Covid Sonnets - a poetry cycle

When Covid struck I knew what I wanted to do. In the spirit of my studies into musical disruption I aimed for home studio perfection. I wanted to see how life like I could make new classical music, to break the ivory tower of the concert hall as the place where high art is made, so I made a song cycle, it’s posh for album! This project houses songs and poems. Here are the poems, the songs are next door at 'Covid Mantras'.

Covid Mantras and Sonnets were made at home during lock down. I contacted a number of writers, who wrote and recorded poems of response onto portable audio recorders I posted to them. In the cases where we could (legally) meet I recorded them. What did the writers do? They responded to loss, sometimes by looking at a major event in their own lives, sometimes comparing social isolation to the climate crisis, sometimes processing their own grief and loss. This is Covid Sonnets, and by the way there is not one sonnet in the album.

After the poems were recorded I spent some weeks conducting field recordings within the 5km radius I was allowed to cover on my daily walks. I combined field recordings with the poems, and I feel that the combination is just right. Normally I compose and play some instruments in such an undertaking, but on reflection I think it is more fitting to listen to nature while we investigate our own natures at this time.

This was therefore the first piece of spoken word I composed entirely with found sounds. Each poem inspired days of walking with my field recorder, because we were deprived of company I wanted this to be a duet between people and the natural world. This cycle is about loss, people dying or withering away from the inside in social isolation. Maybe this is a modest requiem for those who lived and died alone, especially relevant in the project, one of the poets, Anna (Uma) passed away during the project.

Larry Buttrose, Stephanie Dowrick, Jan Allen, Anna (Uma) Voigt, Sue Woolfe, Stephen Sewell and myself all wrote and recorded poems.

The fact that a recording like was undertaken in a bedroom is not new for popular music, though it is still a relatively novel process in art music and possibly pretty rare for poetica. The work was recorded, edited and mixed entirely on headphones, something that is frowned upon by audio professionals, as certain frequencies are boosted unnaturally by them. There is also no crosstalk, the mixing of sound between two speakers, an effect that aids mixing.

As Miles Davis said. 'So what'! I do not think the technicalities of the project are very important. There is heart in these voices, and they remind us of why we need the arts right now, for the pandemics still rages, almost invisible, but not to those who are suffering. Artists work with the dissonances of the world and allow them to coexist so that the rest of us can get on with things. With that in mind I want to thanks the poets and the interpreters of poems for this textual journey into tenderness. Go well friends and friends yet met, Kim