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.

Personally, I feel the shift in diction on the last word effects an exaggerated and unnatural immediacy that combines with the similar enactment of ‘fat’ to erase the collage’s sense of wholeness and thereby – depending on the strength of the collage – the narrator too.

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.