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.
Night is Paper is a cine-poetic collaboration with novelist Dr Thom Conroy.
The artistic process began with a slide show of images generated in Midjourney. The images prompted a sequence of text-based fragments which combine to evoke a sense of eves-dropping into a shadowy, indistinct world where nothing can be fully understood.
A mix of found sounds and electroacoustic music from the Free Music Archive build upon this mood of unexplained mystery.
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