Audio Piece
****["Pretty How Town"]****
This public-domain recording of a poem by e. e. cummings describes a lonely man living in a busy place surrounded by people who ignore him. He lives and he dies as time passes and the seasons change. In adding layers of sound to the recording, I tried working with topical effects such as church bells, leaves rustling, and children playing, but these effects competed with the spoken narrative. So I opted for a background sound that plays softly behind the voice: the sound of people talking in a lounge. I felt this captured the poem’s sense of loneliness in the midst of people.
Spoken poem: https://archive.org/details/audio_poetry_90_2006, read by Yesha, 2006
Lounge sound: http://www.soundjay.com/ambient-sounds.html
Full text of poem: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/anyone-lived-pretty-how-town
Produced with Audacity
Book Town, painting by Ellen Lupton