"Dirge Without Music"....with, um, music: a poem/animation {official Thing} (Patreon)

HELLO MY LOVES.

I am putting down my heavy, wet, white flag for long enough to hop into writing and posting mode to get this project out the door, but god darnit, is it the perfect project for a white flag week. 

I read your comments on my white flag post and felt....well, less alone. So many of you are dealing, dealing, dealing with heavinesses. Mental health crises - short and long term - and playing the support roles to those who are struggling, illnesses, family shit, workplace catastrophes, unemployment, moving houses....pets getting old and dying. If it ain't one thing...

....at least we aren't alone.

We aren't alone.

Sometimes a poem is all you need to get through the day. I've been reading more poetry lately, or, to be exact, I've been listening to more poetry lately....nothing like hearing the words of the wider truths being whispered in your ears when you need the reminder to look up at the sky, the stars, the planes, the branches, the birds, the chemtrails and remember what they actually are: miracles.

My shoulders drop when I hear a poem.

I recommend a poem a day. May I recommend https://poems.com/ for a daily dose and may I also recommend that you chare poetry constantly with one another, whether it's here in the comments, or on the facebook group, or on the shadowbox forum. I just started a little thread for you called "pomes that will save your life":

 https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/the-poems-that-will-save-your-life/8915

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Greetings from Waiheke Island...where my weird little Countdown to America is happening. I'm aiming for departure at the top of June. I'm scrambling to watch after Ash - it's the school holidays, and things are wonky - and also get the house slowly packed up, the car sold, the piano returned, the fundraiser for ArtWorks Theater put together (Aucklanders: save the date!!! May 20/21, plus hopefully a patron party!), and all the objects and feelings sorted. 

Leaving.

It's a death, of sorts, but I'm heading towards all sorts of new beginnings. 

And this project could not be more perfectly or poetically timed. 

"I am not resigned."

I am not resigned.

My dear patrons, I come to you with a beautiful - a truly beautiful and moving - THING.

It's a little multimedia project I did with the illustrator-turned-animator Sophie Blackall ("turned"....for this project! she LEARNED! see below) and her musician cousin, Tom McRae.

It's a heartfelt-poem reading I recorded of "Dirge Without Music" by the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milay, with moving art that will break your heart....and, ironically, MUSIC!!!

DIREGE WITHOUT MUSIC WITH MUSIC WITHOUT MUSIC.

You can play it in the embed above, or here's the vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/685662758

(It's hosted on Maria Popova's "Universe in Verse" channel...and it was The Universe in Verse that gave birth to this little bang of a project.)

Here is the poem, then the story.

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DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

.......

The "Universe In Verse" project was conceived and put together by my friend Maria Popova, who many of you know as the woman behind Brainpickings.org, now re-titled The Marginalian. She describes it as “A charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry”. Some of you in the New York area have ATTENDED IT in Brooklyn, I know, because I've met some of you there. :)

In its live-stage-show form, it's often been held at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn as an evening of POEMS ABOUT SCIENCE and THE NATURAL WORLD, readaloud from a podium by artists and scientists, and threaded together in the way that only Maria can thread.

So, usually it’s a very LIVE live-show celebration (and I’ve taken part in a few of them in the flesh), but currently - because all the reasons - Maria's producing an online ‘Animated Season’ instead. 

In Maria's words, “Each chapter begins with a science story and ends with an animated poem chosen to illuminate the scientific fact with the sidewise gleam of feeling.”

She asked if I would get involved, and I decided to use the patreon to give it a little extra boost and budget. Hooray for patronage! You make magic happen, you really do. Not just for me, but for all the artists who worked on this.

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You can read the full “Universe in Verse” post on Maria’s blog The Marginalian, complete with science story about Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy, here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/03/25/dirge-without-music-emmy-noether/

The animation is by Sophie Blackall, who you MAY recognize as the writer and illustrator of a certain children’s book that I whipped out during our webcast some time ago....

HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!!!!

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The gorgeous music was composed by her cousin Tom McRae, who’s based in the UK....

here's his linktree for more info.

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So it is, and so it will be. 

For so it has been, time out of mind.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew...

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses....

Oh.

......

This shero....

A little bit about Edna St Vincent Millay for you, from poetryfoundation.org:

Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of the most successful and respected poets in America. Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms, creating a unique American poetry. But Millay’s popularity as a poet had at least as much to do with her person: she was known for her riveting readings and performances, her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and, above all, her embodiment and description of new kinds of female experience and expression.

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From Sophie Blackall:

Dear Patrons,

When Maria Popova asked me to work on animating Edna St. Vincent Millay’s wrenching poem Dirge Without Music, of course I said yes. YES, I said, with all the confidence of a person who had no earthly idea what she was doing. I thought I might make a stop motion film with cut paper, and so I gave that a go. How hard could it be? Eight hours later, I had a few clunky seconds of a bird flapping across a page. And so like any reasonable person I gave up in frustration and forgot all about it. And then I got shingles. Someone described shingles as feeling like your torso is in the grip of a rusty bear trap that has been sitting in hot coals and dipped in poison ivy. This is an alarmingly accurate description. Here is a picture of me with shingles.

But this animation wasn’t going to make itself, and Amanda had recorded her beautiful reading of the poem, and Tom was waiting for something to set to music, and so, from my bed of shingles, I began to work digitally, drawing and animating frames using procreate on an iPad. Slowly, slowly, hundreds and thousands of frames. Bringing flocks of birds and climbing roses and murmurations to life.

And there was enormous solace in this slow work, thinking about grief, death, and loss, and life and love, and making something out of nothing. I thought about Tom, across the Atlantic, and Amanda, across the Pacific and weaving together thoughts and words and music and pictures into something no one of us could have made on our own. It felt like a gift. That is Maria Popova’s gift; bringing together ideas and centuries and people in beautiful and surprising ways.

I look at this thing we made and I think about all those we’ve loved and lost, who have gone to feed the roses, and I think about the roses and I feel glad to be alive.......

-Sophie

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From Tom McRae:

Dear Patrons,

Although most of my music making consists of songwriting (for myself and others) it's always fun to be involved in a collaboration, especially if it's my cousin, Sophie. And of course, to be part of Maria's project was an honour. And as a fan of Amanda's work, how could I say no?

I've written soundtrack music for several film projects and art installation pieces over the years, and I'm always hoping that the visual element will be continually inspiring for the length of the writing process (and the ENDLESS repeat viewings required) as the music gets fine-honed and whittled down.

But this was a joy. The animation kept offering up new things each time I watched it, and Amanda’s soulful reading became hypnotic and almost mantra-like, so I wanted the music to reflect that. With the achingly lovely images and Amanda's voice doing all the heavy lifting, the best thing to do was to try and stay out of the way, and not have the music direct the emotion that was already there in abundance.

The words and images flowed so well together, it felt like the music needed to be no more than a gentle stream beneath it all.

Also, I have an affinity for writing anything to do with birds, as a robin visits me in my studio and demands feeding several times a day. 

I like to think that she doesn't judge my own singing too harshly.

If anyone’s interested, you can find my own stuff here on Spotify 

@tommcrae on Twitter and @tommcraemusic on Instagram.

-Tom

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If you enjoyed this and want a little stroll down memory lane, there are a couple of other Universe In Verse projects from years past that were also funded by Patreon...

In 2017, I read Neil’s poem The Mushroom Hunters, featuring music by Jherek Bischoff, and it was animated by the team at Creative Connection...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak6sdSAcNkw&ab_channel=AmandaPalmer

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AHHHHHHHH

What a joy to be able to work with these beautiful, soulful people.

Sophie, Tom, I can't wait to meet you in person one day and hug you.

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And you, dear patrons:

Your patronage helped this all happen, and will be helping to fund all of us as we endeavor onwards.

This is, as usual, amazing.

.......

FROM THE VAULT.....

Just a blast from the "Universe in Verse" past.....

In 2018, I joined Zoe Keating, Sean Ono Lennon, and John Cameron Mitchell for a performance of Big Yellow Taxi. You can see the performance from the event here....https://vimeo.com/275680141

and i THINGED the little official recording we did of it here, oh so long ago!: https://www.patreon.com/posts/big-yellow-taxi-19387276

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AND THEN there was....

Here’s the FULL "Universe in Verse" show from 2019 (I pop up at about 33:30...)

https://vimeo.com/332096199?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=1022824

(And if you enjoyed this, you can also see highlights of previous shows here, in case you wanna dive in. I HIGHLY recommend it: https://www.themarginalian.org/tag/the-universe-in-verse/)

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The Universe in Verse also gave birth to "The Mushroom Hunters".

Neil Gaiman loves a deadline-event-project-deadline as much as I do, and Maria asekd him to compose a poem for the Universe in Verse.

I read it aloud, then we used patronage to turn it into a beautiful animation....

It's one of the most beautiful and "wow, only with patreon" things I've ever put out, because animation is EXPENSIVE!!!! And makes no money.

But with patronage, boom. Why not.

And ohhhhhh....I hadn't visited this video for a while, it's had almost 300k views!! Sheesh.

Thanks, patronfamily. We made a thing!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak6sdSAcNkw

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And finally.....

Sophie runs a little non-profit called Milkwood Farm, a retreat for creatives in the children’s book industry...and I'm gonna take some of this thing-money and make a donation.

I am sure she would love it if you did, too.

LOOK:

Nestled in a valley in the West Catskills of New York State, Milkwood Farm sits on 20+ acres of wildflower meadows and hardwood forest, with mossy stone walls and a meandering stream.

Built in the 1850s and run as a working dairy farm until 2006, Milkwood is now a creative retreat for the children’s book community—artists and writers, librarians and educators, editors, art directors, agents, and booksellers—to come together to write and draw, to think and walk, to talk and eat and drink.

The converted barn accommodates 10 guests, with lovely bedrooms and spacious bathrooms. Meals prepared in the large farmhouse kitchen are served at long communal tables in the dining room, with views of rolling hills. There is a stone fireplace and a welcoming bar.

The two-story library has a growing collection of 5000+ picture books, and comfortable chairs in which to read them, as well as tables for studying, drawing, or writing.

The 100-foot hayloft is an inspiring space for lectures or presentations, yoga classes or celebratory dinners, and for working on large-scale projects.

Outside, the open-air barn is an enormous, covered, multi-purpose space with picnic benches, cafe tables, and a BBQ area.

Milkwood provides guests with equipment for recreation and wellness—yoga mats and mountain bikes, a ping-pong table and picnic baskets.

There are walking paths by the stream or through the woods, and vegetable gardens and fruit trees.

Nearby college towns are Delhi (20 minutes) and Oneonta (30 minutes). It’s a short drive to swimming holes and antiquarian bookshops, and the scenic 26-mile Catskills Rail Trail.

Milkwood is run by Sophie Blackall, an author and illustrator, and Ed Schmidt, a playwright, and is named after "Under Milk Wood", by Dylan Thomas.

YOU CAN DONATE HERE:

https://www.milkwoodfarm.org/donate

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LET'S ALL GO THERE!!!!!!

FIELD TRIP WHEN I AM HOME????

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That's it for now.

I LOVE YOU ALL.

We have the Althing coming, and a response to the TikTok/Town Hall post coming your way.

Thank you for being my patrons.

More soon.

x

AFP

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

1. if you are a patron and new to my work, don’t forget your patronage allows you access to ALL of my patreon releases to date. HERE is the link to download my latest big solo record, “There Will Be No Intermission”, and HEREis a link to download the PDF of the art/essay book that goes with it.

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http://amandapalmer.net/things

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