• About
  • Writings
    • Writing
      • YOGA: Writing and Practice
      • Motorcycling from MotorCyclingYogiG
    • Midwest
    • Music
  • Contact
  • Home
  • www.zerowasteplanner.com

Gregory Ormson

Writer, musician, yoga-loving motorcyclist.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: a poetry/song series the last 8 days of April. Poem/song number, 1 “Whale Song.”

Russell Thorburn and Gregory Ormson have worked together for over a decade writing original poems, prose, and music. Much of it happens in spite of distance and isolation. The eight songs/poems posted over the next 8 days of April will close out NATIONAL POETRY MONTH for 2020.

Russell Thorburn plays “Chelsea Hotel,” a composition he wrote to celebrate Dylan Thomas. The hotel is similar to a whale swimming through the Atlantic humpbacked Ocean of New York City, and lives are certainly made of vibrations, artists and poets who swam through the hallways and never reached shore. In the song Dylan opens the door to Death wearing a Fifth Avenue gown and black gloves; he is there at his typewriter to finish the last pages of Under Milk Wood.

Substitute Thomas for Ormson’s memoir and corners of eternity, and don’t answer the door. “Chelsea Hotel” was performed at the Beaumier Folk Series Concert in 2014, Northern Michigan University. I was on piano and mumbling the lyrics. Here is the basic piano track in another gummersound recording. R. Thorburn

Free diving in Hawaii opened me to a whale song’s sonic jangling my synapses and brain cells. It came to me from deep down and far out. Sounds swam through the water and past my cochlea until my inner ear caught humpback aria as it rearranged maps in my head.

Under the waves, I heard the ecstatic; it was accompanied by sweeter-still unheard melodies of which John Keats wrote. Years later, I’m still trying to make sense of it all, like the yellow-robed priests: Mayan, Incan, or Egyptian, who crumbled into the dust at such otherworldly ditties. … read more...

Final tracks in late January for “Mescalero Territory,” by Russell Thorburn and Gregory Ormson

Hear  “When I Get Back to Marquette,” and “Mescalero Territory.”

Russell Thorburn, NEA recipient, is the author of four books of poems. His last book, Somewhere We’ll Leave the World, was published by Wayne State University Press. Currently he is producing and directing his one-act play Bomb Shelter for Black Box Theater at Northern Michigan University, where he teaches composition. It will premiere March, 2020, and includes original music for the end of the world that never happened in the sixties. www.russthorburn.com

Gregory Ormson, writer and musician living in Arizona, has collaborated with Thorburn over the last decade on word and poem projects. He writes on music, yoga, motorcycling, and landscape.

“Mescalero Territory” Lyric and voice, Russell Thorburn. Sitar, Gregory Ormson, engineered at Gummersound Studio, Marquette, Michigan.   https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7CJeFLGYOO8YVB0NjFQSUFhR0dJV09kSjlVZ2daTk5uYU9Z/view?usp=sharing

“When I Get Back to Marquette” Russell Thorburn, Marquette, Michigan lyric; Gregory Ormson, Mesa, Arizona, music, guitar, vocal, and lyric adaptation; Mike Bjella, clarinet, Montreal, Quebec; Peter Gummerson, Marquette, Michigan, sound engineering. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CiqMkl6W9OOuS82qWe-LASo3ytH_FNLw/view?usp=sharing

 

 

 

 … read more...

Book Review of Misfit Hearts by Russell Thorburn

GREGORY ORMSON
Misfit Hearts by Russell Thorburn
(Rocky Shore Books, 2012) 90 pp. $16.00 (paper) ISBN 978-0-9823319-6-5.
In Thorburn’s five poetry works, I explore the poetic credo arising from his well-structured presentation of human tempest.  In Thorburn’s first work, Approximate Desire, I saluted him for bringing both gravity and grace to us with words that moved me between blissful memories and heavy adult responsibilities. Some of the characters he chose to enliven those memories were Ty Cobb, Albert and Mileva Einstein, Apollinaire, Rilke. The baseball images are stunning: oracles rattling in the catcher’s mitt and the shame in baseball bats blindly stroking for the ball. Maybe they’re not on the field, but baseball leads to tears and I saw them in Approximate Desire.
Reviewing a second work, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, I bowed to him for “bringing it,” to use the sport show cliché. There, he portaled his ancestral stories through music, risk, generational angst and triumph. The poems celebrated many deaths, while along the way highlighted the erotic and its inner physics. His theology and psychology of the generation gap as the first spade-full of dirt that excavates family story, made sense to me. I’m familiar with a shovel, know how to dig, and feel the generation gap turned to bite. I understood his presentation of erotic quivering as the petite mort moving the world, I followed his sport and music angles, and my theological training alerted me to take seriously any writing working to exposes that gap (the generational one) as the first letter in the alphabet of the human condition.
… read more...

Connect With Me

Subscribe for Updates

Copyright © 2021 Gregory Ormson | Quanta Web Design