Askew Poetry Recorded Video Footage of VCM Performance

 Melinda Palacio

Today's post is brought to you by Askew Poetry's YouTube channel. Check out the careful archive by Poet Laureate Phil Taggart. You'll be treated to poets who have read in Ventura County. In a previous post, I mentioned that I wrote a song for my poem How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, the title poem for the book by Tía Chucha Press. Margaret Garcia painted the cover portrait. When she included the portrait in her one woman retrospective at the Ventura County Museum, I knew I wanted to write a song for the work to be performed at the museum, alongside the vibrant paintings. Turning a poem into a song is trickier than it seems. What I had in mind was to write an original song on guitar, based on the poem. Poets sometimes add musical accompaniment to their poems, but this situation was different because the song is its own entity. Some of the themes and verses are taken from the poem, but the song follows rules that make it a song, just as the poem follows rules that make it a poem. Thanks to the video footage, you can hear and see the song on guitar and then the poem performed in front of some of Garcia's fire paintings. When I originally, approached Margaret for a cover image for my poetry book, I had some of her fire paintings in mind. However, she graciously insisted on painted an original portrait for my book because the poems were for my poetry and she felt a portrait of myself was appropriate; this is how I became a cover girl.