WELCOME TO DREAMSTORIES
This Player has a video introduction you may find helpful.
To start it, or turn it off, click on screen.
To start it, or turn it off, click on screen.
TO SOULSPEAK,
YOU MAY WANT TO
CHECK OUT THE
GUIDE TO SOULSPEAK
If not, on to DREAMSTORIES.
This blog is about a radically new type of video I
call DREAMSTORIES.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRorp91azhbTKrrHqm43owOzARr_CMMGe7MLJnNKEosBg-9NoYfIxQSIuYbUYvCea0Lc-JaFV6ydhsC6tCfgJ6BhU3oZU7SB2uTSAGjLZ7lLyRW3iHDZ4IXXUb15Eh3bOIk2pElP8vN039/s320/Grabbed+Frame+1+BLUE+GOD+100x100.jpg)
What you are seeing and hearing in the opening Player at the
top of this page is a Dreamstory. The soundtrack consists of a spontaneous
oral poem called a speaking. You should watch and listen to it, because it will
help will clarify some of the things I'm about to say.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHWm1IqDmsqb9DANnvhZVqMKlLRnmVHfQK5LXUQ_hf0cOAgpLIznXfJghD1WmUWh8LJJH29uMtJtMOPwhzEUwVhGGZWXe-nOEEyHHTuP36eT34ghIbLMSgrWpIeHHPFv9K5kbqNZJrnbw0/s320/EYE+GLASS+FOR+PERSONAL+PHOTO+300x300.jpg)
If you like what you see, you may want to go further. I should remind you that the form is so different from contemporary written and spoken poetry that you can get confused if you don't turn off your questioning, conscious mind for a while and simply let it fall on you like rain.
I believe Dreamstories represent a new form
of short dramatic video. They have been a continuing project of mine
since 2002 and hopefully one whose aims and methodology will eventually be
adopted and furthered by others. I am simply ahead of the curve.
Let me explain what I mean by a new form of short
dramatic video.
My Dreamstories
are closer to the "ordinary" stories of Kafka than of Hemingway, in that they are propelled by the
logic of dreams, the unconscious mind. It wouldn't be far off the mark to describe
my Dreamstories as something like a waking dream.
The narrative of a Dreamstory, on the other hand,
is driven by the mysterious motivations of the unconscious mind and proceeds in
the metaphoric, unpredictable manner of dreams to an often equally mysterious
conclusion.
My Dreamstories tend to be concerned with archetypal themes: death, birth, love, fate, the soul's journey. They are like our most important dreams in that respect.
My Dreamstories tend to be concerned with archetypal themes: death, birth, love, fate, the soul's journey. They are like our most important dreams in that respect.
Similarly, Dreamstories progress with the
quicksilver, unpredictable movement of dreams and also have some of the
visual and time distortions of dreams, but that is of secondary interest
to me.
What I am really after is intelligent energy of the unconscious, because it allows me to touch the viewer not on a thinking level, but on a very deep emotional level.
What I am really after is intelligent energy of the unconscious, because it allows me to touch the viewer not on a thinking level, but on a very deep emotional level.
Dreamstories are meant to hold up a mirror reflecting
the state of the viewer’s unconscious mind, or soul, which at its deepest level
operates beyond the rules of logic. Dreamstories cannot be explained
logically any more than our deepest dreams can. They are meant to be
felt, i.e., emotionally experienced.
If you were to ask me for an example of another film/ video
artist who is working in a similar vein as my Dreamstories, I would
say Terrence Malik. What I mean by this is Malik’s films aren’t logical
communications, but metaphorical communications and have to be treated as such.
Their truth has to be felt. It is aimed at the soul not the logical intellect.
I want to be absolutely clear, however, that I am not trying
to artistically reproduce dreams. That is not only impossible but
also an oxymoron, because dreams are created and viewed when the conscious mind
is asleep. Hopefully we are all awake.
What I am trying to create is a video story that has the
intelligent energy of a dream: its quicksilver, unpredictable progression and
ability to metaphorically portray our deepest—and often conflicting— emotions.
I am not the first person, or poet, to see how similar our
deepest dreams are to our great poetry. But as far as I know, I am the first
poet to attempt to bring their peculiar powers together in a visual artistic
way.
One of the poets I was working with in my early Dreamstories told
me one day that they were “BEYOND POETRY”, but she couldn’t really explain what
she meant by that, nor could I for that matter, but we both knew it was somehow
true.
What it meant, I now know, is that my Dreamstories had
an artistic power beyond that of written poetry because they came directly from
the unconscious—the spiritual Mother Lode—just as dreams do without any
conscious interference or forethought.
Dreamstory narratives are always concerned with what is
going on beneath the surface of our lives: the deep unconscious forces and
emotions that really determine the direction of our lives. As in a dream, a Dreamstory narrative
seldom resolves itself simplistically or logically, and is often talking about
several things at once that are emotionally but not logically connected.
What I mean by that is that the soul, or unconscious, at its
deepest levels isn’t concerned with logic and the things of this world, but the
complex, and sometimes unresolved forces that really control our lives: love,
death, life, birth, hate, fate, despair, etc., all of which are the stuff of
both our deepest dreams and poems.
This aspect of my Dreamstories is not something
that I had consciously designed or planned. It simply happens because of the
deep, unconscious source of the Dreamstory, which is the place where
both dreams and poems are created by the unconscious. It might help if you
thought of Dreamstories as using poetry to bring the stuff of dreams
to into consciousness.
Sometimes they are so deep I don’t fully understand them
until years afterwards. All I know at the time is that the Dreamstory is
beautiful and true—that it makes my body ring. That, after all, is the true
test.
There is a Dreamstory (The House of Women) that is
an excellent example of all this and will illustrate what I’ve been talking
about.
If you were to ask me what The House of Women is
all about, I would tell you it is about the nature of death, the nature of
women, my wife, my mother, and then I would tell you that they are all somehow
connected in to the unconscious mind’s portrayal of death as our eventual
return to the unknowable source of life and death—which it in turn connects to
the mother—only to suddenly leave you there.
You could try to logically explain what I’ve just said, but
you’d be wasting your time.
But if you simply surrender to what the unconscious is
trying to make you feel about death through the Dreamstory, you
will find it both beautiful and comforting. It tells us on the deepest
level that we are not some kind of atomic flotsam—that we somehow belong.
This kind of art is not as popular in our culture as it was
in the Greek or early preliterate cultures. We want a hard, logical explanation
of death. My answer to that is go pound sand. There is none.
Dreamstories have a great deal in common with early
oral tribal poetry, which combined music, rhythmic speech and costume/movement
into one organic whole. It was spontaneous in nature and was created almost
entirely from the unconscious mind.
Like its ancient tribal counterpart, Dreamstories are composed intuitively and very quickly. The closest way I can describe the process of composition is to say that the first draft is very similar to the way Bach composed the first draft of his multi-layered fugues. The rest is dog work.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSgw8ZvLQccGvGaSIPNzUJlx9vicWhfT5euB6FdtRiDO_1XnPgt8lrKRCfbD8UaYtvXsvlerRYAgiEIAuNMmVvdrkbT690b_iQUFYBLjwywrDaJnT_Yz7n1g5FVZXxEaJ2cOITnSOLfigT/s320/JS++l_89cb9dc1f14b59bb072d23bbfc733ae3+uncut+300x300.jpg)
Dreamstories are very much like dreams: you have to feel them to get them. So stop thinking and let them enter you like waking dreams. That is how early preliterate man viewed them.
All of these Dreamstories were created at SOULSPEAK Studio where we
have the latest audio/visual software and hardware.
INTRODUCTION to Dreamstories
Both of those are really hybrid outgrowths or extensions of written poetry,
and although I have done them in the past, they are forms I am not that
crazy about because they are not created as an organic whole, i.e. they
smack too much of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The end result, almost always, is that they feel stilted and artificial.
I think its clear, if you've viewed my Dreamstories, that they have nothing in common with videos of performance poetry, or what we know as video poems, which are created by taking an existing written poem and displaying it on the screen (or reciting it) in combination with an accompanying visual/musical layer.
Ideas don't belong in poetry. They bring it down to the level of philosophy. As MacLeish said so well in his "Ars Poetica", "A poem should not mean/but be". I have always agreed with that; indeed view it as an axiomatic truth.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGMUxaAHNKW6QMFfPQXuJI92DIysSpS4_fJe1GoDGlBrK4YAFE0UEvbwifVFUcsHwaWH0N9S-gjzGQ_A0ZrGXa157vOsqs3d_MGngiE9eWJTU-QZvmyxRhCHjXpTgu724rO5JOJVYf3HhQ/s320/aristotle_homer.jpg)
And if there is one art that can provide an almost flawless mirror, it is the art of poetry. But not the written poetry we know today, or rather the poetry prized today, which is far too conscious. We have to reach back beyond MacLeish, who was too conscious a poet by my estimate, although his intuition on the matter was quite good.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmhVSh1FwJlA6fvahoIRNzA4vL39RUHW9ZVDysGaJhrDd0_3H8nRCDYlDoEAkwIwjb6hpjEfN0l7oUZaiZ0gXhqOTchKXRaF6fFHLnf7eWr8IIDx5bALwf6Z0hx-DuLasgo2_a82-anmNJ/s320/agamemnon.jpg)
The preliterate poetry of Homer and is contemporary epic
poets (in all cultures) was created in exactly the same way, but did not
include costume and movement.
Despite the layers of consciousness that have all but buried that ancient form of poetry over the past 4000 years, we can still access it if our desire to do so is strong enough.
Click here for some audio examples of contemporary SOULSPEAK poems created by spontaneous oral composition. You can select and play them or download them for free.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0RzJj7t2I-vW90inGoTrsi771AVL_5XRyB18VpUCOCyn22xgmC_KPV0COSsM8sU42OFkCfCsSCc878TPKANBuuxhGP0QsTY2yeVRiHXNALS-IuI6V46iWlggY-e31QPh3gNjvWoSB4jUZ/s320/new+guinea+hi+def+smudge.jpg)
It is only with the advent of writing (and our current consciousness) that we see poetry divest itself of speaking and mask and music and movement and become a written art. The Dreamstories that I have been creating for years now is a modern counterpart of that all-inclusive older poetry. But let me change direction for a moment and concentrate on the oral part of that ancient performed, musical tribal poetry.
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All great poetry (written or oral) is marked by the fact that it produces the ecstatic experience I like to call the poetic moment. I have separated this moment from form (written/ spoken/ sung) that carries it, because the moment and the form we give it are really two different (although inter-related) things.
That first point is this: spontaneous oral poetry can't be forced. Not one bit. And in that lies its true poetic value. If forced, it will always fail. Completely. The mouth will simply stammer and stop. If given its head, however, it will never fail to produce the poetic moment. I speak from experience in this.
Perhaps I can make this a bit clearer by saying that creating a true spontaneous oral poem is something like having a waking dream composed entirely of rhythmic speech. It is a largely unconscious process, and because of that, there is no predicting what its shape or content will be. It simply happens.
There is no time to think or analyze or pause or re-direct the process. There is only time to speak.
The poet's major task in spontaneous oral poetry is to be sensitive to that flow from the unconscious and deliver the baby the way the baby wants to come out. If any attempt is made to influence that delivery, the birth fails.
After all written poetry is a thing that the eye-driven conscious mind wants to examine, i.e., it's in our genes. Oral poetry, however, whose roots lie in a less conscious part of us, puts its major compositional demands on the unconscious, so that the only thing that will normally force the poet to return to normal consciousness is a failure of nerve.
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This is because the unconscious is going to go where it wants to go. Which means the oral poet must have the courage to continue feeling his way toward the true speaking of the poem, no matter what.
But, that's only half the story, because only a fool would continue without instinctively sensing that if the course is stayed, the mounting fear will always (and automatically) resolve itself into something impossibly beautiful and impossibly true, i.e., a true poem.
My own experience with spontaneous oral composition has led me to believe that poetry is the natural language of the unconscious, i.e., it is the way the soul, or the unconscious, speaks to us, and through us to others, and that anything else we care to tag onto that definition of poetry is mere frosting on the cake.
SOME DREAMSTORY BACKGROUND ON ORAL, PRELITERATE POETRY AND DREAMS
Since there is a good chance that
you are not familiar with the ancestry of poetry—most poets aren’t either—or
the Jungian view of dreams— I’m going to give you some quick background. It’s
short but will make clear why what I mean by poetry and why my Dreamstories have
the power they do.
When I say that my Dreamstories are
a contemporary version of preliterate, performed, oral/ musical (tribal)
poetry, I mean it is a contemporary version of an ancient oral, performed
poetry in which each element was organically related to the others—because each
element came from the unconscious mind of the tribe member: the face painting,
the movement, the costume, the speaking/ singing.
I have written a book on this
ancient aspect of Poetry: (SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul)
If you think of the tribal
chanting/ dancing you have seen in documentaries, you will have a rough ides of
the kind of poetry I am talking about. It is radically different from our
academic, written poetry. There is no script, no directors, choreographers,
musical score, etc. It all comes from the unconscious of the tribe members, and
is extremely powerful. It is the way all of our homo sapien ancestors
expressed their deepest feelings right up until the advent of writing.
SOULSPEAK is a contemporary version of that poetry.
It amuses me that when I tell
people that SOULSPEAK is a contemporary version of preliterate tribal poetry,
they expect me to duplicate the way it was done 6000 years ago, which is crazy.
I am a modern 21st century poet with many modern artistic elements at my
disposal. What is the same is that the arrangement and selection of my modern
elements also come from the unconscious: there is no conscious intervention at
all. Together they form a modern organic audio/ visual whole I call a Dreamstory.
Just so I’m clear on this: the
visual elements of my Dreamstories take the place of the ancient
visual elements (mask, face painting, costume, dance), while the oral / musical
SOULSPEAK story poem takes the place of the ancient spoken / rhythmic
elements.
If we understand that the ancient
visual elements were the way preliterate peoples visually expressed their
deepest spiritual state, we can understand that the video story also does this
in a contemporary way, i.e. the video story is a metaphor for the speaker’s
spiritual state. Likewise, the SOULSPEAK story poem takes the place of the
ancient spoken / rhythmic elements in completing the expression of their
deepest spiritual state.
Let me say something very important
about the SOULSPEAK oral/ musical poem that forms the narrative soundtrack of
my Dreamstories. When you listen to it, you will see that SOULSPEAK
sounds EXACTLY like common, everyday speech except it is slightly rhythmic and
unpredictable in its direction. It is immediately understandable. The ear is
comfortable with it.
You will also hear on occasion a
second voice responding to me in antiphonal fashion. This is not a second sound
track done later but a simultaneous speaking of a second story poem. In these Dreamstories,
I am responding to the visuals and music while the second antiphonal voice is
responding not so much to my story but the emotion of my story. There
is no thinking involved. The two streams fit together of their own accord. It
just happens.
This double-voiced antiphonal
speaking baffles most written poets who find it impossible to comprehend how it
could be done. Yet we seem to be wired to do it, as early tribal oral/ musical
performed poetry was also antiphonal in nature. We may have changed but the
wiring has survived on some unconscious level. You can see remnants of it today
in the black, evangelical church.
This ancient antiphonal speaking
that is still with us in our unconscious is one indication how deep the source
of SOULSPEAK is, i.e., it is very close to the source of human speech/
storytelling itself. It has none of the denseness and lack of clarity that
marks written poetry when it is spoken. This holds true by the way for all
oral/ musical poetry humans have done since the beginning of time.
Let me make one thing very clear:
by SOULSPEAK spontaneous oral/ musical poetry I don’t mean performance or
spoken poetry as we know it today, which is really a memorized form
of written poetry that is performed theatrically. Rap is an
example of that, as is the poetry of someone like performance artist Laurie
Anderson. One of its characteristics is that it always sounds stilted and
unnatural compared to our everyday speech.
Spontaneous oral poetry existed before we learned
to read and write as human beings, which for most cultures was
around 1500 B.C. These oral poems, of which Homer's epics are the best known, always take the
form of a story, indeed it is the only form they can take, as
the story poem has to come directly from the unconscious, and the only way the unconscious can express itself is through stories—just
as it does in our dreams.
The modern state of mind that is
necessary to create Dreamstories and SOULSPEAK is not complicated.
You simply have to quiet the conscious mind, but—and this may surprise you—to a
much lesser degree than is required for deep meditation.
Then you have to completely
surrender to the unconscious and its ability to create stories. If you think
this is impossible, it might help if you remind yourself that the unconscious
completely fabricates our dreams while our conscious mind sleeps.
Surrendering to the unconscious,
however, if often difficult for some because of the refusal of the conscious
mind to surrender its control to anything, let alone the unconscious. It also
takes a bit of nerve since the artist will have no idea what the unconscious is
going to create as way of a story poem—just as we have no idea what our dreams
are going to be. You have to be a little nervy to do this.
(Women, by the way, seem to be
superior to men in letting go and allowing the Muse to have her way. Two
of my fellow female SOULSPEAK poets (ADORA and SCYLLA) have been prolific
collaborators in creating some of my Dreamstories.
How I work with them is allow
them to select the simple visuals and music they believe will pull the
SOULSPEAK Narrative out of them. Since neither is familiar with video editors,
I load the music and visuals into my video editor and then play the visual and
music tracks to allow them to respond with a spontaneous SOULSPEAK story poem.
I then do whatever it takes to
convert the results into a finished Dreamstory. The result of these
collaborations can be seen on Video SOULSPEAK.
For those who need some more help
in learning to let go, I have written a book (SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of
the Soul) which gives some simple techniques on how to create SOULSPEAK oral/
musical story poems, which are a critical element in creating Dreamstories..
I also have a video site that
will help guide you through those steps using interactive video:
.
Once you have achieved the right
state of mind, creating the “first draft” of a Dreamstory is a
“no-brainer.” First of all, you have to wait for the Muse to rise. For me, this
almost always starts when I view visuals that my unconscious reacts to, i.e.
there is something about the visuals that my deep unconscious begins to respond
to emotionally. It is like a low rumble. It wants out.
I then usually instinctively
rearrange the visuals to form a rough, very simple visual story (I am falling,
I am on a journey, I am lost) that further deepens my response to the visuals.
At this stage, I have no idea
what form that response will take as a Dreamstory. I can intuit,
however, the kind of music I should use to assist the SOULSPEAK narrative in
forming, because like its tribal ancestor, music is a key element, not an
afterthought in my Dreamstories.
Sometimes that music is
pre-recorded and comes from music tracks of the hundreds of SOULSPEAK sessions
I have recorded over the years with improvisational musicians, so they already
have the right intelligence, tempo and intensity.
I prefer, however, to have the
music live in response to my spontaneous speaking of the story poem, as the
fusion of the two is more powerful, i.e., with the right improvisational
musician, the music becomes an emotionally intertwined with the spoken story
poem.
Then all I have to do is view
that same rough visual story on a PC as the music plays and my unconscious will
supply an oral / musical story poem soundtrack and marry it to the video in
such a way that the audio and video become an organic, inseparable whole.
I have nothing to do with this.
The Muse does the marrying and it occurs on a very deep level. It is what gives
my Dreamstories their particular artistic power.
It is a power that has to be felt
to be truly understood.
My Dreamstories, like
our deepest dreams, aren’t stories about topical events. That is, my Dreamstories are
never about things like politics, manners, the environment, etc. Those are
conscious concerns.
The deep unconscious—and thus a Dreamstory—isn’t
concerned with these things, but the most essential human concerns we have:
Love, Fate, Death, Birth, Despair, Faith etc.). In addition, the unconscious
almost always expresses itself in metaphors that portray unresolved Opposites
(Love/ Hate, Fate/ Free Will, Hope/ Despair). These unresolved Opposites cannot
be logically reconciled or figured out—only emotionally felt and bowed to.
This is why a Dreamstory holds
such a deep—and different—mirror up to life. It allows us to feel how beautiful
and true—and comforting—that reflection is—because it tells us in a
way beyond words that we are not some kind of atomic flotsam—that we somehow belong.
Let me say some more about
dreams, so you’ll know where I’m coming from. First of all, I take them as
seriously as Carl Jung did.
I am not talking about the bulk
of our dreams—which are like gossip from the unconscious—but the ones whose
emotions are so powerful they often occupy our bodies long after we have
awoken. These dreams are the equivalent of our most moving poems.
Like Jung, I believe that
awareness of our deepest dreams plays an essential role in the evolution of a
complete self. Jung believed that bringing our deepest dreams into
consciousness was a way of achieving wholeness as a human being.
That wholeness—or lack of
it—extends to our culture. If you believe as I do that much of our culture is
essentially unhealthy, being driven almost solely by concerns of the self, then
it should be clear as to effect of an art form like my Dreamstories can
have.
It doesn’t matter that viewers
may not understand a Dreamstory logically, because they will
emotionally recognize themselves in the mirror it holds up to their deepest
emotions. It is that felt recognition that is both healing and
cathartic because it takes place in the heart, the soul, the unconscious, call
it what you will. There is no need to “figure out” a Dreamstory.
Let me also say that I also
believe, as the Greeks did, that art also plays a critical role in our becoming
fully human. We seldom look at art this way today, but the Greeks based
their civilization on it. Art was not just entertainment for them. They
saw art (poetry, the theatre/ tragedies) as both cathartic and healing. It made
them whole. Attendance at the tragedies was compulsory, because that art
form allowed them to accept the true mystery of their existence. Needless to
say, I am right with the Greeks in this.
OTHER LINKS ABOUT JUSTIN
SPRING AND HIS WORK
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TWO BOOKS BY JUSTIN SPRING ABOUT THE ANCIENT, PSYCHIC ROOTS OF POETRY
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SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul,
and
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Alice Hickey:Between Worlds, A Psychic Memoir
On the Way To Mexico via Las Vegas aka Venice. You Tell Me.
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ALL OF MR. SPRING’S SOULSPEAK CDs ARE AVAILABLE FREE AT SOUNDCLICK
ALL OF MR.SPRING'S WRITTEN POETRY IS AVAILABLE FREE AT JUSTIN SPRING BOOKS
HERE IS SOME OF MY THINKING ABOUT TRUE ORAL POETRY, PAST AND PRESENT.
THE NATURE OF ORAL POETRY
I can't really say what brought about my interest in this mode of composition. I could give you lots of reasons, but in the end I'd simply have to say that something was guiding me.
The essence of oral poetry is spontaneous oral composition, of which scholars know absolutely nothing. The fact that Homer, and all pre-literate poets, re-spoke their spontaneous creations to audiences (which occupies most of the mistaken attention of scholars) has little to do with the essence of oral poetry, which, again, is spontaneous composition. The key to understanding that is to understand that each re-speaking was done out of storytelling memory, not verbatim memory, and that each re-speaking was essentially a spontaneous re-creation of the poem.
That's why he could lie down and have some schnapps from time to time as he re-spoke his epics. He wasn't worried about remembering anything. That was the Muse's job. It just happened.
I believe that if Homer were alive today, he would record his best performances, perhaps giving live performances only when he wanted to do so. I may be wrong on this, as Homer was undoubtedly a giant performer who literally became his characters, and would have wanted to continually satisfy that part of his genius. But he couldn't have been more of a giant than Richard Pryor or Ray Charles, who found both the recorded and live modes of creation to be highly satisfactory.
My citing of Pryor and Charles by the way is not whimsical. I believe if you combined the soul-baring, improvisational, narrative genius of Pryor with the rhythmic/musical genius of Charles, you wouldn't be far from the Homer's own genius (less his poetic genius of course, although Charles was no slouch in this area.)
True oral composition is a forgotten art. The scholarship on the subject is relatively useless as a practical matter, as none of the scholars I have read, and there were many, had any personal experience with the actual creation of an oral poem. So what you wind up with is a look at oral poetry though the only window available to them, that of their experience with written poetry.
Unfortunately it is a misleading window. A parallel would be trying to explain what it felt like to almost be a horse if the only experience you had was riding a bike. That's stretching it a bit, but it's a pretty fair comparison because of the dominant role the unconscious plays in true oral composition.
Let me say it again: Homer isn't just flapping his lips when he says, "Sing muse and through me tell the story…" The existing scholarship never touches on this critical point. It's what happens when you keep looking through the wrong window. Written poetry should beget a similar surrendering but, as I've said, it seldom does because writing produces a visible thing and often tempts us to return to a more conscious, examining state. This shouldn't surprise us; after all writing is inextricably linked to our post-literate, explaining consciousness.
HOW TO LISTEN TO ORAL POETRY
I go through all this in order to give you (hopefully) a
good feel for the differences between written and spontaneous oral composition.
Because of those differences, oral poems have to be approached somewhat
differently than we approach written poems.
If you don't, and expect the oral poems to obey the same aesthetics as a written poem, you'll never get them (or be able to create them). I don't know whether the poets I've approached with examples of oral poetry don't get then because they have an aesthetic window that's too narrow, or if it's simply due to the fact that they don't want to get them. I suspect it's more of the latter, a kind of reflexive rejection of anything not written.
Oral poetry must be listened to like a Bach fugue. All the motifs have to be accepted: the voice, the performance, the music as well as the words. You can't sit there and strip everything off except the words. I've watched poets do that: strip the words off and paste them on the inside of their heads, where they seem to be eyeing the words like a very suspicious telegram.
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If you do, you'll get the genius of the spontaneous SOULSPEAK oral poems you've been listening to.
After years of oral composition
and seven oral poetry CDs, it is clear to me that that oral composition offers
a way of creating a poetry that can reach an audience that is reading less and
less, a trend by the way that is not going to stop, no matter how many book
fairs we launch.
I believe such poems constitute the very heart of poetry, and that they have endured because they haven't surrendered to our conscious desire to explain everything. We have other disciplines for that, such as philosophy and the sciences.
As an interesting sidelight on this, I remember slogging through one of critic David Steiner's long and impossibly polysyllabic tomes on the nature of our literary arts in which he sets out to prove that ideas form the backbone of every masterpiece, only to have the honesty to admit, in the end, that the one exception was Shakespeare, and I quote, "..who had no ideas." Exactly.
WHY A MODERN ORAL POETRY?
So what is this rambling all
about? For sure it's not about turning back the clock. Insofar as some part of
poetry transforming itself through oral composition, I believe that such a
transition is going to eventually occur, although it will probably have to take
place outside our poetry culture, which is horribly resistant to any kind of
change.
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What seems more important, at least to me, is that oral composition gave me (and several others who shared my journey) a way of experiencing poetry in its most primal form, a form in which the physical and psychic roots of poetry become too obvious to be ignored.
We are talking about ancient roots here, perhaps genetically dormant for millennia, but entirely capable of coming back to life quite quickly. I won't pretend that what we experience is anything close to what preliterate humans experienced. We have changed too much for that, but I can also assure you that it is strong enough to change all your ideas about poetry.
THE POETIC MOMENT
It seems to me that this moment is what poets should really be concerned about creating (and propagating) but it is equally obvious to me that our academy-sheltered poetry culture is more interested in protecting the castle of written poetry than extending the ways in which the poetic moment can be experienced.
If there is any thing that indicates the sad state poetry is in, it is this knee-jerk defensive attitude. It is a loser's attitude. We should be on the offensive, embracing and celebrating any form of poetry that produces the poetic moment. That moment was divine for early preliterate humans, so much so that they became totally (and communally) absorbed in making poetry. Down to the last man and woman.
There was a reason for that absorption, and it illustrates the nature of our distant ancestors, because the poetic moment, it seems to me, is one in which they became fully, and truly, human. Their cultures valued that moment. Our culture couldn't care less. I, for one, would like to live a life filled with such moments.
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I would even go so far as to say poetry is a special archetype in the collective unconscious that rises of its own accord to remind us of our true nature: that we are mysterious, unfathomable beings. Some days I would go even further and say that the poetry archetype rises of its own accord to restore us for a moment to the beings we truly are. And there are some days I would go even further and say that when a poem comes to us, we enter a state that is similar, if not identical, to the state of consciousness we enjoyed as preliterate humans.
You might say it's the remnant that won't go away, like the little piggy tails some of us are born with. I also believe we have been moving away (genetically and socially speaking) from the ability to enter that little piggy state at an alarming rate. Whether that is a temporary move, or permanent one, is the question that absorbed Jung, as it should absorb any of us who value the arts (and in particular poetry). We have what I like to refer to as " thin" arts today because they are for the most part consciously fashioned. They may be stunning, exciting, thought-provoking, but they are never comforting in the way that, say, Shakespeare's tragedies are comforting.
Despite the insistence of our current poetry culture that the only true poetry is written poetry, it would be far better if we viewed poetry as the lingua franca of what I have referred to as our "little piggy state", a lingua franca that can take many physical forms: writing, speech, song, movement, although the latter has only survived in Asian story-telling dance.
Perhaps another way of saying that is to say that poetry has nothing to do with literature other than the fac
Yet, despite all the promise that oral composition potentially offers, I have been saddened, over the past years, to find that my fellow poets have had little interest in that promise, dismissing it out of hand with a kind of parochial blindness that borders on stupidity. Other art forms such as music and dance and painting have gladly embraced their primal roots and enriched their art by doing so.
But our poetry culture, like the ostrich, refuses to look. It forgets that crisis is composed of both danger and opportunity. If our scientists worked this way we'd still be dealing with oxen going round in circles. It is one thing too dismiss something as untrue or useless if you have examined it carefully, but quite another to do so without examining the matter at all.
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I should add that the states of feeling that I go through in creating an oral poem are somewhat similar to those involved in creating a written poem, in that the resultant ecstatic moment of poetry is the same, as is the initial surrendering to the Muse, although for oral poetry, that surrender must be immediate and complete.
But what lies between those end points is not the same. It is more powerful, more physical, more psychic. It is a physical/psychic experience one might compare to being suspended in a small, floating orgasm. It might also be compared to something short of speaking in tongues.
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Phillip Roth once gave an interesting analogy about the difference between writing a poem and a novel. He said that writing a poem was like riding a racehorse while writing a novel was like driving a locomotive. I'll add one more twist to that: creating an oral poem is almost like being the horse. I say that because it requires surrendering almost completely to the unconscious for the duration of the poem and letting the natural narrative machinery of the mind (and speaking) work.
At any rate, it is this ability to surrender to the archetype of poetry that is crucial. If you don't, the poems sputters, the mind rises to full conscious and the golden thread is lost. There is no going back as in written poetry, no thinking, no modifying, no saving what you have, etc.
But if you don't falter, and the process is recorded, what you actually get to hear is the moment of poetic creation: the whole nature of the voice changes. It is that sound that the psyche recognizes even if the modern conscious mind doesn't quite know what to do with it. It is that sound that produces zero at the bone. The words are just the spear-carriers in this opera.
I think that's a distinction that has to be recognized if you really want to understand the essential difference between oral and written poetry It is that sound that the psyche recognizes even if the modern conscious mind doesn't quite know what to do with it. It is that sound that produces zero at the bone. I think that's a distinction that has to be recognized if you really want to understand the essential difference between oral and written poetry.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORAL AND WRITTEN POETRY
But it completely misses the boat with regard to oral poetry. Oral poetry doesn't depend upon that kind of accuracy. In fact it would strangle oral poetry. Oral poetry doesn't imitate speech, as written poetry does. It is speech. Remember that. And remember this: what makes it poetry is not so much the radical accuracy of the language used, although it will have a bit of that, but the sound of the poet's voice, a sound that is not consciously but unconsciously formed.
While it is obvious that the language is hardly radically accurate, you have to be a dunce or deaf not to see that the emotional collage created by the differing sounds is the stuff of great art. I would also say it's a great oral poem, despite the ten piece band in back of Brown.
I say this because it's a good example of how close Brown could get to the spirit of the original Shout and Holler blues which, like Brown's lyric hook, consisted of three phrases: the first two identical and the third a different phrase that rhymed with the first two. Shout and Holler blues, by the way, was as close as we're likely to get to an American, popular spontaneous oral poetry, having only very primitive musical elements if any at all.
The song is also a good example of the African/American aesthetic at its purest, which is an aesthetic more concerned with how something is said than with the words themselves. As Amiri Baraka points out, West Africans used the same word for many things, and it was only the intonation, or how it was said, that determined the meaning. That tradition was continued by the slaves brought to America and remains a dominant factor in African/American speech to this day.
Concern with the actual words being used reflects an aesthetic closer to the radical accuracy of language so valued by Dunn. But it doesn't have a significant place in the African American aesthetic, which was spun out of oral traditions, not written traditions.
If you understand this essential difference, something Brown's song makes self-evident, you're a good way towards understanding the aesthetic of oral poetry. I might add that oral poetry is almost completely divorced from ideas because it is almost completely divorced from conscious interference.
By that I mean those of us who use this mode of composition start with absolutely no idea what we're going to do and then let ourselves surrender to wherever the Muse wants to go. There is no time to think, just do. There is no other way. I might also add that it takes a good bit of nerve, as the process allows none of the privacy that writing does for the simple fact that, in practice, the speaking of the poem takes place in a collaborative setting.
What you wind up with in spontaneous oral composition, if you pursue it to its natural end, is a small dedicated group of artists (oral poets, musicians, singers and sometimes visual artists) who don't care how revealing the collaborative process is, only that it produces something incredibly beautiful. I'm not just talking about the resultant poem, but the process as well.
I remember reading many years ago
Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and being overwhelmed when the
restless heroine eventually finds a life and a home within a community of
artists who were living their art. That community felt like Paradise to me. This was years before I even dreamed of
oral poetry, but I realize now that some part of me knew where I was headed.
I can't say enough about this communal aspect of oral composition. It is a profound, enduring experience. Because I have wanted to keep things in a comfortable frame of reference, I haven't mentioned this communal aspect until now. In theory, spontaneous oral composition can take place in a solitary state if you are capable of "strumming the lyre", i.e. producing your own music, or even without music. I have done both, and it can produce a very good poem, but I have found that communal creation (collaboration) generally yields a much richer poem.
I should add that spontaneous oral composition (as I generally practice it) is not only collaborative but also antiphonal in nature. Thus, there are usually two poets, a musician and often a singer and everybody gets to have the small orgasm at the same time.
It's something like dreaming together, which musicians know something about but poets very little, as writing doesn't allow it. It's what made tribal poetry so overwhelming. We only get a wee taste of it, but I can assure you it's still a very heady brew.
I go through all this in the hope you'll intuitively sense that I'm not whistling Dixie about oral composition. I know what I'm talking about. And I've written enough good poems to know what the moment of poetry feels like and what the differences are between the two modes of composition.
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Many of the poems are antiphonal, as that is the first form that intuitively came to us. It makes sense since it is the very first form of poetry, the one we used when in a tribal state. An oral scholar once said to me that what we were doing was not oral poetry, as though he expected us to speak in the single-voiced dactyl hexameter phrases of Homer, which is a very late oral form specifically linked to the Greek language.
But if Homer were alive today in America, his phrasing and rhythms would be very much like ours. In fact I believe he would high-five me. I also suspect that if Homer were to come back today and sing his blind miraculous songs, most of our poets would give him a tin cup and some pencils and lead him to the nearest street corner.
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I might add that in all of these other forms, the poetic moment is revealed solely through the ears, except Shakespeare's where it is also revealed through the dramatic (non-reading) eyes of the audience, and involves much more of the right brain, as all these modes are closer to music than literature. Seamus Heaney seemed to understand this when his Celtic ears picked up the fact that some of what the rapper Eminem is doing is actually poetry, something I've felt for a long time.
Let me add that what I am really writing about is not returning to the past, as that is not only impossible but highly undesirable. Nor am I writing you about the future of poetry as that will take care of itself. Poets belong smack on the cusp of becoming. It is their true home. What this BLOG is all about is what happens sometimes when you stand on that cusp: a new way of responding to the world appears.
The fact of the matter was that the association with an old lady's parlor only deepened the texture of the response, because the contents were anything but that. They were as close to the stuff of dreams as any of Kafka's novels. Sometimes I think of my Dreamstories as Cornell Boxes.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF ORAL POEMS AND DREAMSTORIES
My Dreamstories evolved a few
years ago directly out of my oral poetry and the fact that today's audiences
seem to have lost their ability to sit back and simply listen for any length of
time. Our modern eyes are much too restless. I had found that my early CDs were
hard for most people to listen to, as they were hungering for words they could
see.
It soon became evident to me, however, that the same principles of spontaneous composition could be applied to making Dreamstories When I added that final layer, almost everyone was able to get them. They had something to hold on to.
I have won numerous prizes and
awards for them as art, but they are indeed poems. By that I mean they produce
the same ecstatic poetic moment but go about it a different way. It is possible
to create a Dreamstory very easily on a computer. It is no more difficult
that oral or written composition.
As an aside, as if you needed any reminding of how far our much-too-conscious, idea-driven poetry has fallen in the public estimate and how much it needs an infusion of new methodologies and a return to being, I found that the term Dreamstory came to me as a way of explaining them.
I should add that these Dreamstories, these Audio/Visual poems, are created from the same no mind state as an oral poem, meaning I have no idea what each layer will be. The nearest equivalent would be composing a musical fugue. It is done entirely by intuition, by feeling my way.
No thinking is involved in any of the stages. It is all done very quickly on a computer. At a later stage the titles and credit are added, which takes more time than all of the other stages combined. There is never more than one take on any of the layers, especially the oral/musical layer. I sometimes go back and tighten up the visual layer as it is initially created as rough collage that I sense has the potential to pull a poem out of me, although I have no idea what that poem will be.
I have included a separate description of the process that may or may not be of interest. It seems to me that in an age where we are reading less and less, and where great poetry goes essentially unrecognized, our poetry culture should really begin to get with it and start thinking about maybe not working on Maggie's Farm no more.
If you are willing, as is necessary in all poetry, to meet the poem half way, it's difficult not to get it.. In fact, you can't not get it. It will go right through your pores.
I say this because I know what real poetry is and this is real poetry, a poetry that by its very nature bypasses the thinking, idea-possessed mind and goes directly to the feeling self, the source and target of all poetry worth talking about. I might also add that it is a relatively easy methodology to learn, especially for the computer-literate young, the only real stumbling block being the nerve required to surrender to the unconscious for the duration of the poem. And it is considerable, I can assure you. The up-tight need not apply.
Although it seems quite unpopular today to take the stance that Homer did: "I speak to the gods and to men," the real fact of the matter is that poetry is the way the soul, or the unconscious( if that makes you more comfortable) speaks to us and through us to others. Poetry is meant to communicate. But it is only living half a life if it never gets out of the barn.
If Shakespeare or Homer were alive today they'd be doing exactly what I'm doing but better. Imagine the audience poetry could reach if it didn't have to rely solely on books to communicate, that is to say if the moment passing through your soul could be revealed and communicated in another way. It's worth thinking about, isn't it? All it takes is desire and some nerve. The rest takes care of itself.
One of the poems is for my vivacious Panamanian niece, Anastasia Typaldos, on her wedding day; and one my Uncle, Father Joe Drohan, the youngest and last to die of my mother's brothers and sisters, and a man who never failed to have something kind and funny to say to his apostate nephew. I also enclose a poem I wrote many years ago, just as I was on the cusp of discovering oral composition. It's called Snow Angels. It seemed appropriate to include it.
SOME RECENT WRITTEN POEMS
Snow Angels
I was six. No, five, I was five: my first snow.
I remember the angel suddenly coming together
and then bleeding out underneath me
like I was turning myself inside out,
and then I remember awakening
to a white field, because the angels
were always a surprise to me,
the way they kept falling
in such peculiar positions,
like someone dreaming, or dying.
Like the wings. Friends would take me aside,
tell me the wings were a bit too much:
Like a Babylonian lion's, really.
Those wings, they'd say.
They were right of course,
but what could I say to them except
I couldn't help it, that my arms
always moved up and down like that
whenever I fell out of heaven.
Sometimes
I felt like telling them
maybe it would help
if they thought of the angels
as small relief-maps of my soul,
sudden, uncontrolled curdlings
that occurred whenever I stopped,
opened myself to the sun, or the moon.
And then there were times
I didn't know what to say, except
maybe they should think of the angels
as detailed descriptions of another life.
A life I was living but knew nothing about.
Anastasia's Getting Married
For Anastasia and Raul
Imagine this, Anastasia. We are together, lost
in a forest of light: two small shadows
slipping along the floor of heaven,
trying to find our way home.
I whisper: "Our bodies are like empty rooms."
You say, "Listen to me Tio, that is because
we have nowhere to go. Imagine
we're not lost. Imagine we're in a garden
where no one gets lost except God: nobody Tio, not even you.
Now, imagine the shrubs are trimmed
like little geese and little fishes
and that the garden is in Gamboa
and it's Saturday, January the Eighth
in the year of Our Lord Twenty-Two Hundred and Five
and I'm standing at the altar
of La Iglesia Nuestro Senora del Buen Consejo
marrying the dashingly handsome Raul Cochez Maduro
against the desperate wishes
of His Majesty the King of Spain
and the Seven Sorrowful Sisters of Doom,
who are on every street corner,
watching me like flies.
Imagine that if you will".
So I did. I imagined it.
Then I had somewhere to go, Anastasia.
And so did you.
You Have To Change Your Eyes
For Father Joe Drohan, d. April 22, 2005
Tonight, Joe, I am standing with you at the Gates of Heaven.
Your mother and brothers and sisters are all on the other side,
standing perfectly still, like actors in a play.
You are holding a rosary and a pair of brown shoes
to show your mother you did not forget her.
There is a man standing next to her. He looks
exactly like you, but dimmer. Your eyes
are shining. You tell me when you finally
cross over, the one who looks like you
will become brighter, and then the two of you
will become one person, forever, again.
You say to me: "I know you think
I'm imagining this, Justin,
but I'm not imagining anything.
All of this is real.
Love makes it real.
Love makes everything real, Justin.
Everything.
Even this.
You have to change your eyes."
Audio/Visual Composition -A Brief Introduction to Dreamstory Creation
Audio/Visual Composition represents a new/old way of creating Dreamstories. It is a creative jump similar to that taken some 3000 years ago when we first switched from oral to written composition.
Audio/Visual Composition, because
of its multi-level nature, borrows more from spontaneous preliterate oral
composition than it does from written composition. Audio Visual Poems are
spontaneously composed in layers, with each layer acting as a catalyst for the
spontaneous formation of the next.
You might say that Audio/Visual Poems are a contemporary version of pre-literate communal poetry, or tribal poetry, which was a participatory, communal art in which oral antiphonal poetry, mime, movement, music and song were spontaneously combined into one fluid art form.
This earliest form of poetry
represented a total human artistic response to the poetic instinct. That
response grew narrower with time until today all we are left with are the words.
This new audio/visual form is made possible (and easy) through the advent of PCs and cheap, easy-to-use digital cameras and sound recording devices. This is in turn aided by the advent of free web-based uploading and distribution systems such as YOU TUBE that allow videos to be easily uploaded, distributed and seen by others.
I believe that by the next generation we will see serious poetry being composed and distributed in this manner, mostly by younger poets open to this technology. Other arts such as music and dance and biography are already well on their way.
As far as poetry is concerned, the key to successful Audio/Visual Composition, at least from my experience, lies in mastering reflexive, spontaneous oral composition. I have found spontaneous written composition to be too slow and much too conscious to result in a poem that is an independent yet related leitmotif. Oral composition, on the other hand, allows for the creation of a poetry soundtrack for the video that has an immediacy and relationship with the visual layer that is nothing short of stunning.
Once this mode of composition is mastered, a poem can be created directly from the unconscious with little if any conscious interference, exactly as was done by preliterate poets, but in this case it provides a spontaneous poem/soundtrack. It all happens in one fell swoop. No re-thinking, no re-writing. Just load and go.
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This Is How Dreamstories Are Created:
1) A video of stills or motion is created from life or from photos or paintings or sculpture that interests you on a deep level. Your interest in the subject should be unconscious and strong. Like love. Or hate. No thinking is allowed. If you allow the unconscious to direct your picture taking, the result will be a simple story. That is how your unconscious interest works. The story will something like: I walk through a strange town, I pick flowers. I watch a woman and her child.
They don't have to be masterpieces. They should be shot freely and be a record of your instinctive interest in whatever is happening. You should have no poem in mind as you do it. Nothing. Just an unconsciously directed interest in what is happening. The important thing is to let the unconscious direct the picture taking.
Then load the visuals onto a PC and rearrange/edit the images (if necessary) until something about the sequence starts to summon the Muse. It may be minutes or months or even years before the Muse arrives. But it will happen if the pictures were taken instinctively. When the Muse does arrive, it's time for the next layer.
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2) Play the rearranged video back and record the oral poem on the spot, using the visual story as a catalyst. You have to stay very loose. The idea is not to mimic the visual story but use it to pull an unpremeditated, narrative oral poem out of your unconscious, just as life does. If you try to form other than a narrative poem, nothing will happen, because that is the only form that spontaneous oral poetry will take. I speak from experience in this matter.
3) You can play pre-recorded
music at the same time or have a musician respond to what you are saying by
creating improvisational music. The second option is always better, but the
musician has to be highly intuitive. Either way, the music will act as an additional
catalyst for the poem. The combined poem/music forms the second and third
layer. It should be simple music, 60-90 BPM. No symphonies. It has to be skinny.
5) All this is easily accomplished within a few minutes because of the ease of use of today's computer technology. There is no retake, no editing. One take. It either works or it doesn't. Additional layers such as sound effects and a small written poem (as text) can be added if your instincts tell you they are required, but they usually aren't. This can create a fifth and sixth layer.
These additional layers, again, are created very quickly on a computer. No thinking. Just doing. In every aspect of this composition, success depends on the poet's ability to surrender almost totally to the unconscious in creating each layer.
As an aside, I should add that the poem/soundtrack can be created without music or a responding poet but the results generally aren't as beautiful.
I might also add that Audio/Visual Poems can be created with written composition if oral composition is impossible for you. But as I've said before, the poem probably won't work as well, if at all. Yet if you insist, you must follow this advice: the poem must be narrative if it is to be created as a spontaneous response to the video layer. It won't work any other way. And it should be composed using the methodology I've outlined in my book, SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul. The methodology is the same but you write the poem out as if you were speaking it.
With all this said, I must suggest that if you are so uptight as to be unable to let go, which is what oral composition demands, you're probably wasting your time trying to create a true audio/visual poem. No matter how good your written poems may be, the semi-consc
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BIOGRAPHY: About Justin Spring
Justin Spring was educated at Columbia College. He is a prize-winning poet and video maker. He is also the founder of SOULSPEAK/SOULMOVES, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing poetry and art back into the everyday lives of everyday people. Mr. Spring’s written poetry has been published in such distinguished periodicals as American Poetry Review as well as in numerous anthologies. He is one of a handful of poets who work not only in the written mode of composition but also in the ancient mode of spontaneous oral composition, and a new, revolutionary form called spontaneous audio/visual composition. His work in the oral and audio/visual area is pioneering and he is considered by many to be the father of contemporary oral poetry.
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Other Poetry Grants and Honors. Finalist, 1987 State St. Contest (Donald Justice, Judge); First Prize, 1987 Published Poet, U of Florida Sigma Tau Delta; Finalist, 1989 FCCJ National Poetry Contest (Phillip Levine, Judge); Commendation, 1989 Chester H. Jones Foundation; Homer Award for Spoken Poetry, Tampa Bay Poetry Council, 1993; Finalist 1994 Walt Whitman National Contest (Academy of American Poets); Hall of Fame Award, Poetica 1995; Honorable Mention, 1995 Billie Murray Denny National Poetry Contest; Finalist, 1995 Carnegie-Mellon Poetry Series; First Prize, 1995 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest; Finalist, 1995 Akron Poetry Prize, Honorable Mention, 1996 Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition; Finalist, 1996 Akron Poetry Prize, Finalist, 1997 Walt Whitman National Contest (Academy of American Poets); Honorable Mention, 1997 Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition; Third Place, 1997 Billie Murray Denny National Poetry Contest; Honorable Mention, 1997 Akron Poetry Prize; Winner, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, 1998; First Place, 1998 Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition; Finalist, Akron Poetry Prize; Honorable Mention, 1999 Billie Murray Denny National Poetry Contest.; Grants received for programs directed by Justin Spring for SOULSPEAK/Sarasota Poetry Theatre, Inc. from: Bates Foundation; Beattie Foundation; Community Foundation of Sarasota County; Florida Department of Juvenile Justice; Kates Foundation; Knight Foundation; Bank of America; Sarasota County Foundation; Sarasota County Tourist Development Council; Selby Foundation; Selby Partnership; Southwest Florida Community Foundation; State of Florida Interdisciplinary; State of Florida Arts in Education; VSA Arts; Woman’s Exchange; Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice.
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Mr. Spring is the author of seven collections of written poetry: Polaroid Poems, Other Dancers, Talkies, Nursery Raps, Poems of Sarasota and Florida, Poems for Family and Friends, and COLLECTED POEMS 1985-2014. Free PDFs of all of these books are available at SARASOTA POETRY THEATRE PRESS
In his role as lead poet and director of the nationally known, multi-voiced performance-poetry group, Many Voices of SOULSPEAK, Mr. Spring has also recorded seven CD collections of oral poetry. The first five are: Gathering, Smoke, Nursery Raps, Speakings, In Your Mind, I’m Talking to You Oprah. Free downloads of these entire CDs are available at SOUNDCLICK
Free playing and downloads of the Barbeque and Witnesses Log CDs are available by clicking on the appropriate title:
Mr. Spring’s videos range from documentaries on poetry to groundbreaking art videos that combine oral, written and musical poetry in a new video form Mr. Spring calls Dreamstories.. Among the nearly 200 documentaries and Dreamstories are : Spirit of Life Speaking Across the Generations, SOULMASK, and Soul Exposures, Poetry in Three Dimensions, More Poetry in Three Dimensions, A Different Mexico, Painters and Poetry Paint Poetry, Fractal Poetry, and The Witnesses Log, Audio/Visual Poems, Soul Journeys 2004-2005.
PAINTINGS OF ALAMOS PLAZA Copyright 2007 CERVANDO PEREZ MARQUEZ, PHOTOGRAPHS OF JUSTIN SPRING IN MEXICO Copyright 2007, LA ROBINA. PROFILE PHOTOGRAPH, ADORA
soulspeakspringjustin@g ss1