I call this one Creation. No photos were harmed in the production of this piece!

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.

Digging The Graves Grow Bigger…

A Review by M. D. Friedman

Jared Smith portrays the gritty reality of the modern American Dream in his latest book, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations (Higganum Hill Books 2008). His heartfelt, bare-knuckled imagery sticks with you like a warm bowl of stew. His command of language consistently startles you like a wet sheet popping in a summer wind. Sometimes stark, sometimes gentle, Jared makes what is real more real, makes vivid what is hidden, and finally sets us back on our own feet to find our own way.

The opening poem of the volume, “A Silver Zipper,” invites us each to look inside:

Whatever is hidden burns brightest

when the time of counting shadows end.

This poem introduces one of the major themes of the volume: how we all strive to beat our own mortality and how all humans intuitively sense there is something more than the years we have here. It suggests there is an innate greatness to living that endures beyond the things we make and build in our own time:

Most of life is waiting for what comes in.

Most of what comes in was here before.

Beyond the buildings are estuarine islands

where a tall bird waits expectantly.

In the haunting, vernacular, title poem, “The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations,” Jared weaves history and legend to further develop this theme.

I swear I’m going to remember this, and forget the graves,

and forget the markers and forget the names, but I’m going to remember

the smell of furniture polish on old oak banisters, and the dust of books,

and the coolness of old stone buildings in sleepy towns on summer days.

I’m going to remember the too bright eyes of small blonde girls

with their forced bright smiles in silent public rooms and archives

and I’m going to keep on rolling along across America unmarked,

taking the hand of each one and sweeping her off her feet,

making love with each one at the least expected time

and filling my heart with her smile and with her memory

because there is nothing larger than this that I can imagine:

the depth of shadowed rooms, a silent ray of light, purple flowers

and a woman’s touch. The graves get ever bigger

from one generation unto the next.

Through this blue collar, grayscale narrative, Jared reveals a profoundly black and white truth. It is how we live that is important, not how we die.

Having so epically explored our fascination with immortality, Jared turns his pen to our difficult relationship with nature. In “Life at the Margins,” he notes the irony that no matter how much damage humans do to nature, we will always be integrally linked.

We are a part of so much that is born of sun,

even as we roll away into the watch of space

devoid of hope. The shadows too are lighted.

Jared quickly expands this irony to include how human society invariably damages our own nature. In “Having Never Wanted To Own The Business,” he brilliantly describes our human compulsion to own what we do with the metaphor of working away our lives trying to run a business.

A man is 26 miles of intestine stretched above a desk,

running multiple times to the snack machine and urinals,

a sensory input in an electronic web of phone calls to the infinite.

My years are gone.

Once again Jared looks to the strange miracle of our existence for an answer. In “To Be Alive,” Jared articulates our situation with the words:

because what else are you going to do with

a universe when all its guts are emptied out.

He then humbly placates our plight with:

I too wish I knew what to do and how to cope,

and sometimes I think that in itself is enough

to be alive.

Throughout this manuscript, Jared challenges the poet to deal with modern societies’ major issues. As we travel his landscape of sinew and gears, of transparent shadow and unifying light, we soon realize that, for Jared, it is imperative that culture lives up to its responsibility, that poets have a sacred duty to lead us out of the all consuming cycles of self-poisoning and emptiness. Jared’s throws down his gauntlet to contemporary poets in his poem, “Why Put Up With This Anymore?”

there are ultimately no others who can come before you

whether it is by spoken words or written ones, Poet,

I cannot understand why you hang your head down

and skulk in alleys eating poverty with your words.

In this collection Jared swims through the complex floods of modern life, bobs with the joys and heartbreaks of love, and reaches for the glittering surface above greed and regret. He treads in a world of concrete and flowers, of wires and sunsets, of metal and bees, with the grace and vision of a poet seeking only the truth simply put.

It’s not like street yard baseball, this poetry thing anymore,

where you used to lean back with whatever piece of wood you found

lying around and hit each clunker of coal as far as it would go.

With The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations, Jared Smith has hit one out of the park!

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”.

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” 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.

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

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.

Well, it’s been a while but now that I’ve finished with my new Harmonica: So Low CD and have had a couple more days snowed in from jamming, I have managed to finish 2 new digital art pieces. It feels so great to get back to my art after almost a six month break.  (I have only been doing this computer art thing for a little over a year now anyway).  So, it really seemed to click (no pun intended).  The Fowl Flowers piece is one I have been thinking about since the time clicked the photo last August.  (For the first time ever I even framed the photo when I took it with some digital manipulations in mind).  I was so surprised at how much I liked the ducks swimming on the one sunflower that I put a photo that my niece sent me from a Hawaiian fish market in a second flower.  All in all it definitely feels a little dada even though I can’t help but think about Van Gogh when I look at it.

The Touch piece is a true “digital painting” in that no photographs were harmed in the production of this art.  It was the first chance I had to create from a blank page using my new Corel Painter software.  It was really just too much fun.

Please let me know what you think of my new work.  (Be as brutal as feel you need to.)  If you like these, I have more of my digital explorations for view at www.mdfriedman.com.  Thanks for checking out my play.

~md