Tomorrow, April 30, 2020, 89.9 FM in Portland–All Classical Portland–will broadcast “Strawberry Man” by Lisa Neher and me, as performed by Arwen Myers in her Artslandia broadcast from last week. Tune in at 3 pm Pacific time to hear it and four other pieces from Arwen’s recital. Here’s the full line-up:
Emerson Eads: Of Life & Light
William White: Vocalise
Lisa Neher: Strawberry Man
Stacey Philips: In the Moment
Nicholas Emerson: Smells Like Quarantine Spirit
Tomorrow at 5 pm PST ! Arwen Myers will be singing Lisa Neher‘s and my song “Strawberry Man” at Artslandia‘s Happy Hour recital on their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Artslandia/!
“Strawberry Man”
The Strawberry Man
and his little pinto pony
Sweetness, slaked
in the city street
As promised, here is a micro-chapbook of my poetry.
Many people have been writing about the fact that King Lear was written during a time when the theatres were closed due to plague, and while I didn’t like the implication that we should all be creating masterpieces as we isolate and quarantine ourselves from Covid-19, this line of thought did prompt me to re-read the play. The collection is named from it: in 3.2, the Fool sings:
He that has and a little tiny wit–
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,–
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.
The first set of poems in the collection use works and ideas from King Lear, as well as those generated by anagramming “King Lear” and “Covid” together. Other poems touch on times of personal isolation, rituals, history, and my local habitation.
Fortunes Fit is available through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license for free. You can download it here from the Humanities Commons CORE Repository.
