Sorry, I had to delete the file because there was no audio enclosure or player for you to listen if you wished.

It posts fine at Blogspot.

direct link: indigo dance.

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith.”

You can watch the video poem in the last post of this blog, or at YouTube.

direct link: dance/ …indigo folio leaves (with poem)

A dance that is creative movement, a moving meditation. Brenda Clews: prose poetry, dance, video. Music: José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith.”

Music

…enters your backbone, joints, plucks the
cartilage holding you together. Music is the
moon of the red tides of your bloodstream.
Drift to and fro, a willow tree, or sway, bend,
a flamenco, stretch, purple morning glories
on the vine, jump. Sway your hips, delta of
fiery flow. Express yourself, woman. No-one
is watching. Say it all. The lyric travels tenderly
through your wrist, a memory of the wind on the
hill. You are an instrument of the musician who
is absent, gone. Whose music plays on; who
does not know you exist. Orphean muse. Twirl
on the floor, the beat in your ankles, room
spinning, see the canvas walls, luminous see
the sun, moon, stars that are always there.
Spin on the clock turning. Give everything.

Wanton woman. Harlot of the night. Mother of
angels. Insufferable radiance. Black hole of
emptiness. Sweet moan nectar.

Mystery dangles like your silver bracelets,
the ghosts are present. Approach yourself by
disappearing. Undulate your liquid bones.
Beautiful sensuality. Seek invisible illumination
in your writhing steps. Leave time, transform in
your multiplicity, a seer searching the spheres.
Manifest your dreams. Shake them out of the air
to materialize before you like light forms. Shimmy,
wet sweat, a flag in a wind storm. Thunder the
floor. Witch, werewolf, Goth beauty, fragile
starchild, cyberpunk, pull the sky down. Sway
those hips, woman. Sway them until you ignite.
Dance with your ineffable muse. Just, dance.

I pull purple veils over my vision, indigo
blue silk lights and shadows.

Listen: dance on the stage of your
imagination.

© by Brenda Clews, 2011
_

Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves of a book or manuscript.

Late afternoon, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith“:  Besides being technically beautiful, quite goth baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.

And I layered two different dances to the same music: first I separated the figures, but it didn’t look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.

I see the woman of the dance transformed into figures that are, but are not me.

I wrote to the Spanish musician, José, on his track, ‘Monster’: ‘This piece is so beautiful, like the passion of angels, pain and transcendance in the music that you play, what is the monster? Is beauty the monster?

How can beauty be a monster?’

He teaches all day, and at night, the music. Stressful, hard. He rarely has time to read, walk, visit friends, relax. “Everyday I work on it with passion… or maybe just obsession. So, everyday, when I’m recording an album, I feel more and more tired, it consumes me… Music is my own monster, my search for the perfection and the beautiful thing is my own monster. This is my explanation.”

‘I understand. A consuming passion. A beauty that devours its creator in consummation.

I, too, prefer art that is vulnerable, without pretence.’

Contemplating the Muse

                                          

Music by Buz Hendricks: Somewhere Off Jazz Street.
Buz created beautiful ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual music for a poem I composed out of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. The long, original track is at Jamendo. I reworked a portion of that track of music with a new reading of the central poem of the Suite:

Veils to clothe Botticelli’s Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It’s more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer – the process of painting

Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix.
Music, Lena Selyanina’s piano solo, ‘Summer Morning,’ from “Snowstorm Romance”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/73627

Cover is a detail of a painting of mine.
_

Testing players – WordPress’s embedded player doesn’t work, or even appear, on my iMac, though it plays fine on my PC netbook.

In a moment I will hit Publish and see what might appear or not with SoundCloud.

Salt of the Sea.mp3

direct link to poetry recording at SoundClick (if the links above doesn’t work): Salt of the Sea.
Livio Amato’s, ‘Dream Opening,’ from his album, “Sensitivity“

Salt of the Sea

             She said seawards-
            "Salt in the seas
            like the blood in tears,
         a forced forment of waves:
         our cries, rushed into
         life, and death,
         a barge that carries
         souls to the other side
               of nowhere."

The moon slides
into a shell
conch, cone, harp, volva
      that hears
      our whisperings-
            breeze, seafoam.

This season of weathered wood, amniotic
scent.

Inner forces drive the ocean.

Mystery emerges and recedes like waves
opening dreams.

Osprey and clouds sail high over surf.

      Print the soul in the flag to fray.
Rocks rubbing in water become sand.
Wet sand under the pincers of crabs who burrow.
The warp and weave of the ocean slapping
            at our consciousnesses.

You came, on a minion of steel, the noise
of condensed crowds. Like an engine
of grief. Imprinted with caustic
wax winds. Ripe as a
salt flower.

With blue love on your lips
the colour of seaspray.

           ≈

The sea drops its showers
of diamonds on our skin.

We waited for each other
in the violins
of wind.

The water
thick with history.

I placed my heart
in your stone
chest.

A wave gives to another wave
its white wedding foam.

Here in the depths of understanding
among the seahorses and anemones,
graves, lovers, sunken dreams,
buried treasures.

       "Love, love until the night
        falls swiftly."
                Pablo Neruda

(photo from North Vancouver, 2003)

(only leaving this so you can more clearly see the writing;
this is, after all, a response to poetry prompt)

Sand Is On Fire, 15″x13″, 38cmx33cm, india inks, soluble
pastels on archival paper, 2010 (actually just now, crazy
inking away on my bed, lucky the open bottle of permanent
ink didn’t spill!)
The original -ok, I shouldn’t give it away so soon, right?!

In the burning ocean. Where oil spills plumes drag through the world’s gloom. Swoop of your feathers. Gloss the rocks. You can’t know where we go at night. Or why the morning shines. Or the glimmer of gold before sunset. Relentless tidal cycles. Let me tear at the crests and troughs. Go in. GO IN. Shiver. Sin. Dark water, grey clouds. A rain of black ink falls from the sky. Drips. Rips, slashes the wet heaving page. Heat of sand on fire. Burn the slick, ocean on fire. Coral crevices. Grottos. Invite. Come in, why don’t you. Open. Open. Open. Arms reach up. Seeds rain down. Wash the foam. Pray forests. Burning despair of illusion. Fruit of veils to burn in. They said GO IN.

__
click on images for larger size

Response to Big Tent Poetry’s prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

zebra bands of revolving opposites

light: where we offer our admiration to each other
dark: where we hide our opinions of each other

flashing white smiles, coveting dark thoughts

Janus-faced, Dorian Gray, the split personality

the world of relations: is a strobed text
the world of relations: cannot be decoded

opposites rest on each other, one revealed
the other hidden

our proclamations of support, joy
in the bright, sunny, funny ways
we notate our responses to each other
don’t reflect the reality

of the jumbled human mind

__
Response to Big Tent Poetry’s prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

direct link: If I Could Write.

for JP

What would I write if I could write?

I reach across continents and oceans into the Parthenon to find you pressing the shutter on your camera, the photograph you sent.

Or ordered chaos, but this is my life.

A leaf swollen with rain. Sleeping in a hammock in a barge with hundreds of others on the Amazon River in Brazil. Sun shining on metal. How my sentences fold in on each other like white rose petals.

Days pass endless waves in the lake. I found her, a spirit in the forest of the place in the Canadian terrain where I fast for days. She broke the spell. Unexpectedly, in the silvery leaves of the maple standing in water.

Abandon logic for metaphor.

Speak in the tongues of poetry. I burn the fire on your eyelids in my soul.

Those Ionic columns in the heat of your Grecian photograph.

You ask me to be real when I like to wear mirrors to hide behind. My polished earrings, necklace of reflective stones, shirt sewn with tiny mirrors. See yourself seeing me.

Or the clouds that form a grammar of understanding of the sky.

To be the wine that sweetens your lips. The dazzle of a sunset the colour of oranges.

__
Piano solo accompaniment: Roger Stéphane, ‘Lointain,’ from his album, Picasso, on Jamendo.

Response to Big Tent Poetry’s prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

The recording is an earlier draft. Luckily SoundClick allows uploading revised versions…

No
………..milk
of kindness
here.

In my dull stare
I watch you.

You seek a
comfort of stars
I can only imagine.

Do not praise me, fool.

The maze in which you are lost
is my lair.

_____
Words from a wordle, Big Tent Poetry’s prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments):