The poetry in Humanophone, the third volume from award-winning poet
Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry
Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to
invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their "mind's
ear." Taking its title from a George Ives invention -- an
instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single
note, arrayed like a xylophone -- Humanophone appears on its
surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist's
creative dilemma -- how to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song
or a poem, through existing media.
Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiar --
syllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnets -- and engagingly new.
With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara
Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats's belle dame to Dante's Francesca, feng
shui to a recipe for octopus, Humanophone celebrates how the body
shapes art from the world it is given.
In Humanophone, Holmes not only chronicles events such as Harry
Partch's transformation of glass chemical containers from the
Berkeley Radition Lab into the melodious and beautiful
Cloud-Chamber Bowls, but also traces a playful path through the
familiar, as a trombone's upwards glissando becomes "a backwards
pratfall/in brass." Engaging a broad array of subjects, Holmes's
poetry is as delightful as it is thoughtful, as simple as it is
complex.
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