Musician and Poet — Currently working on an anthology of lyric nature poetry.
The Netherlands | South Africa
Joined September 2016
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Progress on the anthology has been slow, but this year, I shall at last distribute a chapbook version (a rudimentary, amateur booklet for scrutiny).
I understand that ‘lent et douloureux’ is the tempo Satie intended for Gymnopédie No. 1, but Reinhart de Leeuw’s sluggish rendition slows it to such an agonising crawl that the melody all but evaporates. One longs for it to end, convinced that it ever will.
I would like to ask whoever curates @AppleMusic's 'Meditation Moments' classical playlist how Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109, can possibly be considered an appropriate choice.
It is summer in South Limburg, and one of my favourite sights is the baby blue blossoms of woodland forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) stilly adorning the waysides.
Of the fifty-plus poems I wrote, only 'A Sunbird!' was ever jotted down on paper as a sketch, one of my earliest attempts at traditional nature poetry (2017).
There are instances where I have two finished versions of a poem. This is the case with 'A Batis' (a South African songbird). Here is the discarded version.
A haze of dust in the distance overlooked by the majestic Riviersonderend ('river without end') mountain range, photographed in mid-autumn, 18 April 2018, Overberg region, Western Cape Province, South Africa.
Sometimes, in the dry summer of the Overberg region of South Africa, a gust of wind will rush across a dirt road and conjure a cloud of hazy golden dust into the air. 'Dust' described this fleeting occurrence in two short quatrains:
ALT The original 'finished' version.
ALT Towards the final edited version, a few variations of the evolving first stanza.
'A Walk' is the first completed poem to be discarded from the anthology. An early composition, its pathos is lost in lacklustre lines. Moreover, I could never forgive myself for fabricating a landscape for the sake of rhyme (the hill depicted is treeless)!
During the composition phase, I kept every version of every stanza of every poem as it evolved from sketch to poem in lengthy documents with tens of variations per stanza.
My task is now to extract the final stanzas and assemble them as individual poems onto individual pages, which I can then arrange and rearrange. forgottenfields.co.za/2023/0…
