No. 20 a poem for 2 voices

Last Thursday night, my granddaughter Raven participated in our monthly open poetry reading at Coffee Grounds. She read two original poems and then she read two poems with me from the wonderful book, Joyful Noise/Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman. Two-voice poems are buckets of fun to do with kids and we had a great time. Raven pointed out that we should really try to do the unison parts with the exact same inflections so we worked hard on that. I believe that we got the effect we wanted as someone came up afterwards and said we sounded like aliens. I am going to believe that was a good thing.

The other day I remembered a couple back in Miami who regularly read at Books & Books readings. They often wrote and performed poems spoken together and, though I don't remember particular poems they did, I remember always enjoying them a great deal. So I started thinking that I might like to work on some poems for two voices, and I started with one written for me and Raven to do.

Unfortunately, I haven't a clue as to how to post it here and retain the formatting (which is crucial so you can see the two separate columns of parts and see which lines are meant to be spoken by one person and which lines are meant for two voices.) I spent more time trying to figure out how to post it than I did writing the poem!

Finally, what I was able to do was save it from Appleworks as a page of html (after learning that tabs and regular spaces won't save right, that you have to use option-space for multiple spaces) and upload the page to my web space.

So now, you'll have to click on yet another link to see today's poem. You'll also have to use your imagination and hear two voices reading some of the lines, and it should be fairly clear just which lines those are.

A poem for two voices: Zannma & Raven

Namaste,
Zann