elizabeth,
the poem began with the sound of the word. my partner, whose mother has
been blind most of her life, suggested the title. and there is an actual
"photo" - the poem is part of an ongoing web project. your wonderful
analysis is quite correct but i can't claim to have set out with any
particular hypothesis in mind. the "cawing" happened for me too, though
i've not come across chris watson's work. (i am a fan of that art - i
remember an excellent radio3 programme many moons ago, _a gloucestshire
night_, in which a sound recordist lurks in snowy woods and fields to
capture the cries of foxes, an unearthly noise.)
i was amazed to discover recently that i was once considered a "sound
poet". my poetry was essentially oral and my performance did involve
chanting and singing, yelling and such. rhythm and sound were the
fundamentals. it is not easy to translate this to a disembodied text-only
interface.
my partner and our children have the "gift" of synaesthesia in that
words have particular colours. i can't say i envy them, really.
"Elizabeth James" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> so I think what it's doing is to test the sonic properties of this word
>> that's supposed to indicate a visible effect, the reduction of
>> visibility (when hearing can become more acute); one that has
>> accumulated many emotional & moral overtones here pitched at and
>> dripping off the simple reiterated call, or caw, like those that echo
>> from a rookery at evening (there's a great one on the CD called [by
>> chance; or not] 'Stepping Into the Dark', by the brilliant sound
>> recordist Chris Watson who -- if you like this kind of thing; I do --
>> turns his trade into art). And by that association, for instance, we
>> come back into the semantic ... Is that the hypothesis? that some
>> English words not obviously onomatopoeic can also signify *essentially,
>> ring true
>>
>> e
>> >
>> >
>> >dark so dark matter is dark dark timber utterly dark
>> >dark soil in the folds of darkness dark nebulae chasm
>> >dark dark planet ashfall and darkness a plague of darkness
>> >bruised with dark cloud dark dripping masses dark desires
>> >dark as the animal blood dark cave dark pure dark dark
>> >stone dark city the dark hour distorted darkness dark
>> >plains dark highways in the dark interior things in
>> >darkness cramped in dark uncharted dark dark wine and
>> >spilled the sunless dark darkness and earth darkness
>> >impenetrable fragrant dark indifferent dark pitch dark
>> >to the end inner darkness the darkness of the tunnel
>> >huge and velvet the reverberating dark dark canals dark
>> >streets dark houses dark centuries dark furniture dark
>> >and heavy fell the dark slab of dark utter dark
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