©2022 Michael Raven
It’s been a long couple of days, for whatever reason. Well, I can name a few, but those even seem too little to fill up all the empty space consumed.
You guessed it: update time.
Continue reading Shaving the yak©2022 Michael Raven
It’s been a long couple of days, for whatever reason. Well, I can name a few, but those even seem too little to fill up all the empty space consumed.
You guessed it: update time.
Continue reading Shaving the yakAbsurd little tale in a series of tweets. I had fun. Not sure if Fizzy did, but she was a good sport all the same.
©2022 krista marson | michael raven | towint
Below is a “blind” collaboration several of us put together based solely on three random tarot cards drawn from a standard deck, The Crow Tarot as designed by MJ Cullinane. Krista, Towint, and myself independently wrote three poems with no more than 100 words total based on those random tarot cards. None of us was aware what the other had written while we wrote out own contributions. The text colors are consistent for each author throughout the piece: Krista=beige, Towint=yellow, and Michael=blue. The text follows each panel of the triptych for those people who utilize screen readers or only have handheld devices.
This post is best viewed on a full screen tablet or monitor.
Continue reading triptych — a poetic collaboration©2022 Michael Raven
Towint and Krista have both agreed to the skeletal outline of my mad collaborative scheme proposed a few days ago. [Cue evil overlord laughter: “Mwahahahaha”].
Silliness aside… Here’s the short version:
Continue reading The call of the triptych©2022 Michael Raven
I honestly didn’t expect responses regarding my Call Out post yesterday. I’ve post such things in the past and largely received radio silence. And then, Towint and Krista both actually responded with raised hands and I had to actually think about what I might do if I were to work on a collaborative effort with not only someone, but sometwo.
Thinking is hecking hard when you only have two brain cells and they’re not currently on speaking terms.
In the past, I’ve directly contacted folks when I’ve gotten it into my head to collaborate (and may still do so, depending on the results of this post), or they have contacted me — but as I was thinking about the “how” of what I might propose, I started to have dangerous monsters rear their ugly heads inside my head (see: two brain cells, not on speaking terms, so it must be monsters). And I thought I’d propose something, well, weird.
Continue reading Follow-up©2021 Lauren M and Michael Raven
I can't let you hear ragged panting breathing I need to be hidden below so cover me whole with your body smother & jetblacken me maybe I'll come up for air eve nt ually bloodkiss hot lips your teeth tear the sutures clean to drinkme eatme fuckme alive fill me lover make me banshee howl nightsongscream wash my limp skin rags scrub my worn flesh clean an umbra eye-witness to sickness and laughter nails clipped rough from their beds as we assume our positions [in the funeral home after] pale legs wrapentraptwine and draw hold tight in wine-stain'd lace neither of us will sleep this winter night NOW: nail me down bury me|six inches deeper bone grinding in the morgue & the director weeping harder than the preacher
Lauren, from The Lexicon, once again lets me ride on her coattails for this, as she described it, a nec/romance piece we wrote together recently. I always enjoy when I have the opportunity to work with Lauren, as the pieces we have collaborated on over time seem to write themselves (okay, she does most of the heavy lifting, who am I trying to kid? I get to be the slacker).
I haven’t put the call out recently, but I am generally open to collaborative writing as long as the chemistry works between all of the writers involved (I’ve worked on pieces with as many as five poets on a single piece in the ancient past and it was only possible because we all shared a very warped sense of humor and it bled the piece through and through). Post a comment below, or use my contact form, if you’d like to try to work together on a piece of writing or DAW-based music.
© 2021 Lauren M | theweesmirk and Michael Raven
A little over a week ago, I had featured Lauren’s site in a Follow Friday post (which due to circumstances beyond my control, not limited to losing power for part of the day, did not get replicated last Friday) and we chatted a bit since then and discussed working together on a few pieces.
In ways, Opium is more her poem than mine. I just went along for the ride and she didn’t kick me out of the car while it was still cruising down the road at many miles an hour. But seriously, this piece was in her style and I tried to fit my stuff in. As per usual, I don’t care for obvious delineations for who contributed what, so I did my best to emulate her atypical approach. The result is the image shared above.
Why an image? Well, Lauren’s use of white space and alternate emphasis wreaks havoc with your standard post editor. She was having problems getting it to look good and I said, “I have an idea”. I proposed the above and she gave me the thumbs up. I took some liberties with the formatting when I pulled it together, add some color to mix it up, a suitable background image. And, like that, it became a picture. Problem with formatting and fussy editors solved.
Except… it didn’t. Thank you, theme creators for not making all pictures dynamic and responsive [/sarcasm].
So, anyway — this really belongs more on her site. And I think we’ll get it so that the internet gods accept our goat cheese sacrifice (feta works wonders, let me tell you) and she can have it on her site — but we’ll have to tease it into working, I think.
Lauren drove the car, I went along for the ride. I look forward to future collaborations when she has the time. i can’t tell you just how pleased I am with the result.
Yes, the title of this piece was influenced by the song I had posted earlier. It seemed to fit.
©2021 tara caribou | michael raven
I asked Tara if she would be interested in working with me on another collaboration, but with a different approach than what we’d done previously with the mixed contributions towards a poem. Instead of infusing each other’s writing to try and create a cohesive whole, I tossed her a couple of fragments of a song I was working on, something that was not very cohesive at all, and asked, “Do you think you could write something to some or all of these pieces? And then read it into something an mp3 format and toss it my direction for some production?”
She bravely accepted the challenge, added some visual content after I got done messing with her vocals and fusing it onto my music (I have yet to delve into video production because I’d be OCD about it and drive everyone I know crazy, and the few friends I have would leave).
Tara wrote the words, which I’ve included after the video. I wrote the music and did the audio production, with special effects by Loonatik & Drinks (just kidding, it’s only me — I couldn’t resist the nod to a song that some of you may know). I did some minor rearrangement with her original vocal work, and you’ll find some more repetition than evidence in the text provided.
Update: WordPress Reader is borking the video at the moment, please visit the site to watch until I can resolve the problem.
Update 2: The problem seems to be limited to the mobile version of the WordPress Reader. I cannot seem to resolve the issue on my end, so I recommend visiting my site directly to view the video. If you prefer to stay within the Reader environment, I’ve uploaded the ‘audio-only’ version of our collaboration following the video.
reach for me reach step down in me inside headswirl edging down my slip-painted sides reach pour out inside drip-drops outside beside my mind reach stretch out with me expertly guide inside my mind reach deep inside me
I’m blessed to have Tara so willing to work with me on this and I hope you enjoy the finished product as much as I enjoyed working with her on it.
Once again, if you are interested in what I’m doing either as a musician or as a writer and want to work collaboratively, please feel free to contact me and propose an idea or two. I prefer that both people have an artistic stake in the collaborative effort, and I am not currently looking to monetize anything I do with someone else — it would be strictly for fun.
tara caribou + Michael Raven | ©2021
artwork ©2021 | tara caribou, used with permission
through the damp wood dim and heavy, humid with the tears of Danu’s children from ere they dwelt in their mounds, where betwixt and ‘tween the misty veils lies a fortress forbidding bare and stark built of black mud, river boulder, bone and feather in single file dressed all alike, black robed and solemn, they walk the pathway climb the tower up the stairway ‘round cold bricks about my heart tight, so tight, i cannot breathe! worms trying to shatter those stones reshape my world, theirs yet… ‘neath the soul’s window on the ledge there stands a raven black and dark her feathers silky beak so sharp eyes that glitter in the night upon stairs tread by boots of traitors line they then of one accord first the one and then the other bend a knee lift arcane stave as one voice murmur dark curses known only to those across the vales all at once with sudden vigor raven surges upon her wings takes to air caws and cries an eerie shouting a dismal spell all her own to their horror and great amazement notice they, the twelve of cloak, within her claw she holds a blade of silver etched with runes they cannot bear rending these speckled sill maggot interlopers asunder, them vying for a premature seat at the funeral feast
This is a collaborative effort with Tara Caribou, who provided the starting material which we both built from over the course of several editing periods over the past few weeks. After reading her initial suggestion, I felt it should appear as a seamless piece that could have multiple authors, or a single author. She may have had other goals — we hadn’t discussed that element during the process of creation. That goal, in my opinion, was largely met with the results above, although I suspect you could probably extract who did what if you really wanted to make such an effort. I honestly wouldn’t waste your time doing so — you’ll just get annoyed because it isn’t by stanza and I won’t admit to anything.
I’m very pleased with the results and look forward to working with Tara in the future (assuming she’ll continue put up with me and my weird habits of notetaking on other writers’ writing and abstract, nonsensical comments).
As always, I am interested in collaborative efforts, should you wish — be it with fiction, poetry, music, or some combination of all of the above. It makes a different part of the creative mind work than that which creates solo efforts, and I feel it has the potential to make both participants better at what they do as a part of their overall growth. It won’t always work, sadly, and I will honestly (and yet politely) say so if it comes to that — but we’ll never know if we don’t attempt to work together.
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