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meta poem

uploaded: Wed, May 16, 2012 @ 12:53 PM last modified: Wed, May 16, 2012 @ 12:55 PM (add)

by	robwalkerpoet
length	3:40
Recommends	Recommends (10)

This is a poem about the making of a poem. In January I’d signed up for the Leap of The Heart secret mixter before realizing that I’d be travelling in the far north of Japan. I got the secret artist sent to me while I was in a blizzard (luckily, inside a hotel which had internet in the lobby.) The following day I mixed Transcending Silence on my MacBook during a whole-day coach trip heading west. When I’d finished the remix I reflected on the entire bizarre experience and wrote a poem about it.
The music I chose is a sample by colab simply called piano 3/4. Looped, I find it hypnotic and achingly sad yet beautiful. Colab has a rich ore-body of under-utilised resources!
I’ve included a dry vocal stem & colab’s looped samples without my voice if anyone else wants to use this beautiful music.

meta poem

i have been to the north-eastern coast of hokkaido in winter going-with-the-floe in an ice-breaker-for-tourists and now we spend hours crossing back across the width of japan to sapporo. I spend elastic hours gazing at a pure-white landscape, the farmhouses and barns snowed in, the fir forests dabbed like plaster-of-paris scenes i’ve previously seen only on christmas cards.
and in between i am mixing on my laptop.

mixing my own previously-recorded voice reciting a poem i wrote years earlier about my father when he was still alive. blending it with some beautiful piano by dokashiteru and the slightly-raspy singing voice of hektor thillet. and i’ve never met these people but their music and my words are now embroidered into my poem, a constantly changing whitelinen landscape and my own emotions

and i am simultaneously still in that nursing hospital and inside the piano and hektor’s mouth and that minimal landscape has become a metaphor for life and death and i don’t know whether the scenery is a video-clip made for the poem or the pressure-changes in my headphones are the soundtrack for life playing out before my eyes but i am existing in all times, all places yet there is no past or future. Just here now.

© rob walker, 2012

Meta poem was first published in Australia’s Rabbit Poetry Journal (Issue #5, May 16, 2012.)