The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.
Her poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés."
If We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.
As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.
I found an old note that contained a project to write a haiku every day. My project started in December 2018 and ended promptly in January 2019. The themes included work, baking, and difficulty finding nice fabric.
“Controlled environments” are another of modernism’s great obsessions. Extravagant amounts of energy are spent to keep buildings—as well as skyway systems, shopping malls, and domed stadia—at a constant temperature year-round via entirely mechanical means. The folly is not simply a touchy-feely isolation from the authenticities of nature, which can admittedly be cruel, but a larger disciplinary presumption that seeks to extend the centralized authority (central air, central government) of power ever more comprehensively. It is possible that this particular hubris may have pushed Gaia to the tipping point.