Poems Part1

jimbouchard

The whole piece was 24 minutes long. It’s a whole bunch of short poems that I wrote back in 1976, read one after the other, under which I added ambient sounds, playing some harmonica and banjo and using samples and effects of various types, synths, etc. It’s pretty subtle, but rather than upload a low bitrate version of the whole piece I decided to break it into 4 parts. If you want tohear it as I intended, download all 4 parts and create a gapless CD of the 4 tunes in iTunes.
The poems were in 2 small sketchbooks, those typical blank sketchbooks with black covers, around 4”x6”. I set myself and exercise at the time to do 4 drawings a day in the book that were around 2x2” square and under each drawing I printed a short poem. One of the books was all naturalistic nature drawings and the other was abstract nature drawings. I drew on every other page and both books were filled and then I put them away and didn’t think about them again until recently when I decided to scan the pages and I’d posted some on my facebook wall. The drawings were done with a fairly light pencil and the printing is really small and hard for my eyes to read now so this was one way to make them easier to read. That takes a bit of work to scan all those out of the books and it occurred to me that I could use them to make a long piece for my RPM album.
Since the books were on a shelf for a long time, and I’m a speaker, I called the album Bookshelf Speaker.