Month: December 2024

I was watching this video of a Meyerhold production, The Inspector General, which is generally considered the prime synthesis of theatrical grotesque, and it very much reminded me of the music of my poems, and I would think so in quite an obvious way.

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/file_sets/1g05fb61q

I then wanted to write a short poem, and I found myself looking down on the page, as I wrote, and this enabled me to – finally – have the confidence etc. necessary to use fragmentation. It’s not my best work, but it does seem to be collage, and moreover, the last edit I hope shifted everything into harmonic distortion (‘fat’)

Rolls

My stomach fat

aghast, I clutch

drink a glass straight

skirt drawn tight.

So the music to e.g. the poetic inversion of ‘glass’ is unaffected by the visual appeal of that, making it somewhat meaningless, and I probably feel that the shift in diction on the last word effects an exaggerated and unnatural immediacy that combines with a parallel enactment of ‘fat’ to erase the collage’s sense of wholeness and thereby – depending on the strength of the collage – the narrator too. Of course, the judgment that it does anything I want is intuitive and analysis of this sort is meant as justification of that.

So I’ve been playing with a synth, cancelling a waveform (adding an inverted mix of it) after adding harmonics to it (with hard clipping). It does what you would expect: makes the fundamental more inaudible (blank?) while adding a bunch of sine waves, plus artefacts (I guess). Dunno what to make of anything. So I can sort of create an intuitive sense of that, insofar as I can convince myself I am writing to that kind of effect, and the result, as lyric music, is oddly something, maybe nomadic, rather than anti lyric.