Came up with two new chants at Drum and Dance this weekend in Amherst on Friday night. I’ll make teaching .mp3s in the near future. Also with ‘s permission, I’ll make a teaching .mp3 of the song I wrote for her wedding, but didn’t sing.
The lyrics to the two new chants are:
Moon rises high in her waxing newness,
changing and renewing and reshaping the night;
she’s keeping her eye on the meek and friendless,
stirring up mischief to bring them delight.
I thought that one was pretty good. A lot more people were taken with the second one, though, which required a lot less work to write and had a nice boomy-thumpy drumming rhythm going on underneath it…
Shed your leaves and dig in deep—
there are roots to spread before you sleep.
Seeds to plant before the snow,
and many a springtime yet to grow.
got to do Sophia with her women, I got to go to an open house with some Covenant of the Goddess people which was pretty good, and to lounge in a hot tub for forty minutes or so. I also got to hang with F in his shop for a while, helping him crank out books for his little publishing business. He’s got a really hiqh-quality setup to crank out his small chapbooks, including a method for trimming the page edges opposite the binding. I don’t think his studio is open for making chapbooks for the poets out there, but it did give me some ideas about how to go about making my own books.
I noticed today on the P22 Type Foundry website that they have a set of typefaces called Jacobean Initials which come in four or five styles that interface with one another, so that you can print one part of the initial in black, one in red, one in green and one in blue, and produce a four-color capital initial on the page, which you can then drop-cap or do something nifty to, in order to make it look damn fine. I’m thinking about doing 50 copies of the moon sonnets in color, with capital initials and maybe some illuminated pictures around each of the poems. I should look into finding some artists to do those pictures. Something medievalish and yet modern would be good.