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Friday, August 12, 2011

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.

3 comments:

  1. I'm so glad you found and liked Soundzine! And it was poetry editor Sherry O'Keefe who first suggested it to me!

    I just listened to your poems, and was familiar with them from reading them earlier in print. Great to see/hear them here. I was amazed by the reading style that is part singing, against the subtle musical background. I've not heard this kind of delivery before.

    I loved the build of the bee invective. And, oh, I got sadder and sadder in the beautiful "Anniversary."

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  2. Thanks, Kathleen! I was happy to get more mileage out of the poems and to give them an audio life. I'm so glad I saw that FB post of yours some months ago. I return the compliment to you for your own poems. I love the image of the mother in a photo before the speaker knew her. And I admire how you've used questions, but left the answers for us to find.

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  3. Diane, I love Soundzine and I love these poems. Brava!

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