http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx The Elsie Dee Project is dedicated not only to the diffusion of poetry, but also to the exploration of the musical formulas which one could call the 'lowest common denominator'. Copyright 2007 - 20011 Pierre Voyer and Boyd Williams SOCAN http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/images/Arthur_Michault.jpg http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx en Song 45 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dwight E. Edwards. Once again D.E.Edwards builds a metaphorical conceit in which erotic and esoteric twists are easily confused. Is it an ode to the free life in wilderness or a hymn to self sacrifice in the green war? In this song, the Elsie Dee Project comes through as a singing duet, and that6 certainly opens a door to a whole lot of musical possibilities. Song 46 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. For the third time the Elsie Dee Project has fallen for the absolute charm of Lewis Carroll. This time, we used part of a poem taken from his Phantasmagoria. It is a kind of humoristic ars poetica, as light sounding as it is deep and «heavy» in content. As one the main nonsensical poets, Lewis Carroll gives us here the secret of endless meaning. Some twenty years after his death, the French surrealists started playing literary games using the same method of writing not to convey conventional meaning but to create new meanings, as did the Socrates for Victorian nerdy girls. And so did some of the poets of the OULIPO workshop (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). Song 49 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jack T. Hammer. Jack T Hammer has always been on the edge of something or another. He had given us Freeze last year, now he is more ambiguous, but still pushes the limits of civility and outrageousness. Some members of ION (a group of artists) have told us that they had a hard time pondering his natural 1his forgotten romantic soul. In Homecoming he manages to walk a straight line - so to speak - while adventuring out of his comfort zone. Song 31 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dwight E. Edwards. Dwight E. Edwards was born in Duncan?s Cove, Nova Scotia (1954). His mother was a Danish harpist struggling to get by. Playing the high society venues her instrument called for was not easy, even if she extended her artistic territory to New-Brunswick, Newfoundland and Maine. His father was an out of work fisherman: he had been badly traumatized by a blue whale who he claimed had words with on a stormy night off the shores of Sable Island. But he had to be drunk that night too, since he was all the time when home. Song 33 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dylan Thomas. This Welsh poet?s poetic power is almost incomparable. His style is unique, blending traditional rhythms and intensely personal imagery in riddle-like knots of wisdom and rage, love and despair, faith and the humbling waves of the ever beating heart of the sea. Song 36 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jack T. Hammer. His first attempts at poetry were rap revival of old English masters. He almost made the Guinness book of records with his non-stop rendition of Percy Bysshe Shelley?s The Revolt of Islam. Song 26 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is another lover of simplicity, but of a fiercer kind of robust simplicity. No lace making, but sophisticated nakedness. People who prefer daylight to romantic moonshine, the early risers of happiness, will easily identify with this violent optimist and soon forgive him his naive narcissism. Moving awhile is a patchwork Elsie Dee made out of bits of much longer poems. Song 27 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is too notorious to add anything new about him, but his sonnets and poems in general are certainly the least known part of his work. The single theme of the sonnets is the passage of time and its harm on the love that, as we have learned through experience, never doth runs smooth. A sentence from Marcel Proust illustrates, in concentrated, the two-mile fifty-six towards one hundred fifty-four sonnets trying to express: "And what would be the wrinkles and circles under the eyes if it wasn?t for the sufferings of the heart". Song 29 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Taliesin. The Song of Taliesin is to Welsh culture what the Kalevala is the Finnish culture or what Deuteronomy is to the Judeo-Christian culture: an alphabet which is also a calendar where each line is a step (moon) whose name is that of a tree. Elsie has added a few repetitions so to give this poem an air of sacred jingle. Song 13 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 14 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of the Redding Geole is certainly one of the sadest poem this witty man has written. It is full of gore and morbidity, but it is also a very touching look life gone by while one was dancing and frivolously enjoying the profound superficiality of life. A short extract of this long poem has become Elsie Dee's song "The Gallows". Song 18 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 2 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his Hymn to Proserpine Song 5 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics byLewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 8 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 9 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his tragedy Atalanta in Calydon Song 22 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Emperor Yuraku. This first Japanese song by the Elsie Dee Project is made of six tankas (short poems of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables) related by a common theme: the mono no aware or "feeling of things". They are sometimes attributed to the legendary emperor Yuraku, but as we know more about them since the German scholar H.J. Klaproth has translated them and made them available to the western world, we realize they originate from the ancient Japanese oral tradition kept in the Manyoshu. Song 35 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Friedrich Nietzsche. When he was 25, he was best friend with the 50 years old Richard Wagner. They were both writers as well as composers. The music and the philosophy of the twentieth century would not have been the same without them. But even in the best friendship, there is no room for two giants. Song 42 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Fernando Pessoa. It is impossible to verify if this very popular text is really by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). First of all, the style and content have nothing in common with the works of the famous Portuguese poet, but then again he left an incredible amount of unpublished material, signed by no less than 17 heteronyms. The fact is: the message it conveys could not be simpler and clearer. And since we wanted to thank our many Brazilian fans by recording a song in their language, it fit the bill perfectly.