“Rhodora”
Grand Prize Winner of the Silver Sounds Showdown Music & Video Festival
Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem of the same name, the song is an ode to a flower that serves as a warning about the dangers of the fragmenting poetry of the male voyeuristic gaze in the mode of 'blason,' a descriptive cataloging of a woman's features that verbally tears her apart in rhapsody and rhyme. By invoking the myth of the young hunter Actaeon and his encounter with the divine Diana, I am able to capture this exchange between spectator and spectacle; as Actaeon's botched rite of passage transforms him into a stag, he is soon torn apart by his own hounds 'from horn to hoof' in a vengeful reversal of hunter come hunted. Cardboard and paper struck me as the perfect medium to build this world, as it can be torn asunder, perfectly echoing the poetics of the violated body.
