Field Recordings
4/5
()
About this ebook
Inspired by the life and writings of famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Field Recordings is divided into three sections. It is anchored by a long poem that tracks Alan Lomax on his 1938 journey through Michigan collecting music for the Library of Congress. This poem speaks to the complex process of recording the voices and stories of working-class musicians in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. It is rich with the pleasures of music and storytelling and is steeped in history. Like the rest of the collection, it also speaks to the questions and anxieties that, like music, transcend time and technology.
In poems alternately elegiac and rhapsodic, Field Recordings explores the way art is produced and translated, the line between innovation and appropriation, and the complex, beautiful stories that are passed between us. From poetry readers to poets, music fans to musicians, this collection will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.
Related to Field Recordings
Related ebooks
100 Cassettes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStatic in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEco-Sonic Media Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEight Lectures on Experimental Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe World Soundscape Project Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsListening In Dreams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPulses in the Centre of Silence: Composition Scores and Artistry Concepts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOcean of Sound: Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the Arts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDervish at the Crossroads: A Soundquest Through the First Two Decades of the New Millennium Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRepresenting Sound: Notes on the Ontology of Recorded Musical Communications Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDr. Eleanor's Book of Common Spiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology and Electronic Dance Music Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Goddess: Inside Madonna Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Revolutionary Spirit: A Post-Punk Exorcism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard's Illuminated "Scivias" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDistillation of Sound: Dub and the Creation of Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDysfunction and Decentralization in New Media Art and Education Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMetaphysical Licks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Field Recordings
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Field Recordings - Russell Brakefield
Nietzsche
I
The Way We Learned to Sing
At the bar again, my back to the band,
I’m listening for the quieter animal
inside my body instead.
Outside—what passes from field to rot
and back to snow—
the ribs of March are kicking through.
And there are beasts bent across these hills
that fill the night with praise
for the natural order.
Who the elder mammal here
and who newer?
Their howls scrape the black screen
like a symphony warming.
Each voice strays the pack
but is prepared to collapse together
to sing the length of history’s body.
A slip of land beyond the city’s edge
is threaded with ancient shadows,
animals savage and famished
and put down like black patches on the snow
as though they fell
and their shapes, in falling,
opened room enough in the sky
for the stars to form.
This Is America and We Are Boys
We have been wild for so long now,
boyish and red with reminders
of the importance of acquisition—
a knife against the apple’s skin,
the thin cycle of streetlamps on pavement.
Hounds are blessing the backs of buildings
we don’t know how to leave,
blessing our exhaust breath. Ghost hounds,
back for the scraps.
Choose this vice or choose that, we say,
and count a tornado of slow concessions—
hives, inhibitives, acid reflux.
Choose this vice more than that, we say,
and find one heavy blanket to be enough.
When, in summer, we build a raft
of foam and rope and bend it into a thin river,
we know the statement we are making—
this is America and we are boys
slowly tiring into our fathers.
Our bodies are shorn and hung
with sly shadows. Our bodies hope
against the crack of armchair,
thick lung, hot chest.
The river, once dry then revived,
this is beauty we recognize
and destroy. A diorama,
slack edge of time, not knowing
what to do with even this—
just enough rope to keep ourselves alive.
The Butcher’s Boy
Whitman’s father was a carpenter
and conceivably also had boot-stained socks.
Mine, in the evenings, has his own beard
and copper foot stuck on the couch.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, he says
and Ask forgiveness, not permission.
And I form the beginnings of a sorrow
that erupts and erupts in the presence of women.
My father’s father was a butcher called Chuck
who died young and in the night,
his chest a suddenly collapsing fire,
the smaller kindling wrapped and eaten.
On the radio today—The Butcher’s Boy,
a version that I can’t recall
but do not