Tag: digital poems

Voyager -for a ‘poem bowl’ by Rupert Spira – and all four digital poems!

The fourth and final digital poem I made for my MIMA/Tees Women Poets residency was Voyager, written for Poem Bowl by potter, writer and philosopher Rupert Spira (b.1960). A vast black dish, it is decorated inside and out with a mostly illegible hand-written text that has been incised through the black glaze. Certain words can be made out, and these have been incorporated into the poem.

My inspirations for the imagery in the poem comes from the way the dish reminded me of both a warped vinyl record and a radio dish. Combined with the only partial legibility of the decoration, it led me to play with ideas of decaying signals and transmissions through space. The audio accompanying the digital poem features a short sample from “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holliday, which was the last message sent by NASA to the Mars Rover Opportunity before it ‘died’ in 2019.

The sound track for this poem was the most complicated, featuring free samples of for example vinyl record clicks and Cold War numbers stations alongside my own voice pushed through echo and distortion effects, and the poem text run through AI voice generators. All of this was put together using free Audacity software, which also allows you to create blocks of static interference.

The digital poem was also the most complex in terms of the kinetic typography, even though it was made in Canva in exactly the same way at 79AD and Origin Story. Drawing on the circular nature of the bowl, and all the images of records, radio dishes etc that are in the poem, I made the typography follow arcing pathways. The sections of text overlap and ‘degrade’, just like the audio. To make the effect of degradation I reduced the transparency of the text by degrees, sometimes in arcs that were offset so the faded echoes can still be read; and once in a fully-aligned circle with text blacked out except for certain selected letters.

I’m really proud of these digital poems! Here’s a reminder of the ceramics that inspired them – a leaning neck vase by Betty Blandino (Origin Story); a tazza by Annette Fuchs (79AD); a bowl by Deirdre Burnett (Egg Fiction); and a poem bowl by Rupert Spira (Voyager).

  • A rough and rusty-looking vase with a neck that is bent to the left.

And here are the finished digital poems in the loop as it appeared at MIMA. Headphones on!

For those that are interested in the sounds, here’s a list of all the sound clips I used – see if you can tell which poems they appeared in!

  • Volcano lava
  • Dripping cave
  • Message 4
  • Chickens
  • Seagull flock
  • Vinyl scratch skip loop
  • Cave music
  • Chucks Egg classic arcade game
  • Little chicken
  • Needle drop
  • Numbers station 332241
  • Seagull short
  • Vinyl scraped
  • Vinyl crackle 33rpm

Egg Fiction – for a bowl by Deirdre Burnett

Unbelievably, I didn’t take a decent photo of the third ceramic piece to become a poem in my Tees Women Poets @ MIMA residency, but here are some examples of Deirdre Burnett’s other work to give you a flavour. The one on the right is closest in colour and finish, but imagine it looking much more like an eggshell. The porcelain is also eggshell-thin, and quite small (ostrich egg?)

Egg Fiction draws on my own memories of collecting eggs and family folklore about witches’ boats. I learned charcoal animation for the resulting digital poem, and tried to keep a childlike feeling to the flow of images. I named the poem Egg Fiction because it is in no way an actual biography of Burnett’s route into ceramics.

The animation was entirely unplanned and freeform. I used a central egg motif, and simply kept doodling in and around it using charcoal and chalk, taking 2 shots every couple of marks made, using the free app StopMotion on my ancient reconditioned iPad mini. I didn’t do separate drawings frame by frame, every frame was drawn on the same piece of paper. Rubbing in, sweeping off dust, erasing, chalking over, layer upon layer over a combined total of around 8 hours, until my desk was grey and grubby! Completely backbreaking, utterly obsessive…

1500 frames later, having made a whole 58 seconds of film, I recorded the voice track for the poem and was devastated to see it come in at nearly 3 minutes long! Nooooo!!!! Radical editing of words ensued, but I was still only half way with the visuals. Physically unable to continue with hand-drawn animation, I came up with an ingenious solution to triple the length of the film. Importing the original animation into iMovies, I duplicated and layered the sequence over itself, using the editing app’s greenscreen feature to set first the darkest parts and then the lightest parts of each frame as a greenscreen. In this way, the rapidly metamorphing egg began to ghost itself…

Here’s the text for this most challenging and enjoyable piece. When I show you all four finished films in my next blog, you’ll hear that the voiceover for this poem is not me speaking. In fact, I had my first foray into AI-generation by using a text-to-voice app. There were many accents to choose from, and male and female voices of different age profiles. When you read the poem below, what voice can you ‘hear’ in your head? What accent would you have chosen in my place?

Egg Fiction

nanna sent her to steal an egg
fresh from the straw
the darkness clucked

it was the end of the world
it was a rite of passage
don’t trip!
don’t smash it!

don’t smash it too soon
soft-boiled children must learn
the tap the crack the dip the scoop

now smash the empties!
scuttle the coracles
so witches can’t sail to sea
with their wicked, wicked storms

but that warm, smooth weight
had ordained her palm

it’s enough to make her grow up a potter
throwing porcelain
not to shatter, but
to release the paradox-
strength and fragility are twins
this is the earth whose yolk brews wings

this is the earth that knows fire
in the kiln it turns into a little sun
little pitchers become themselves
or smithereen…

look, this bowl has hatched a dragon!
half-shell with a scorched equator

and in the bottom
freckle-speckles
like the memory
of a hen’s egg

The Tees Women Poets are currently open to applications for their autumn residency at MIMA’s Towards New Worlds exhibition. If you’re a woman poet in Teesside, especially if you identify as disabled or neurodiverse, take a look at the info and apply here.