Songs

By Martin Sercombe and E.E.Cummings

 
 
The American poet E. E. Cummings’ work began to enter the public domain in 2019, which then allowed other artists to make use of his poetry in derivative works across a range of media.
 
 Taking advantage of this, Songs chooses five short poems from his first three volumes: Tulips and Chimneys, & and XLI Poems as the basis for extension into the realm of the moving image.
 
 The translation poses a number of challenges, namely finding ways to preserve the lyrical flow of Cummings’ language as it might be read or spoken, whilst preserving his idiosyncratic use of syntax, line breaks and punctuation. The second challenge is finding appropriate ways to illustrate Cummings’ word images without over defining or misconstruing their meanings or intents. 
 
These five works make no claims to have solved these problems. Rather, they attempt to preserve the spirit of the original works via complementary sounds, music and imagery, reinventing and reimagining them in the process.
 
All the images were generated using Midjourney, and the soundtracks comprise of public domain music selected from the Free Music Archive.

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