Ian Badcoe Poetry

2018-03-29

NaPoWriMo 2018 Remix

It's nearly that time again: NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month.

This year again I think I'll do it naked — by which I mean I'll post the poems here, unedited, as I turn them out.

As previously: Expect a poem for each day, not always on the day in question, I do have a life and it would be unrealistic not to allow a little give and take, but expect 30 brand new poems in roughly the next 30 days.

I seem to have joined rather more groups devoted to this that usual. Hopefully this will mean a wide variety of prompts; I hope it doesn't mean I lose track of half the places where I have promised to post things...

In the meantime that is last year's pencil, I must get a nice sharp new one...

2018-01-30

New Muses for a Posthuman Age

I follow a filk singer/songwriter called Dr Mary Crowell and on her album: Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour she has a song: Courting My Muse. This track inspired me to write a sonnet sequence about how the Muses might be updated for the 21^st century.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there, I've written sonnet sequences before...

...however when I came to record this, I had a problem. Muses are female and plural, where I am male and singular. So I hatched a plan. I put out a call to various female poetry friends asking them whether they would like to be one of my Muses (I phrased it a little more carefully than that.)

To my delight friends signed up in sufficient numbers to be able to record all nine Muses, plus a group effort for my bonus "Omnes" sonnet that rounds things off at the end, and I was doubly delighted when Mary Crowell leapt at the opportunity to participate (bringing the whole thing full circle...)

I've spent some time editing these together with sound effects and music to complement the poems. I also recorded myself narrating between the various goddesses in my guise as "The Mortal".

I have to say I'm very pleased with the result. There's something uniquely satisfying in hearing talented voices read your work back to you, and it also is also educational, bringing out things in the poems that wouldn't be there in my reading.

Cast in order of appearance:

The Mortal

A man, like any other...

Ian Badcoe

This is my blog you are already reading...
Facebook
Twitter

Calliope

Goddess of Complex Computation and Difficult Projects

Natalie Shaw

Natalie Shaw is a poet who also works for the Government Digital Service. She is @redbaronski on Twitter and writes very occasionally on her blog: https://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com/

Clio

OMG of Celebrity Gossip and Fan-fic

N Magennis

N Magennis is an author and artist. She lives in Argyll. https://nikkimagennis.com/

Euterpe

Rock Goddess

Amy Kinsman

Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor of Three Drops From A Cauldron and the host of the regular Sheffield-based open mic, Gorilla Poetry. Their debut poetry pamphlet & was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2017 and is due out in April this year.
Facebook
Twitter: @manykinsmen

Erato

Goddess of Personal Development and Self Image

Juliet Anthill

Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull with a SORN'd Fiat Punto and a cat called Alice. She has poems coming out in Magma and Prole this Spring.

Melpomene

Goddess of Heartbreaking News

Dr Mary Crowell

Dr. Mary Crowell is a geeky musician from north Alabama who is very active in the filk community. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano at a local community college as well as at her home studio. Mary loves to write songs about mythology, gaming, coffee, beagles, and zombies. You can find her gaming album Acolytes of the Machine & Other Gaming Stories (2012) on Pandora Radio. Her latest album (funded by Kickstarter) is Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour (2017).
Patreon
http://marycrowell.com/

Terpsichore

Goddess of Body Modification and Bionics

Jenn Zed (Cyborg Edition)

Ms. Zed is an artist and writer who lives in Bath, England, with her cat. You can view her Portfolio at https://jennzedblog.wordpress.com/

Thallia

Goddess of Lies we tell Ourselves

Rosemary Badcoe

Rosemary Badcoe’s first collection, Drawing a Diagram, is available from Kelsay Books or directly from her. She is editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon and has been published in a range of magazines.

Urania

Goddess of Space Shots and Surprisingly Distant Robots

Brenda Levy Tate

Brenda celebrates life in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wanders outdoors at midnight, camera and tripod at the ready. She's especially drawn to astrophotography, so Urania is her particular Muse. She was a senior high drama and English teacher for endless years. Now she's a cat lady, poet, occasional singer and cheerful retiree.
Her book: Wingflash
brendatate.com

Polyhymnia

Goddess of Misc.
and Everything
and Holism
and Interdisciplinary Studies
and All That...

Jenn Zed

Biography as above

Credits read by

David Callin

David Callin lives on the Isle of Man.

Additional vocals

Rosemary Badcoe

Sound effects acknowledgements

All sound effects were downloaded from freesound.org under either The Creative Commons Attribution License, The Creative Commons Public domain License, The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License or The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Changes were made such as fading-in and -out, tempo/frequency shifts, noise reduction etc...

The effects used can be found at:

2018-01-29

New Muses, more details...

Possibly I was being a touch too much of a tease in my last post.

What I've done is written a sequence of ten sonnets: nine in the voices of a single Muse, but upgraded for the 21^st century; and the tenth from all nine.

Then I found a group of nine like-minded individuals—you may find it disturbing that I can so easily find nine like-minded individuals—got them to perform the individual sonnets, and then mixed the performances together with some narration and a selection of supporting sound effects.

It has been a most inspiring experience. Hearing such a variety of voices performing my words has shown me things about the poems that I would not have heard had I merely recorded them myself, and the process of editing and adding sound effects to each recording has had me concentrating on phrases, individual words, or sometimes just the space between a pair of words.

It is nearly ready for release now. I just need to dot some "i"s and double-cross some senior priests...