I made a simple video for yesterday’s poem, using some footage I shot last January (when we had actual snow). The music was a SoundCloud find, licenced for any use with attribution under the Creative Commons.

Merry Christmas!

Watch on Vimeo

My first NSFW videopoem. If you are for some reason offended by the sight of naked human beings, there are lots of cat videos on YouTube that you should probably be watching instead.

Rather than spend another whole day working to re-build my ramshackle blog network, I dove into a project that’s been tempting me for days, ever since I listened to Nic Sebastian’s reading of “Orchard” by H.D. at Pizzicati of Hosanna. Sometime in the midst of the chaos, I got the idea of trying to work a female nude into this video. When I ran across filmmaker Laurel Nakadake’s video of porn actresses reading poems by Dora Malech, and I saw how poetry conferred a sort of dignity on those women, it strengthened my resolve to try and incorporate natural-looking, non-exploitative footage of a nude into a true videopoem. What I found is unattributed, and evidently uploaded by its creator at archive.org’s Community Video section, which I’m pretty sure means it’s public domain. I found the Creative Commons-licensed music on SoundCloud, which is by a fellow in Kiev named Tim Six, by searching for anything with the word “ritual” in its description.

I’ve never been a huge fan of H.D., but Nic’s reading made me see this poem, at least, in a new light. The volunteer Keiffer pear tree behind my house, which is still loaded with fruit even as its leaves turn color and snowflakes swirl around it, was another inspiration. It was tempting to do the obvious and incorporate shots of the tree into the video, but I managed to resist that loveliness.

Since it’s out-of-copyright, I might as well share the text of the poem:

Orchard

by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

I saw the first pear
As it fell—
The honey-seeking, golden-banded,
The yellow swarm
Was not more fleet than I,
(Spare us from loveliness)
And I fell prostrate
Crying:
You have flayed us
With your blossoms,
Spare us the beauty
Of fruit-trees.

The honey-seeking
Paused not,
The air thundered their song,
And I alone was prostrate.

O rough-hewn
God of the orchard,
I bring you an offering—
Do you, alone unbeautiful,
Son of the god,
Spare us from loveliness:

These fallen hazel-nuts,
Stripped late of their green sheaths,
Grapes, red-purple,
Their berries
Dripping with wine,
Pomegranates already broken,
And shrunken figs
And quinces untouched,
I bring you as offering.

I uploaded an image to my photohaikublog, but thought I’d try a video haiku, too. I’m not sure the latter is as successful as the former, but you can be the judge.

I guess we’ve gotten in excess of five wet inches here as of 4:00 p.m., with more predicted to come. Fortunately, it’s warmed up a bit, causing much of the snow to drop from the trees. Most of our oaks and tulip trees are still in leaf, so a heavy, wet snowfall this time of year can be a destructive thing.

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Speaking of trees, we are in desperate need of hosts for upcoming editions of the Festival of the Trees, the monthly blog carnival for all things arboreal.

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Speaking of blog carnivals, check out the first anniversary edition of the >Language >Place carnival at Dorothee Lang’s personal blog, life is a journey. The theme this time is “Streets, Signs, Directions.”

watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube

Who’d have thought a Chilean poem and an Irish folk song (“The Foggy Dew” on penny whistle, by British software- and web-developer Chris Kent) would go together so well? But the mix of sweetness and melancholy was just right, I thought.

This is one of those videopoems that began with some of my own footage (of a spinner who wishes to remain anonymous). When I thought about what sort of poem to match it with, Gabriela Mistral came to mind almost right away — those who know her work will understand what I mean. Nic Sebastian readily agreed to make and upload a recording to her new site Pizzicati of Hosanna. (How many times have Nic and I collaborated on something now? I’ve lost count. Riches, I got ‘em!)

Dicha can mean happiness, joy, good luck, or good fortune. Many translators, influenced by the title and the “stolen” part, have gone with “fortune,” but I think it’s better to keep our options open. So often, the simplest poems are the hardest to translate…

Riches
by Gabriela Mistral

I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost:
one like a rose,
the other a thorn.
That which was stolen from me
is still in my possession:
I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost,
and I’m rich with purple
and with melancholy.
Ah, how beloved is the rose,
how loving the thorn!
Like the double outline
of twin fruits,
I have a steadfast joy
and a joy that’s lost…

I hadn’t expected to be so impressed by Blackwater Falls. The West Virginia state park was just a place to camp, conveniently located close to two microbreweries in the towns of Thomas and Davis, not to mention a portion of the Monongahela National Forest which my hiking buddy Lucy and I planned to explore the next day. But we dutifully went down to look at the falls after pitching our tents, and were blown away (see the photo in my postcard). The tannic color of the falls (whence its name) was striking, and the location in a wooded gorge couldn’t have been more picturesque.

I made an audio recording of the falls, then switched to the video camera. At a certain point, Lucy — who has an excellent eye — drew my attention to the water spraying off a large boulder at the foot of the falls and suggested that might make a good film “for a poem by you or Nic Sebastian.” I saw immediately what she was talking about.

After several more days of relishing the unparalleled silence, breathtaking scenery and wilderness quality of the “Mon,” we made our way back to Central Pennsylvania, and I discovered to my shock that Via Negativa and all its associated sites had been down for two and a half days (sorry about that). But my gloom at the unreliability of my webhost was soon cancelled out by my excitement at seeing what other, more diligent online poets had been doing during my absence. Luisa had continued to write daily poems for publication on Via Negativa even without the benefit of access to The Morning Porch archives for prompts, which is especialy impressive considering all her other commitments. And Nic Sebastian, who had recently decided to close submissions to Whale Sound, her online audio archive of contemporary poetry, had just launched a new audio project called Pizzicati of Hosanna, featuring her readings of work by dead poets in English, French, Spanish and Italian. One poem, Neruda’s “Fábula de la sirena y los borrachos,” seemed like it might make a good fit for my waterfall footage.

I whipped up a fairly literal translation — good enough for subtitling, I thought. But finding the right soundtrack consumed quite a few hours more, using various search terms at Jamendo, ccMixter and Soundcloud. Part of the problem was I couldn’t decide on the mood I wanted to establish. But once it became clear it should be elegiac (rather than, say, angry or dissonant), I quickly found something I thought might work. I shared the result at a private Facebook group where a few of us aspiring videopoets critique each other’s work, and was encouraged by their positive reactions. Brenda Clews suggested I increase the sound of the falls after the poem ends. I decided to go a little further and include waterfall sound throughout the title and credits, using the higher-quality audio from my portable recorder rather than what was on the video.

Here’s my translation, for those with dial-up connections who don’t feel inclined to wait for the video to load:

Fable of the Siren and the Drunks
by Pablo Neruda

All those gentlemen were there inside
when she came in completely naked
they’d been drinking and they began spitting on her
fresh from the river she didn’t understand anything
she was a siren who’d gotten lost
insults streamed down over her smooth flesh
filth drenched her golden breasts
she didn’t know how to cry so she didn’t cry
she didn’t know how to put clothes on so she didn’t put clothes on
they branded her with cigarettes and charred corks
and laughed until they fell down on the bar room floor
she didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to speak
her eyes were the color of distant love
her arms were made of twin topazes
her lips were cut from coral light
and she went out that door as suddenly as she came
no sooner had she entered the river than she was clean
she shone like a white stone in the rain
and without looking back she swam anew
swam toward never again swam toward death

Listen to Neruda himself reading the poem at Palabra Virtual.

Incidentally, speaking of Brenda Clews, she’s just launched a weekly series of blog posts reviewing videopoems, “videopoem Fridays.” Here’s the first installment.

A bit of fun with William Shakespeare and a couple of public-domain films from the Prelinger Archives. SoundCloud came through once again, with a small selection of Creative Commons-licensed English Renaissance music to choose from. The piece I used is by William Byrd, “Malt’s come down,” performed by Vicente Parrilla and company.

My first videopoem to use footage from another, equally fun hobby, homebrewing. The poem by D. H. Lawrence is now in the public domain, and I found it rather quickly because my copy of his complete poems is quite throughly annotated with marginalia by its previous owner — my poetry sensei, Jack McManis. Jack had put a big check-mark beside the title and underlined all the best parts, helping me see past its — to my mind — overly didactic framing.

Here’s the text.

Terra Incognita
by D. H. Lawrence

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.

Usually I would wait till morning to post something completed so late at night, but this one needs to get its first few views from my fellow night-owls. It occurred to me that Emily Dickinson might well have envisioned a male narrator for her poem “Wild Nights…” (1861).

I first watched the silent footage used here on CreatureCast last year and was entranced. Fortunately, they license everything Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, God bless ‘em. You can watch their original, higher-resolution version here. “This footage shows what a remotely operated submarine was seeing at about 600 meters depth in the Pacific Ocean.”

The music is “Soundscape #3” by Ithaca Audio on SoundCloud. Oddly, as I was taking a break in putting this together to surf the web a few hours ago, I happened on a blog post about the guy behind Ithaca Audio and his approach to creativity and sharing. There’s serendipity for you.

There are no planes
or denunciations in it,
nothing combustible,
no flags or falling bodies,
no twisted I-beams
or pacifist cris de coeur.
In this poem, we are
eating soup, & the radio
is off as it always is during meals.
Nobody calls to tell us
to tune in. We are for
the most part ignoring
the extraordinary events taking place
all around us in field & woodlot,
in the air & soil & water
from which we are knit.
The soup is hot, & so good.
I dip my bread in it,
extending its dominion.
When the bread is gone, I lift
the bowl to my lips & slurp
as I learned to do years ago
in Japan. My father
will wash the dishes.
We will each slice open
& remove the inedible stone from
a dead-ripe peach.

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Shown in the video: a green darner migration swarm from last weekend.

(Update) Here’s the whole song I used a snippet from for the soundtrack:
Beatrice et Benedict: Je Vais Le Voir- Berlioz by Teresa Macdonald

Luisa A. Igloria turned 50 today. Online birthday commemorations usually strike me as fairly pointless, but I wanted to do something special for the genius poet who has contributed so much wonderful content to Via Negativa over the past nine months, and what better than a videopoem? I’ve shied away from envideoing Luisa’s poems until now because they struck me as rather too challenging for a videopoemographer of my basic skill level, being both rich in imagery and usually fairly long. But I saw some cool footage at the British Film Institute the other night, free for non-commercial use under something called a Creative Archive Licence, and today I went through Luisa’s poem archive here until I found one I thought might work with it: “Reprieve,” from back on August 2. Then for the soundtrack, I floundered around on SoundCloud for a while until I got the idea of searching for something with “kisses” (a central image of the poem’s) in the title or description, and the first track that came up worked brilliantly, I thought.

I wish I had a higher-resolution version of the film clips to work with, but beggars can’t be choosers, as my mom always says. It was fun to cut and splice and see how well I could make filmic and poetic images line up. Happy birthday, Luisa!