The Sound of Poetry

Photo by Georgia Simandan

Several months ago Kathleen Kirk tipped me off to a cool online journal called Soundzine. This journal combines poetry and audio and art. Lovely combination. Each poem is posted along with an audio recording and a relevant piece of art. I decided to submit some poems and was happy to have three of them accepted. Those poems appear in the current issue. They are "Invective Against the Bumblebee," "The Fruitful Woman," and "Anniversary." You can visit them HERE. Since "Invective Against the Bumblebee is posted first, it gets the artwork—a creepy bee.

This issue includes 30 poets as well as 3 Spoken Word poets (a separate category in the journal), 6 prose writers, and 27 artists under Art & Photography.  I was happy to see the aforementioned Kathleen Kirk included among the poets.

Each poet is given a choice to record his or her own poems or to have one of the journal's regular readers make the recordings. I chose to do my own. I took that as my opportunity to finally learn how to use Garage Band. So that took many days, but I think the sound quality is a tad bit better than Quick Time. Also, I've never been able to figure out how to add a music track to a Quick Time recording—is it possible?—something that was possible and not too hard in Garage Band. I wanted to add music tracks behind each poem. Garage Band has tons of tracks to choose from, or you can add music from another source.

The theme of this issue is Luck. It's issue #13, thus the Lucky Issue. Although my poems have nothing to do with luck, I consider myself lucky to have them appear in the journal. I'm grateful to poetry editor Sherry O'Keefe for taking them.