner
benefits second.
Jump on this breaking news
first thing.
It’s the best thing
you had ever seen!
Every man wants it!
New’n’hot.
Read a letter.
Impress your girl
with prolonged hardness,
plentiful explosions,
increased duration.
Pay attention to the letter.
For anyone who wants
to become an oil-hardening
pea-picking champion in bed.
Your future, palm willow.
Your money, myrtle-leaved.
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Your money, posh egg.
Your future, Norse-american
Your cash, oven-shaped
Your future, oil slick
Your health, palsy-stricken
palsy-quaking
Your cash, open-flowered
Your future, olive drab
Your cash, mind-healer
All medications to cure yourself!
To buy or not to buy?
Neutral point one-flowered
Any med for your girl to be happy!
Better Future, well-sanctioned.
Your money, olive-kernel oil
Better Future, witch-hunter
Your money, noodle-head
Better Success, wire edge
Better Future, whale-headed
Better Life, well-interpreted
Better Future, yellow-fever fly
Better Life, wind-beaten
Better Future, wing dam
Better Life, whole-feathered
Order status, mussel crab.
Pan-arab
are you jealous of cute porn stars
with enormous dicks?
Why be an average guy any longer
nose leaf?
Women care more about the girth.
This delivers amazing results
and makes your dearest limb bigger
and better-working!
Make your dick longer than the Great China Wall!
Make other men envy you
and girls worship you.
Enjoy the newest.
Make your girlfriend
or wife speechless
with increased hardness, richer orgasms
and more power in bed.
Enjoy ssex with her!
Rock hard manhood.
Pony rides – 25 cents – 2 for 50!
Banned by Christian group.
Open something new for your self.
Separate yourself from other men.
Several times more semen volume.
Stop the painful craving for more food.
Take just a candy and become ready for 36 hours of love.
It is absolutely safety for your health!
Forget about it and take pleasure every night!
As long as you live.
Brand new.
Want to be perfect lover?
And it’s not strange – you cuum very fast!
The head of your ppenis is so sensitive…
Don’t feel bad.
Feel Better Now!!
Harvest the cream from this stock,
seasoned traders recommend it.
Oh, you do it very fast…
It’s not wonder your girlfriend is very angry!
You always cuum during a sexxual performance…
I think your girl doesn’t like it at all…
It’s a pity, because you could do it with her much longer!
Stop doing it; this small thing will help you!
Buy Exttra-Time and forget your fears!
Work anytime, be creative, and make money.
Discover the latest.
Surely you only dream of it.
Enjoy.
Update your PayPal records.
~ Listen to M. D. reading Spam Nation at the Internet Poets’ Cooperative Open Reading on Oct. 12, 2006.
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- My Newest Creation
- Robert King Interviews M. D. Friedman About His Digital Poetry
- Know Where to Go Crazy – A Digital Poem by M. D. Friedman
- Digging The Graves Grow Bigger…
- Creation Stories Review
- A Letter to the Delegates
- Forever Trespass
- The Word, a digital poem
- Digital poetry?
- New Digital Art
- Li Po Returns to His Lover in the Night
- Spam Nation
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