tHe PoweR of raNdomiSing sTories - coLLaboraTive coLLage poEtry (short version)

This is a trial in collaborative collage poem making that Janieke and I did one night. 

We are creatives with an interest in healing. For the longer blog version which discusses the overlap of creativity and healing go here

The Creating:

The aim of the collage poem process was to create poems that combined content from both of our thoughts and experiences.

We chose a couple of themes:

1. Travel - Janieke's recent trip and any travel memories I had that came to mind
2. any internal condition/questions we had been going through recently

Step 1:

We wrote mini poems/thoughts on pieces of paper - as many as were required. It was great combining both a concrete experience (travel) and introspective thoughts.

 
Once these were written, we read them to each other in their original form, and handed them over to the other person who then cut chosen words/phrases out and placed them in one of four jars.

Once this process was complete, we both chose two jars and two backgrounds each and proceeded to empty a jar and order the words contained into a poem combination of our own choosing.

The Results:

These are the completed four pieces of writing...

1.

I am in habit so steep
The magnitude collecting in a bucket
How am I Mt Agog - telling a hole in it
A voyeur in Basil - rows, paper, incense on corners

How to place the middle of nowhere
It was the papers
the same air

You need not fall forwards - crow
I watch an eclipse
Kindness, swipe me

2.

 
Scared to travel - Lap it up

Under construction the long way
Peoples' homes view it
petals, rice, sand on an airport

Wayan around, as if above such bad news
And when questioned says,
Oh wait, I don't pocket them
Colour, children, strangers

I put everything for a moment
Through the turnstile
 
3.

 Being in a Place

This place I travel through might
I gather, install
Point A, Point B

One day I was at myself
I was water, matter
But don't mind me
Point me to the General Electric

So my driver takes me, shoes off, of his affairs
No knowing my movement
Have I really mechanisms of control?

Why give him one step in front
To inhabit my world
Everyone lap it up
Be in the same

Thank you is here

4. 

 
Placed with Doorways

Collect this bit
Rest your body differently each time

Tiny island street
A minute of drink, new food
Wondered how I got there?

Make my offerings
Take the next day with feet in the freedom

I kid
I leave a home and return different


The Presentation

We placed the four collage poems up on a mirror wall (of all things) and surrounded them with the remainder of photos and words - in mural fashion. It is at once a finishing, and the beginning of a second iteration...

 
 

tHe PoweR of raNdomiSing sTories - coLLaboraTive coLLage poEtry

what can you do to convey an old life event/story in a way that alters it in the telling and alters you in the telling?

don't we sometimes get caught up in telling an old memory/story in a constantly predictable way - with all the emphases in the right place...the characters/events re-told in the same tone...so that we no longer have a unique perspective or any chance of transformation?

and yet - the story wants to be told....and the transformation wants to happen....

what happens when you combine a creativity that is both deliberate and random to the story-telling process - and combine with other peoples' stories as well?

Janieke is a homeopath, nurse who loves to facilitate healing and who identifies creativity as an additional means toward this. I am a musician, teacher with a personal interest in mechanisms of healing. 

The creative and healing processes have some facets in common:

1. The unpacking of layers to discover/convey a core of 'truth'. The sifting of information/feedback to arrive at the nugget or essential aspect of a thing.

2. The messiness of arriving at an essential aspect of creation or healing. Often times, the process is one of increasing chaos, indecision and lack of clarity before a breakthrough of sorts.

3. The need to trust this process and rely on instinct when all is not necessarily logical or coming about in a logical way.

4. The value of interacting with others for a greater/different perspective - whilst needing to feel a sense of control or self-determination and contribution.

5. The effectiveness of removing intense gaze 'at a problem' to a broader bird's eye view at times - the effectiveness of play in allowing the subconscious 'problem-solving' brain to be activated. Greater discoveries are made at times when one is relaxed and one's eye is not so keenly on the ball.

Janieke and I wanted to gather people together for the purposes of creating and explore opportunities for healing at the same time. We wanted to develop a toolkit of processes that would allow this to happen.

We decided to try these processes on ourselves first to see what would eventuate.

My belief is that the power of the creative process comes in combining a number of factors and allowing them to cross-pollinate in their own way.

The Background:

For our self-imposed experiment, Janieke and I chose an event/pocket of time that was common to us both - her 5 day trip to Australia. This period of time was to be our 'resource-gathering' time - and a time where we could become attuned to any particular thoughts/experiences. 

We agreed that we would take note during this time - Janieke collected images - taking numerous photographs during her time away. At times she would send me the photos and I would add text to them.


This part of the process may not be a necessary step to the creating which happened two weeks after Janieke returned, but it served to focus our attention to any themes, interests.

An interesting event happened during Janieke's trip...on the night we went to the airport to drop her off, there was a massive amount of rain - so much so, that there was flooding on the Kapiti Coast. We were fortunate to have gotten into town because shortly after we left at 3am, a slip happened on the Coastal Highway, which is pretty much the main access route from the Coast to Wellington. Hours later, as Janieke was arriving in Sydney, I was at a school in Whitby scrolling through news photos to see what was happening back in my local area when I saw the following pic...

Photo courtesy of The Kapiti Observer / www.stuff.co.nz

This is Janieke's house! Later when I got back to check, all seemed good until I noticed this inside....

For me, this was in an odd way, a joiner between Janieke's and my experience - a strange collision of realities - Janieke's house is leaking while she is overseas and I am someone on the ground to tend to it.

The Creating:

The aim of the collage poem process was to create poems that combined content from both of our thoughts and experiences.

We chose a couple of themes:

1. Travel - Janieke's recent trip and any travel memories I had that came to mind
2. any internal condition/questions we had been going through recently

Step 1:

We wrote mini poems/thoughts on pieces of paper - as many as were required. It was great combining both a concrete experience (travel) and introspective thoughts.

 
Once these were written, we read them to each other in their original form, and handed them over to the other person who then cut chosen words/phrases out and placed them in one of four jars.

Once this process was complete, we both chose two jars and two backgrounds each and proceeded to empty a jar and order the words contained into a poem combination of our own choosing.

The Results:

These are the completed four pieces of writing...

1.

I am in habit so steep
The magnitude collecting in a bucket
How am I Mt Agog - telling a hole in it
A voyeur in Basil - rows, paper, incense on corners

How to place the middle of nowhere
It was the papers
the same air

You need not fall forwards - crow
I watch an eclipse
Kindness, swipe me

2.

 
Scared to travel - Lap it up

Under construction the long way
Peoples' homes view it
petals, rice, sand on an airport

Wayan around, as if above such bad news
And when questioned says,
Oh wait, I don't pocket them
Colour, children, strangers

I put everything for a moment
Through the turnstile
 
3.

 Being in a Place

This place I travel through might
I gather, install
Point A, Point B

One day I was at myself
I was water, matter
But don't mind me
Point me to the General Electric

So my driver takes me, shoes off, of his affairs
No knowing my movement
Have I really mechanisms of control?

Why give him one step in front
To inhabit my world
Everyone lap it up
Be in the same

Thank you is here

4. 

 
Placed with Doorways

Collect this bit
Rest your body differently each time

Tiny island street
A minute of drink, new food
Wondered how I got there?

Make my offerings
Take the next day with feet in the freedom

I kid
I leave a home and return different


The Presentation

We placed the four collage poems up on a mirror wall (of all things) and surrounded them with the remainder of photos and words - in mural fashion. It is at once a finishing, and the beginning of a second iteration...

 
 

whEn RoSalInd mAde heR sTory intO a hOuSe...

I met Rosalind at a songwriting workshop I held at the Paekākāriki Railway Station. 

She was one of those people who professed to not being particularly musical, but like the other students on the course, she was open to a new experience. Together we supported one another, told stories, laughed, played and created songs. 

Rosalind had a flair for rhythm and tone in her writing and ended up with a journeying spoken word piece that incorporated the rhythm of the rail with the musings of a wombat. We gathered together with the others and recorded her song Full Steam Ahead. The instruments included the side of a train, gravel, a plastic bucket, and the metal side of a building. The players are Rosalind, Te Ahu, Drew, Chris and Nic. Here is an excerpt of that recording from the day...



Rosalind was keen to continue exploring the telling of story through song and sound, and I was keen to continue working with her as I have long had an interest in working with people to create stories and song using sound (particularly of objects and buildings). 

We met regularly and did various writing and sound exercises. One exercise was to write about a specific childhood memory about a sister. Mine was about a visit to a farm I did with my two sisters Kim and Bron, and how Bronny and I wanted to test a hole in the side of a hill for bees, so we gave a stick to Kim and asked her to have a prod...suffice to say there were no bees or injury but I'm sure Kim has a bit to say about that now!

Rosalind's writing centered around a memory of her sister playing the piano. I love the visual detail Rosalind brings to her writing (she is a visual artist and architect).

This small poem transformed into a sound piece in an interesting way - but first here is the initial reading...



Once we had the recording, we chopped the wave into pieces and Rosalind chose a colour for each one, so now they looked like this...

 
At this point I admit, I reached the usual impasse as to what to do next. Enter that uncomfortable moment when you feel blocked, tired, unimaginative, and unsure what to do next - and that's the facilitator! But I have learned to trust in these instances, and once again to return to whatever is happening in the present.

What was happening in the present for me was that I had recently become fascinated by, and an avid reader of architecture. This began with discovering Louis Kahn through watching the documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey...

the New York by Gehry...

 It moved onto Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright,

It continued with Dancing House by Gehry....

And the first female architect to catch my eye - Zaha Hadid...

Rosalind is an architect and all I really wanted to talk about was architecture. Go where the heart is racing towards I say...

So I said to Rosalind "let's create a house from your sound files". I asked her to look at the coloured 'bricks' and to construct a house using them. Here's what she came up with...

 

As Rosalind is visually oriented, it provided a way that the poem sound excerpts could be arranged without us knowing what they were. The house, I remember, has over-hanging eves, and the bottom level is colour co-ordinated so will provide an aural repetitive loop of some sort.

We then decided to cut to an internal view of the house, and Rosalind created sky-light frames (volume) and a staircase (panning).

To finish, we returned to the exterior view and added a keyboard accompaniment - a synth pad sound already in the software called Floating Embers. Rosalind chose the keys and played throughout the piece. This she coloured in a beige colour to create the ground for the house.

To separate the voices, we added an effect to one of the house levels. The effect was a delay that also acted as a pitch shifted - interesting because the poem talks about Celia as a small girl. Rosalind chose the effect merely by sight.

With the words rearranged and the volume and panning automated, and with added keyboard - here was the result.




What was amazing to us was that without knowing it, we had referenced content of the poem through constructing skylights and stairs - as both of these are mentioned in the poem - the automation brings out those specifics too.

Rosalind also found the poem and resulting sound work refreshing and full of light - much like a well designed house. 

unDer the islaNds are stArs

Several months have passed and my erratic 'working', sound-making life has continued its tributaries in many directions...

a performance at The Wine Cellar in Auckland; 

an installation at The Wellington Railway Station in collaboration with Erica and Struan from Tape-Art New Zealand where we created a visual/aural fantasy-world labyrinth for people to walk through;  
 

a songwriting camp (The Great Songwriting Slumber Party) with fellow songwriter Holly-Jane Ewens of Rosy Tin Teacaddy - where 22 kids ate,slept, and breathed songwriting;

So I get to now and am dragging my head back into the Muriel project...only I know from experience that no such effort is required. Yes, it seems that way...how does one reconnect with the writings of someone who was writing 70 years ago on the other side of the world?

Well...to quote Muriel herself - "O for God's sake / they are connected / underneath..."

It is a good day when one realises that all of the activities of the day/year...all sights seen...all sounds heard....conversations had...they are all informing of what is to come next.

So my next 'task' was to compose a third song for the play 'Throat of These Hours' by Marian Evans - a play and now radio-play about two women who work in a radio station, and which centers on the works and life of Muriel Rukeyser .

I don't know if it is a lazy position to take, but when I am at a loss as to what to do next, I inevitably come back to those things that have happened, been observed/experienced...those things which have stood out in my mind and activated that sense of rush in the gut...

I felt stuck coming into this third song - am I anticipating my style based on what I have done? Am I anticipating the effects of Muriel's writing on me? Do I really know what I am doing? (the answer to this most definitely seemed to be 'No').

First approach - well....read the poem. That's easy to say. But. Reading a poem takes quite a bit of skill. I can tell you that with a certain amount of confidence now that I have a poet as my love interest. I am very fortunate in that Hinemoana is not only a fantastic writer of poems - she is also a musician and vocalist with an astute 'ear' for sound and composition. She has told people many times that she vicariously studied sound art at the same time I did, but I can tell you she already had a love and understanding of sound in her bones.

This is very handy for me :) because she understands the world of sound, and the world of words - and can do a little cross-translating for me when required. It has also meant that over the years I have been to a great many more poetry readings than I would have, and slowly but surely, am expanding the poetry-listening muscle...and it is indeed a muscle...it takes a certain fortitude to immerse oneself in a world that can be so intricate, dense, and at times mysterious - and one needs to bring all of oneself because...then it is gone. Every word has been chosen specifically to maximise effect and meaning, often with conservation of word use at the core.

I also love that Hinemoana has largely delved into and written poetry that has sound at its core - a place where meaning and narrative are secondary to the sounds of words. This approach is a good companion to the world of sound composition because it requires the listener/reader to bring more of themselves to a piece instead of having it do all the work for them.

So in coming to some of the poems of Muriel Rukeyser, I have at times needed to go through a reverse process. In looking at Islands, it is quite accessible and easy to understand. It seems quite straightforward. 

Islands by Muriel Rukeyser

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The Bathers think
islands are separate like them

Connectedness. Tick. Yes. An obvious meaning. What could I bring to this poem? How could I meet with it? I often hold a desire (of which I am not proud) to be an 'original' - to bring something utterly unique to a work - something that will set me apart...and here I am faced with a piece which has connectedness as its theme. Using islands as a metaphor.

Next step - walk the dog.

Tai is a border-collie/huntaway (read that as - bundle of energy, slightly crazy, strong-willed eye dog). Hinemoana and I have had him for nearly 2 years and after a particularly hairy first year, life with him is settling into a routine which includes at least one, sometimes two walks a day. We are fortunate in that we live on the Kāpiti Coast (About 40 mins north of Wellington, New Zealand).

One of my favourite walks is along a beach which is connected to a large inland area of parks and walks. It has a stream which runs out to sea, farmland, railway tracks where an old tram takes visitors for rides, and an area whee model plane enthusiasts fly their aircraft. I have been to a wedding in the area that was serenaded by the high pitch whines of planes taking to the skies. The park is called Queen Elizabeth Park. Sometimes Hinemoana and I both take Tai there...

The Kāpiti Coast is magnificent. You can view the coastal hills as they descend towards the sea - separated only by what is known as the Coastal Highway - a thin piece of road that follows the curve of the coastline. On a stormy day, it can be quite exhilarating and a bit scary driving with wild ocean breaking against the barriers. One of the hills looks to me like the face of a man staring upwards to the sky. 

One of Tai's favourite activities is chasing tennis balls along the beach. 

Looking out from the coast, one can see Kāpiti Island - an island that fascinates me both for its physical shape and its history. To me it sits in the water like a crocodile, and, depending on the day, can be stark in its contrast from the surrounding sea/sky, or soft around the edges and misty. Sometimes it all but disappears.

The island is Ngāti Raukawa land, having been inhabited by an infamous Māori chief Te Rauparaha. It is now conservation land and a sanctuary for native birds, with the North End being maintained and occupied by descendants of the local iwi (tribe).

Unless you are high atop Paekākāriki Hill and looking across to the island or in an airplane flying over, you won't notice the three islands in front of Kāpiti. They are hidden from ordinary view, even though the distance from shoreline to the island is only 5kms. The islands were used as camouflage for the local iwi who lived there during war times.

So there I was, walking the beach, wondering how I would connect with Muriel's poem, and translate it to music. The island view helps I'm sure - but not while I am at this stage, embarking on a mental exercise. I guess it will only be later when I am actually with the music and physically engaged in it, that the energy presence of Kāpiti Island will make itself felt.

There comes a time when no amount of walking and thinking can actually replace sitting down and turning up to the empty yet-to-be-written-piece.

I knew I just had to sit down and try - imagining the piece wasn't going to write it. I had an imagined first line - in Scott Walker style, like a burst of operatic monologue - OhforGod'ssake!

This was most certainly the first approach I would take for certain, but this over-rehearsed line in my mind disappeared as soon as I started to engage in the music.

There was one other thing that was to inform the process of writing this song and that was a wee movie I went to called Gravity. Amazing film. Soundtrack by Steven Price.




For some reason this film resonated with me in terms of connectedness without being really sure how. I had a feeling of vast. alive. cosmic. isolation. for sure. but also. connected to others. to dreams. to memories. even if only. in 2-bit. morse code. stars. tectonic plates. all nimbus. fingers. reaching.

sound. texture of sound. background. foreground. the opening music so startling. 




confronting. radio waves. trying for communication. sound waves from 50 years ago. fly through space. echoes. debris. sounds cutting/splicing. reaching. underneath. 

we. are. all. made. of. stars. we. burst. and. fade. we. are. all. connected. underneath.

and so came the sound palette. glitch. broken-up speech. suspension of sound. foreground. background. pulse. a vocal that goes underground. that echoes. that moves. and disappears to the other side. that disappears from view.

i listen back to the very early demo of the piece i have started for Islands on iTunes. When it is finished, iTunes shuffles to the song Isolation by John Lennon - another New Yorker writing 40 years later...

People say we got it made don't they know we're so afraid
we're afraid to be alone, everybody got to have a home...
Isolation

We're afraid of everyone, afraid of the sun
Isolation

The Sun will never disappear
but the world may not have many years
Isolation