Work-in-progress sample: ‘The Turn: Kinetic Poetry’
Before I ever designed for theater, I was a composer, and before I ever composed with sound, as a child, I learned to compose with words. I had two wonderful writers for parents and they blessed me with the gift of written language. As a composer and a reader, I subscribe to the Mathias Énard theory of music: ““Music is time domesticated, reproducible time, time shaped.” John Cage pushed the idea with 4’33” and sound designer/composer Richard K. Thomas builds from the idea, rephrasing it as “music is time manipulated,” before building a case that, therefore, all intentional manipulation of time is musical — theatre, dance, film — and the practitioners of those crafts are all specialized musicians (Recommended Reading: Thomas’s ‘Music as a Chariot: The Evolutionary Origins of Theatre in Time, Sound, and Music’).
So in that spirit, I present these words, arranged in time for you.
Before embodiment in time, each poem begins on paper, my own kind of crossword, lines that can be read left-to-right as well as top to bottom, and as the eye sees fit in between. These are the beginning of a bigger collection, intended to be installed in libraries as infinitely generative video projections, as well as future electro-mechanical embodiments of the same poetic form.
Turning / Of my Fan
(sound on!)