text by Mark Strand
Duration: 7.5 minutes
About
With this setting of Mark Strand's poem, I wanted to write a piece that reflected my own experience as a reader.
This poem fascinates me because Strand builds an incredibly rich and complex interweaving of imagery and form out of short phrases, simple words, and bare language. None of the seven short fragments quite make sense on their own; each sets up an image of some sort which isn't exactly logical, for which I can't construct a mental picture. Yet while the fragments are undeniably interconnected, it is also not quite clear how they relate to one another. There are too many gaps to fill in, too much is missing.
Darker was written for Amy Justman.