Sing this to the grass. Repeat.*
Grass appears to be a recurring motif in our anniversary years.
We sang to the grass when SYC turned 50, with words of Sam milled through the music box of Eric Banks. This year we turn 60. Whitman's Leaves of Grass forms the backbone for the body electric—the story of how a man (choir) came to grow and seed the future.
Sixty years of working into, above and beyond the soft slippery soil of Singapore, how did our garden grow? In Sam's words—
This is the present,
the heaving, backbreaking,
aching Present.
We ask ourselves where we are,
not really knowing that the answer
lies buried, still breathing.
Samuel Lee, Cover and Concealment
Where are we? Still breathing—knowing that the answer lies buried in SYC artifacts—we / I begin to write words for our new song about grass, re-purposing names and contours of felt things and body parts from old music.
after the poems of Samuel Lee
Phrases / words from the poems of Samuel Lee were selected and re-arranged into the 5-7-5 syllabic patterns of haiku. The haiku have been titled after the poem to which his words belong.
I A definition of affection
half-singing, morning—
mysterious construction:
electricity
II still life with radishes
blossomed, bodies lay—
the collective aesthetic
breathing old moonlight
III Poem Machine #3
deadened hands, pegging
language, stones, markers of place—
This is mine—counting
Words are place-making, we choose them in love and frustration, patterning the chaos that plays within, still breathing yellow, banana and white, brown black and dotty pink, and red! with electric stars and crescent moon. Repeat.
soft sift, an hourglass
fells of flanks of the voel**, vein
it crowds, tall way down
Jennifer Tham, haiku after Hopkins
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*Samuel Lee, SYC alum, Logistics for a Garden Show
For SYC's 50th birthday in 2014, Eric Banks set the words of poet-member Samuel Lee to music. The text fragments are from different poems (including what Sam considers his B-sides) and become what Eric calls The Burnished Verses, each of the 12 verses a room full of curiosities and colour.
**bare hill (Welsh)