Day's Instruments

Gloomy Sunday, On a Tuesday (10 min.) is a sound collage of repeated, recycled and cyclical recorded voices singing and saying different versions of “Gloomy Sunday,” (a.k.a.) “The Hungarian Suicide Song” (1933) by Rezso Seress, in every day cityscapes. Theses voices are positioned alongside a sound poem that responds to re-memberings of the song and its hauntological (Derrida, Specters of Marx xx) relation to suicide and mourning. The poem juxtaposes my perception of “Gloomy Sunday” (1933) as a song that vocalizes modern alienation, defeat and processes of mourning against a distorted and fictionalized memory of my mother’s suicide within family narratives that buried her death it in secrecy. My reading of the poem will be layered between voices of “Gloomy Sunday” creating auditory hallucinations that “mishear” the content of what is being “said” (in the song) towards a repetition of mourning that does not recover, but rather opens-up new orientations towards listening to a fragmented voice. Building upon Canadian composer, Raymond Murray Schafer’s, tradition of “Sound Souvenirs,” I will use audio technologies to reconstruct memories of “Gloomy Sunday” that attend to a past in which I did not participate. My interest in this sound recording method is to explore how sound poetics can move beyond text into realms of perception that re-member (put it back together in a new way) an event, and re-open experience in ways that do not cover-over its emotional voice, but attempt to utter its story of suffering in otherwords. The recorder’s ability to amplify and superimpose sound enables a rediscovery of the human voice as a site of memory, imagination and music.

2016

Since beginning school at the University of Arkansas in 2008 I have learned many lessons both in and outside the classroom. To date, the most challenging lessons have been those that I have learned about myself. The manifestation of the person that I am today has been an adventure with many twists and turns. This piece aims to capture the essence of some of the lessons that I have learned. Each poem offers the product of that lesson. The movement entitled “Memories” has a subdued joy in its message. The poem offers nostalgia to begin the piece with. However, it is also a commentary on my own struggles with memory loss. The following movement, “The Musicians’ Wife,” is an exploration of relationships. While the external message may focus on the relationship with another person, the internal message is about the relationship with the self. The third movement, “The Road Not Taken,” is a poem by Robert Frost. The poem’s message is to encourage individuals to walk a different path than e...

Family Medicine, 2019

Journal of Musical Arts in Africa, 2013

Critical Quarterly, 2011

2013

This thesis is composed of two parts: Hoard, a collection of poems, and Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry, an inquiry into the metaphor of darkness in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry. Hoard includes four series of poems-'Red Boat', 'Hoxne', 'Quatrefoils' and 'White Swan'-which use the Hoxne hoard as a metaphor for lost love. The second series is titled 'Foundlings', and is based on archival tokens from children who were abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century. The third series includes 'Elegy' and 'Decorations', and uses descriptions of the Staffordshire hoard along with eyewitness accounts of global conflict in the late-twentieth century to the present day. Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry examines the theme of loss presented in the poems Hoard, progressing from orphans to silenced women to bereavement to war to ecological disaster. The book is a series of mediations of a central topic and includes close readings that show how an individual contemporary writer uses the topic within his or her work. Meditation One posits that forms of loss appear in poetry as metaphors of darkness, and proceeds historically through the work of Dante, Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright; the chapter ends with a close reading of John Burnside's prose poem 'Annunciations' (Common Knowledge). Meditation Two looks at the mythological uses of the concept of darkness, especially as it represents ego loss, and discusses Joan Retallack's 'Afterrimages'; the chapter closes with a discussion of Rusty Morrison's Whethering and when the true keeps calm biding its story. Meditation Three looks at the emotions of lost love, both familial and romantic, and includes a discussion of Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions and ethics. The chapter includes close readings of Elizabeth Robinson's The orphan and its relations and Susan Howe's That This. Meditation Four discusses the pain caused by war and the form of my long poem 'Decorations'; it includes an examination of Seamus Heaney's North. The chapter concludes with an essay on Maxine Chernoff's book Without. Meditation Five discusses objects and how they become a part of the body and therefore become a potential locus for both pain and loss; the chapter closes with a close reading of Brenda Coultas' The Handmade Museum. The themes and ideas are reiterated in the Conclusion.

1944

Abstract As a poet and language educator, I am often asked, Is this a good poem?, as if I carry some kind of standard measuring device for assessing the value of poems. But, perhaps the important question is not, Is this a good poem?, but instead, What is a poem good for? So, in this paper, I offer five reasons why poetry is important for living.

Fillip No. 19, 2014

A conversation between myself and Bettina Funcke, who served as Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13).