A video version of my poem from last week. It took about four hours to make, process, and upload a video for a poem that I wrote in twenty minutes.
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This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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This is great. I love how you connected ‘I have no words’ to the blank Scrabble tiles in the video. I think chopping block could be loosely compared to the tiles as well. Impressive video. Have a great weekend.
Thanks, Michelle. I didn’t think of the possible tile-chopping block association. But my philosophy with these kinds of things is to bring two fairly dissimilar sets of images into conjunction, and hope that the result will end up being suggestive as you found this one to be, and not just a confusing mish-mash. :)
This resonated for me a great deal, as did the original poem. I was spellbound by all that energy moving in a space of speechlessness dealing with the presence/absence paradox of all those blank tiles. I found myself thinking, what’s on the other side of those tiles? is it the poem? sometimes I have to work to be blank.
Great comment! “Energy moving in a space of speechlessness” — I like that. So glad this resonated with you. Obviously, it’s very via negativistic. (Which reminds me, I need to tag it as such. Also need to stop writing in short sentences. I annoy myself.)
Cool!
Nice. Very Quaker. Maybe they get together to play/worship like this.
Maybe. My dad the peace scholar said it made him guffaw.
Dave, I love this. Right down to the yellow leaf that wanted to be a punctuation mark.
Thanks! I liked that leaf too, and wish I hadn’t been so quick to remove it. But I felt this was the sort of idea that’s best done in one take.
For me, the word “Scrabble” resonates with the claw-scratching of “scrabble.” Not being a farmer, I can’t say for sure — do chickens “scrabble” the ground for food?
Oh yes. In fact, I think they provide the “scrabble” in “hardscrabble.” Interesting association.
I think this is a great example of video working with the text to create something greater than both “poems”!
Oh, I’m glad you liked it! Thanks for stopping by, Ren.