Parlez à Voir
‘Love hath a language of his own
A Voice that goes from heart to heart – whose mystic tone
Love only knows’ (Thomas Moore Mute Courtship 1779-1852 from a Persian Love poem).
This extraordinary work deals with the human condition and its dialogue of what could be the understanding of love. The poet uses modern musical notation as an inventive way to keep the reader emotionally engaged. For example there is a sign to the reader to flutter over a word, or the symbol ‘ >’ over a word means accent letter, word or syllable or gesture forcing us to ‘see’ the word differently and so alter our thoughts via feelings. Some fifty notations are used to aid this along and to express the original emotional experience (the ‘erlebnis’) which gave rise to the poem.
The result is a mirroring of the written content in an aural effect – the creation of a new language to the words. It is written as if being said aloud, live and vibrant and raw, rather than to be skimmed over in a library. It is strikingly contemporary, un-nuanced on the surface but penetratingly intense in a struggle between inner and outer, between resistance and persuasion, between challenge and pace, between the Y and I of the poem.
It allows us to renew our contact with the origin of poetry as a spoken language.
Information
Parlez å Voir, Song, 2014. 104 pages.
A poem about its title, and an extraordinary work dealing with the human condition and its dialogue of what could be the attempt to understand love. The poet, orde uses modern musical notation as an inventive way to keep the reader emotionally engaged. Some fifty notates are used to aid this along and to express the original emotional experience (the ‘erlebnis’) which gives rise to the poem.
