My One Little Word for 2025: Melopoetic

Melopoetic: One Little Word 2025 - 1

It’s been a few years since I’ve decided on a One Little Word to start the new year off. Honestly, as much as I usually hope the word will be a guide, I often forget it rather quickly. (Sorry, me). This year, a friend, Rita, posted a fun but rather obscure word for her OLW (Coddiwomple — how cool is that?), and that got me thinking.

So I dug around for a word that relates to constantly thinking of or composing music, either in thought or on paper (not that I do this constantly — that’d be weird – but it is quite often, so maybe weird enoug) and, with help from Claude, I came across: Melopoetic.

The word is part of Ezra Pound’s three kinds of poetry, and is defined loosely as words that evoke a sense of music. Or an entanglement of music and words. Or at least, that’s how I am interpreting it from my research, and I like the ring of it, so I’m going with that.

How will this concept guide me forward? No idea. I guess we’ll see. Or hear.

Peace (sounds like …),
Kevin

Further Bird Song(ing): Deep Fake

Printed Circuit Bird, 2021 from Kelly Heaton on Vimeo.

“Deep Fake Birdsong unites art with science to inquire about the electrical nature of lifeforms and to push the envelope of artificial intelligence. ”— Kelly Heaton and Johann Diedrick, 2020

I’ve recently wrapped up some explorations of bird song, music composition and AI. In my various inquiry travels, I stumbled across this post about a project that I found pretty fascinating. It’s called Deep Fake Birdsong, a project by Kelly Heaton and Johann Diedrick. It’s fascinating, and involves circuit boards and programming to emulate the song of birds.

Kelly Heaton explain the project a bit here in this talk entitled: Hacking Nature’s Musicians

It’s all interesting, these intersections. To me, anyway.

Check out this circuit board from their project:

Schematic for “Breadbird #1,” 2019. (Updated in 2020 to reflect minor changes) by Kelly Heaton

Peace (and song),
Kevin

That Dang Bird

Sea Gull Perch
Sea Gull Perch flickr photo by fran.trudeau shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

My wife and I, and a friend, spent the first day of the long weekend at Crane Beach in eastern Massachusetts. It was a lovely day of mostly sunshine, and the beach is beautiful — long, white sand, and full of trails traversing the dunes.

The problem? The seagulls. Talk about brazen.

At one point, when I was reading my novel and my wife was resting, a seagull stealthily came along and grabbed a small plastic bag of crackers and refused to drop it.

Thus began a slow-motion chase scene as my wife tried to get the bag back — she didn’t care so much about the crackers but she did not want the plastic bag to be part of the environment. The bird never flew. My wife never ran. Instead, the gull kept hopping, with the bag in its beak, as my wife calmly followed it, sometimes clapping her hands and giving out the order to “drop it” like it was our dog.

Finally, the bird gave up, released the bag and flew off.

I had noticed a young woman, a few blankets down, filming the whole encounter on her phone, and as my wife returned, I told her: You’re going to be trending on Tik-Tok or Instagram later today.

She laughed.

Peace (and the chase),
Kevin

Standing Inside Emily’s Writing Room

Emily Dickinson Shadow

(Note: this is a shadow silhouette just down the street from the Emily Dickinson Museum. Next to it is another shadow silhouette, of Robert Frost, who also lived in Amherst for parts of his life, as a professor. They would not have known each other, due to years lived, but Frost no doubt knew of Dickinson’s poetry)

I’ve long admired Emily Dickinson for her poetry and her amazingly fertile mind. I’ve read books about her and explored some of her poems. What I hadn’t done is visited the Emily Dickinson Museum. Which is odd, since it is only about a 20 minute drive from where I live and I passed by the Amherst, Massachusetts site often enough on the way to other things.

I fixed that yesterday, spending a few hours at the historical site, which has two main buildings: the home where Emily Dickinson lived and wrote, for most of her adult life, and the adjoining home where her brother and her sister-in-law lived. (Her sister-in-law, Susan, was a key player in Emily’s life, with plenty of romantic speculation, but at the very least, Emily wrote and sent nearly 250 poems to Susan).

You learn a lot about her life, of course, but I found the most interesting space was her room, and the chair and little desk where she spent so much time, thinking, and then writing her poems and letters. The desk is set in front of a window that, at the time, presented a wide view of the center of Amherst (with farmlands in between). There is a sense of wonder at the mind at work, in the quiet, and mostly by herself, as she penned poetry that would one day become the fascination of the literary world (thanks to her sister, who discovered the 1800 poems after Emily’s death).

I had some inklings about the legal battles that took place over her poems, but the more I learned about the two camps — one, led by her niece, was to keep her punctuation and words intact, while the other was in favor of heavy editing, adding punctuation and rhyming word replacements — the more I thought of Emily, writing her days away, capturing the world on scraps of paper, stuffed into her pockets and desk.

Observation: I was the only male in our tour of about 12 people. Most of the other were young women from around the country, and most had not only watched the Dickinson TV show (on Apple, which uses historical information but with a modern twist) but were fascinated by the props that the TV show donated to the museum, and were rapt listeners as the tour guide shared poems throughout the event. I had the sense that some of these young women were writers and poets, come to see how Dickinson lived and wrote in the world.

If you want to learn more about Emily Dickinson’s poems, my Western Massachusetts Writing Project colleague (and former site director, and my good friend) Bruce Penniman is hosting a virtual workshop through the museum in late August entitled “Through The Dark Sod” and it is designed for educators. More information is here.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Blogging and Writing: A Stream A Collage An Unfolding

BlogsTyler Weaver, in his newsletter, wrote this passage about blogs (such as this one you are reading) in a way that I thought captured my own sense of why I continue to come to this space, writing and sharing and thinking out loud.

“… blogs work best as a crossroads between a stream and a collage made human by the collision of processings and ruminations through time, simultaneously representative of an individual, fleeting moment and the totality of those moments in a perpetual unfolding … ” – Tyler Weaver

Tyler’s newsletter — MacroParenthicals — is a quirky dive into comics, music, media, writing and other creative strands that he pulls on and looks at with a distinct voice.

Tyler’s piece had me thinking (yet again) of this blogging space, and how my view of it has changed over time. It used to be more of a space that I imagined as “outward” facing — sharing with other bloggers, and being connected into larger blogging networks — but now I see it more as a reflective space, something more “inward” where I am curating my writing and thinking. My audience may be smaller (I may be my only audience) but I still keep the door open for others (you, perhaps?) to peek in and see what I’m up to.

Peace (in the unfolding),
Kevin

PS — and then later, I found this piece by James Shelley — What’s The Fun In Writing On The Internet Anymore? —  that has an ancillary point about the act of writing on an Internet full of AI bots and algorithms:

Write here because ideas matter, not authorship. Write here because the more robots, pirates, and single-minded trolls swallow up cyberspace, the more we need independent writing in order to think new thoughts in the future — even if your words are getting dished up and plated by an algorithm.

Those who write — those who add ideas instead of paraphrasing and regurgitating them — inform the lexicology and mental corpus of how we think in the future. Indeed, the point isn’t “being an author,” but contributing one’s perspective, even if one’s personal identity is silenced, erased, and anonymized along the way.

– James Shelley

Video Documentary: The Last Repair Shop

When I was a kid, my father (a drummer) used to bring me to visit a musical instrument repair shop for odds and ends, and it would be a place I enjoy just being in, just hanging out in.

It was called George’s Music Shop, and George was the man behind the counter, and when I was learning saxophone, it remained a place of wonder. I even used my memories there for a collection of connected short stories at one point (NOTE TO SELF: dig that up and revisit the stories)

This documentary — The Last Repair Shop – is a wonder of capturing a place in Los Angeles, and how the shop is a hub for fixing things and maybe, people.

It also inspired my morning poem:

On a memory stop
to an old repair shop
on Main, a whistle in B flat
ringing on the door, opening,
explaining I’m here,
aiming to get a broken sax,
fixed; worn pads,
replaced; things sound
better, with love

I hand it to the man
behind a glass counter
littered with sheet music,
cork grease, guitar strings –
his probing fingers pour
over every turn of the neck,
the bell, the cage, the springs

In a gruff voice, he speaks,
in a sort of bebop rhyme:
he’ll weave some magic
to make my sax sing again –
come back in two weeks time

Peace (and repairs),
Kevin