Easter Sunday morning always I am depressed. Like I'm under the earth kind of depressed, not sad, or forlorn. Just dead. And by afternoon I feel I'm rising into the air, happy, renewed. A new year is beginning.

Today I realized that my new year is the full moon after the vernal equinox. Passover, Easter, and take a look at April in Wikipedia for the countries and religions, mostly Asian and East Asian, celebrating their New Year this month.

The winter brings increasing exhaustion, weaker and weaker it continues, until today. On Easter Sunday morning it's like I'm buried, decomposing with the termites; I can smell the dank earth of transformation. My inner being shifts today.

By mid-day, the strengthening begins. Energy awakens, renewal has begun. My new year begins.

My spirits rise, I am enlivened.
__

This poem, in 2006, and it's still the same, every year.

Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

I found myself ebbing
away, and so I fasted.
When my commitment to
life renewed itself, I broke
my fast.

If you've ever been dead and come back to life,
been hopeless and found a way to continue,
thrown yourself into nothingness to find meaning.

An elusive tune,
slender wash of light,
bare opening in the wall,
a sliver, crescent through which.

Or what's a moment but a casting through.
If you've been too tired to get up and then you get up.
Filled with silent despair and then the will to.

Nothing's even, that's the problem. Many impermanent states.
All taking turns or colliding. Interpenetrating or scattering.
Flowing or stuck. Constraining or freeing.

I like to have clean thoughts because then I can live in my mind.
Sometimes the dust, anger, grime.
Throw what's scathing out.

I feel your bright and beautiful presence
even if you feel like you've disappeared into nothing.

The edges of the sky hang like an aurora borealis of silk.

The trompe l'oeil of the moment. Discreet packets of time.
If you didn't tell me I was going to die, I wouldn't believe it.

And then the scaffolding crashed, blocks fell apart,
what resisted melted, and it was time to resurrect.
Passing beyond memory into. Or the rising.


©Brenda Clews
Good Friday, 2006
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photographic path: a photo I took of sheer fabric over light, cropped, layered on itself, rotated, made somewhat transparent; then I may have used a marque tool to crop the uppermost layer to better reveal the brocade ribbon below, or was that one of the trajectories I didn't use; various marque tools to crop the right & left edges of the uppermost layer on right angles; the stamp tool to fill in a line that was left over from who knows what process; the burn tool to darken the upper and bottom right corners for visual balance. A collage I composed after writing the poem...

This is a photopoem: I've digitally embedded the poem in the image along with copyright information.

  dance/ ...indigo folio leaves by Brenda Clews

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

You can watch the video poem in this blog, or at YouTube.

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The next day: listening, no, I don't think this recording works. The sound of the breath is okay in the dance video but here it is bothersome. And it looks like I didn't fully remove the former filters from the clip right at the end, which is alright in the recording I guess.

Anyway, I think to make something listenable I need to re-record the prose poem, perhaps layer it in the style I was developing in my last poetry album. A style I haven't continued exploring because, except for one person, no-one commented on, or even mentioned their response to the intricacy of all that layering of readings of single poems. Virtually none of the musicians whose music I used came by my Jamendo site to leave a comment and so I took that to mean they did not particularly like my experiments.

But, who knows? Everyone is so busy and working on their own stuff. I work mostly in a vacuum of silence and keep going, well I have no idea how. And I have experience from the past - the explosion of painting that produced the birth paintings in about a year (mostly from about May 1986-May 1987), and such a difficult topic, especially in those early days of 'women speaking their bodies,' left me feeling that I had accomplished something. But everyone who came to my house remained fixedly silent on them (ten were framed on my wall). I submitted them to an art show and was politely told they were not appropriate to show publicly, and to a 'feminist' magazine, and the photos were returned to me two years later in a brown envelope, no letter, no note, just a sense of anger emanating from that rejection. It was numbing, hard. It wasn't until around 2000 that I began to receive accolades on them, and some were used as journal covers, and one of the reasons I set up an accessible art website was because I get one or two academics requesting use of them in seminar or conference presentations every year.

And now we are nearly 25 years later, and the birth paintings continue to evoke strong and positive responses. I just have to remember how I was treated during the first ten years after producing them. The silence, the disapproval. Oh, people liked the colours. But the subject, the woman's growing belly, the opposite of the femme fatale, and birthing, the baby emerging from her, oh, it was too much for people in those days I guess.

Sort of like my poetry readings, video poems, and video dance poems. Perhaps. Who knows? Perhaps my current work isn't that good. I am unable to judge myself as others would see me. I only know that personally I feel I am amassing quite an oeuvre, and am accomplishing a multi-media art that incorporates and crosses disciplines and boundaries that leaves me mostly feeling good about myself.

But then, I always get self-reflective on Easter Sunday, depressed and resurrectory. It's a day of reBirth.

  dance/ ...indigo folio leaves by Brenda Clews

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

You can watch the video poem in this blog, or at YouTube.

direct link: Tree Bird Moon Ghost

White fire spills from
the cauldron of the night,
where spirits gather
before they arrive
and after they return.

The site where I drew the image. The bamboo music is a snippet from Desert, a free download on LastFM.

(Yesterday I uploaded this micro video poem to Blogger, and to my album of 'Poem Paintings' at Picasa, but was unable to view either on my iPhone. I've uploaded to YouTube, instead.)


This slide went by too quickly to
include it in the micro video poem.

Blogger's movie has a charm, yes it does. In that smallness.
Tree Bird Moon is also secretly -only not so now- uploaded
to Picasa. If you click on the image below you will go to a
decent size and resolution of the 23 second movie:

From Poem Paintings

Below, one of the slides I didn't use in the slideshow movie,
which was very short, and this slide whipped by too quickly
(click for a larger size, the scribbler site has potential,
I tell you it does):

White fire spills from
the cauldron of the night,
where spirits gather
before they arrive
and after they return.

direct link: Asura (Red Puma), '360.'

An album that shines, relaxing, full, sweeping, ghostly, beautiful... a symphonic New Age, without the superficiality of the latter, a whole forest of musical sounds, instruments, technical techniques, all founded on real voice, real instruments, O what a find! I downloaded three minutes into the first track. Highly recommended.

I like the abstraction of this still from 'dance/ ...indigo folio leaves,' and am currently using it as my YouTube Channel background while this video is featured.

I've been using a still from whatever video is featured as the background for my video channel at YouTube recently and quite like the echoing, painterly look that is achieved.

Each videopoem seems to have a strong and unique palette, and the colour schemes from one video to the next don't match. So I've enjoyed uploading an image from the current video as a background so that the webpage is a coherent visual presentation. Design? laughs -yes, all the way.

-
Update: I fiddled with it so much that YouTube is claiming to save my changes, and then reverting to a standard channel design when I click back. Some play is good, but not too much.

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

Incredibly well done animation. Blows you away with a huge vision, of longing, love, communication, art. That huge ocean between us all where we are all islands unto ourselves. Building figures out of sand, and snow, and the messages in the bottle, imaginative, sweet, clear, disarmingly innocent, and we fully understand the story without dialogue, voiceover or any other words. The cuts are perfect - I can't imagine the work that went into this. The story unfolds brilliantly. And, wow, gosh, it's so multiracial! A video for our times. Bottle
by Kirsten Lepore

direct link: joseph r tomlinson's nightmare.wmv

A favourite artist, Beardsley, and these drawings/paintings are like entering Beardsley's Salome and going right through those decadent art nouveau lines, into the heart of the Baptist's head on the platter. All the psychopathic, zombie, vampire lore of our era is here. Echos of the rich stories of comic book art (though 'fin de siecle' is stronger), of film noir, of Goth horror, are here. The blood and the violence and the sexuality. His Medusa is wickedly dangerous. Under the hand of tomlinson's draftsmanship, vivid, powerful work.

direct link: dance/ ...indigo folio leaves (with poem)

A dance that is creative movement, a moving meditation. Brenda Clews: prose poetry, dance, video. Music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

Music

...enters your backbone, joints, plucks the
cartilage holding you together. Music is the
moon of the red tides of your bloodstream.
Drift to and fro, a willow tree, or sway, bend,
a flamenco, stretch, purple morning glories
on the vine, jump. Sway your hips, delta of
fiery flow. Express yourself, woman. No-one
is watching. Say it all. The lyric travels tenderly
through your wrist, a memory of the wind on the
hill. You are an instrument of the musician who
is absent, gone. Whose music plays on; who
does not know you exist. Orphean muse. Twirl
on the floor, the beat in your ankles, room
spinning, see the canvas walls, luminous see
the sun, moon, stars that are always there.
Spin on the clock turning. Give everything.

Wanton woman. Harlot of the night. Mother of
angels. Insufferable radiance. Black hole of
emptiness. Sweet moan nectar.

Mystery dangles like your silver bracelets,
the ghosts are present. Approach yourself by
disappearing. Undulate your liquid bones.
Beautiful sensuality. Seek invisible illumination
in your writhing steps. Leave time, transform in
your multiplicity, a seer searching the spheres.
Manifest your dreams. Shake them out of the air
to materialize before you like light forms. Shimmy,
wet sweat, a flag in a wind storm. Thunder the
floor. Witch, werewolf, Goth beauty, fragile
starchild, cyberpunk, pull the sky down. Sway
those hips, woman. Sway them until you ignite.
Dance with your ineffable muse. Just, dance.

I pull purple veils over my vision, indigo
blue silk lights and shadows.

Listen: dance on the stage of your
imagination.


© by Brenda Clews, 2011



Contemplating the Muse