I’m absolutely thrilled to announce the publication of my first krahenlied poem, “The Power of Then,” in issue 13 of Ghost Proposal. This feels like a big step on a journey I’ve been on for several years now. It’s humbling. I’m deeply grateful that the editors at GP had faith in this piece and in this project and that they wanted to work with me to take this thing that’s been in my head for a very long time and turn it into a thing out here in the world.
The piece started out as a performance for flash crash 220806. If you tuned into that performance, this will be very familiar. Thanks, @tyleretters, for putting that beautiful event series together. Thanks, too, to @Galapagoose, @dan_derks, @vagueintl, @okyeron, @license, and everyone else who helped make krahenlied possible. Thanks to @walker for taking some time to patch and chat with me last summer; ideas from that day led directly to the patch I wound up using for this piece. And thanks to @alanza for reading the text version of this piece on the bus ride home from Dan and @jaseknighter’s norns/habitus workshop at luck dragon. Our conversation that day was enormously helpful.
Thanks, finally, to Eckhart Tolle, from whose Power of Now audiobook the spoken audio in this piece was derived.
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I just finished listening to the piece and it is truly a fabulous accomplishment. Congratulations! I look forward to spending more time listening and pondering with it. <3
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I like this a lot - musically and concept wise. Rearranging Speech is something I am into myself.
But I also wondered if it shouldn’t be mentioned that the ‘lyrics’ of this piece are written and read by Eckhart Tolle. Especially as it goes under the label poem?
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Yeah! This is a really interesting question. Iirc (and it was a while ago, so I might not), that was something I mentioned explicitly when I submitted the piece to Ghost Proposal. And of course, the title is meant to acknowledge the source material, Tolle’s The Power of Now. From a legal/ethical standpoint, I think the piece falls squarely under the category of fair use (I would liken its relationship to Tolle’s work to that of a cut-up poem to its source material), but I can see how a more explicit acknowledgement of the source material could be a good idea. I’m not an editor of Ghost Proposal, so I can’t change their website, but I’ve changed the op on this thread to acknowledge Tolle directly. It’s also worth mentioning, perhaps, that I began working on this piece in the weeks immediately following the release of Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. I had also just finished teaching a semester-long course on Lamar’s discography and the Bible at Temple University. So that album was very much on my mind throughout the process.
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