Poetry News

‘I lifted twenty-two poems from the perfect nowhere where poems live and threw them into the perfect din of music’: Michael Zapruder on Pink Thunder

Michael Zapruder checked in with Impose magazine to talk about Pink Thunder.

Here’s some:

A while ago, I took words on pages and planned music to go with the words. I wrote upper case letters above phrases, lower case letters above syllables. I made sets of directions for specific sounds to make and notes to sing. I lifted twenty-two poems from the perfect nowhere where poems live and threw them into the perfect din of music.

I followed those directions and turned them into electrons on tapes and bits on hard drives. I built up information that computers can interpret as sounds. I gradually constructed recordings, wrestling with heavy, lifeless things in my studio on the vacant ground floor of a commercial building on Franklin Street, to turn these half-formed golems into something living, something as graceful as a tern or a kestrel, or a bear or an eel.

When what I was hearing seemed like it was more than the sum of its parts – when it seemed like music – I loaded it onto tiny disks, like folds in grey matter. I clicked those into small circuits, like little brains, that live inside platforms that are like skulls. I put strange objects on top, like bodies. Then they sat like little servants, like wind-up birds that react to every situation with the same one call.

They waited for you to come pick up the headphones and press a red button to make them sing.

Full piece here.

Tags: Michael Zapruder
Posted in Poetry News on Friday, December 14th, 2012 by Harriet Staff.