17: Stevens, McShea

Texts: Wallace Stevens’s “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” and a poem by Baltimore poet Megan McShea, a section of a work written to live music at last year’s High Zero festival. Texts follow the sound files.

Stevens, short version (less than 30 seconds):

McShea, second-to-last take:

Stevens, as part of a 3-part take with repetition:

Last take of McShea poem:

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
– Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

III (section from a longer poem)
– Megan McShea

it’s in a jungle it’s on a
shelf in the morning.
We think about it and it’s baking.
Whal (pronounced like ‘pal’) presents
its history but is drowned out by
its living its
squeezing through an obsolete pore
through trees draped with seaweed
and all in the walls gangs of
what we’ll call
“the tremendously small”
think so roundly the quivers wall breaks –
it’s going on there with us
we’re okay you know we’re
getting busy getting things to spring up and
roll out while hard street birds with
desk jobs are taunting us from behind,
time like an alloy, a death compound.
A sound like tinsel flickers off the
nave of the corner church and its
flakes make hobbling noises, breaking
with our space traditions, while
basking in the air-deprived, fluorescent
apologies they offered out in the lobby.
On task, briefly loud, first you then me then
him, ignoring flies, traffic, bombs,
a quiet splatter, using tongs.

Our rehearsal on the 14th also included anadvanced session. (Texts: Rev. of “Emperor of Ice-Cream,” begin 3 Yeats poems (Drinking Song, Child Dancing In The Wind / Two Years Later, and No Second Troy.)

Recorded on Saturday, August 14 at The Blue Room at the Baltimore Free School.
Jake Appet (keyboards), Matthew Falk (vox), Richard Goldberg (vox), Paul Harrell (vox), Dara Weinberg (vox, dir), Jesse Wharton (sax, vox), Gavin Whitt (vox)