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.

The Beginning of My Movie Career

I've been practicing what Todd Boss preaches (see my previous post), i.e., sitting at the computer and making a video with audio of me reading my poem, "The Fruitful Woman," from my book, Eve's Red Dress. I decided to begin with a short poem so I'd get less frustrated when things bombed and I had to begin over. But really, the whole thing was pretty easy.

I also decided that for this one I'd make a video from photos that fit my poem. So first I had to round up a boatload of photos. In the end I ended up with many more than I needed and had to do some strategic cutting. I'd previously used an external microphone to record myself reading some poems, but with my new iMac I now have a good quality internal mic so thought I should learn how to use that.

I first put the photos in what seemed like a sensible order. Then I did a voice over which could not have been easier. I wasn't satisfied with my first several efforts—frog in throat, AC kicking on in the background, too fast, etc. But that was no problem. Just delete the voice over and make a new one. Once I had one that I thought was decent, I fiddled around with the order of the photos and the length of time each would be displayed. Again, very easy. Added a credit page at the beginning and end. Sent the whole thing off to YouTube.

After I was well into this project, the new Snow Leopard arrived at my front door. This upgrade for the Mac includes a new Quick Time which enhances your ability to make videos and audios. I wanted to see how that worked even though I was already set with my finished project. Again, easy to make an audio. One problem I had, though, was saving the recording to iTunes as an audio so that it could be dragged and dropped into a movie project. I eventually figured it out, but I think that's one unexpected glitch in the new program.

Now my next project is to make a movie of me reading one of Shakepeare's sonnets. I want to send that to the Our Daily Sonnet project.

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