The Alchemy of Anger


Alchemy of Anger from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

I hadn’t planned on making another snake video poem so soon after the last one, but I got some great footage of a northern water snake yesterday on a visit to a friend’s hunting camp, and the poem came to me this morning. The reading here might be a little over the top; I decided to try reading through clenched teeth.

(Transcript)

Whatever burns in the airless ooze of my gut,
it’s far from fire. If red be its color,
it’s the toxic red of cinnabar.
It churns. It gurgles. It ties itself in knots.

Anger is an acid, altering everything it touches.
Vitriol, the alchemists called it:
mixed with common salt, it produces
gastric acid, which those ardent
scientists of the soul revered as spirits of salt.

Ah, to think that their philosopher’s stone,
granter of base wishes,
might be glimmering at the end
of such tortuous metamorphoses!
The Alkahest, universal solvent, so wondrously corrosive
nothing could ever hold it in.

Bird-Count Bear

The soft crunch of gravel: a bear-shaped shadow detatches itself from the woods, ambles up the road, turns onto my walk, and stops right in front of the door. Stands there under my portico, still as a statue. The light of the half-moon is disappearing into the dawn like spilled milk into a cat.

I’m up early to help my mother with our annual Important Bird Area point-count, which involves counting every bird seen or heard in three minutes from each of 16 points, located 250 meters apart, before 9:00 a.m. — but first I have to take my coffee, as usual, out on the porch. The large red cedar in my side garden is blocking my view of the bear, who doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. The other week, a bear tore up a couple of greenhouses in a nursery less than a mile from here, but the game wardens trapped and relocated it, they said, several counties away.

I ease the porch door open, creep inside, and tiptoe through the house to the other door. Fortunately, the cold front had blown in the night before and I had pulled the sliding storm window down over the screen. There on the other side of the glass, a massive head shakes slowly from side to side, as if trying to free itself of some hallucination. I consider trying to get a flash photo, but why let the trophy-hunting instinct hijack this encounter?

I crouch down so my eyes are level with the bear’s, six inches away. Does he see me? It’s hard to say. He finally turns around, pads back down the walk to the driveway, and heads up the hill toward the barn. I go out after him, and this time, he does acknowledge my presence, looking back, then breaking briefly into a slow trot.

Two and a half hours later, we’re ascending the southeast-facing side of the hollow along the Dogwood Knoll trail, en route to point number ten, when I spot a large black animal in the middle of the trail: no doubt the self-same bear. We watch from 75 feet away as he sits down — still in no hurry — and appears to engage in some birdwatching of his own. This is the first non-humid morning in two weeks, and with the temperature in the low 50s, it’s reasonable to assume that the bear, too, is enjoying the change.


Video link (subscribers must click through to watch)

We must’ve watched for at least five minutes. The shakey, often out-of-focus video I managed to shoot has been edited down drastically, and fails to convey the slow, contemplative mood the bear seems to have been in. If I hadn’t moved to try and get a clearer shot and disturbed its reverie, we might be there still.

Therapy again


Video link (subscribers must click through).

Yeah, I know it’s the wrong time of year, but the music made me do it — that, or else I have what Wallace Stevens called a mind of winter. Encouraged in part by a post by Lucas Green — “poets, poems, and videotape” — in which he argued that poetry is fundamentally an oral art, I wanted to see what would happen if I put more thought into the soundtrack, mixing voice and music in Adobe Audition first, then cutting and splicing video clips to fit. I’d been searching the free music site Jamendo.com for something to use in a different poem when I happened across the Sound Sculptures of one daRem, and immediately thought of my old poem “Therapy.” The composer describes her/his five tracks as “Experimental ambient music with a dark, but calm touch. Originally written for use as music for art exhibitions of my father.”

The extended version of “Therapy” includes a prose introduction, haibun-style, but when pondering video possibilties this morning, I couldn’t see how to make that work. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination, and I’m simply too much of a neophyte to know how to switch registers like that and make it work.

I appreciate the dissenting views on the value of music in the comments to my previous video, and I’ll be curious to see if my inclusion of a piece of experimental electronica this time also meets with opposition. My basic goal with poetry soundtracks, I think, is to find pieces that fit the mood I was in when I wrote the poem. One problem, though, is that music with a regular rhythm may conflict with the rhythms in the poem. So it probably makes more sense to search avant-garde classical, electronic, and ambient music — or less-composed soundscapes, if I can find them. (I’d need a dish microphone to gather my own ambient audio, so that probably won’t happen for a while.)

I’m not sure about the effect I gave my voice here. I think that could be better. But the main thing I learned today was that fairly lengthy spaces between stanzas or sentences can work so long as music is present.

Which is good, because I think such spaces are really important to aural comprehension: the main problem most people have with poetry readings is that the words go by too damn fast, at least with poems composed for the page. Modern lyrical poetry is nothing if not dense with layered meanings and images. Slam poetry works, when it works, because it’s not terribly subtle, and because it tends to repeat phrases and ideas, in common with almost all truly oral poetry. But more than once I’ve had the experience of buying a book or chapbook by an outstanding live performer only to find that the energy didn’t translate to the page. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed by lackluster readings from poets whose written work I love. So now I’m wondering: are Lucas and I crazy to dream of a hybrid between the two?

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By the way, I apologize to readers on dial-up. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy and videography is what I want to learn right now, so I’m afraid you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of this kind of blog post.

Walking Forest Blues


Subscribers must click through, or visit the video page.

Transcript:
I went to the woods to live haphazardly, from hand to mouth, marching like an army on my stomach. The path travels through me like a wave, like a particle. I’ve learned nothing, & am much the better for it — the forest teaches by confounding expectations. The bright orange of an eft, like the hair of a punk rocker, says: leave me alone. The spots on a fawn are a map to a country that doesn’t want to be found. The sun doesn’t move there, trapped in a net of trees. A hen turkey clucks not to lead her chicks, who disguise themselves as stones & vanish, but to lead me, her sudden unwanted charge — to draw me away. Which might turn out to be exactly where I was going.

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Speaking of forests, be sure to visit the June edition of the Festival of the Trees at Roundrock Journal. And for many more creepy-crawlies like the millipede in the video, check out the latest Circus of the Spineless, the blog carnival for invertebrates and the people who love them.

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I learned something about making poetry videos today: the addition of music can mean the difference between success and failure.

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I’m always excited to see other poet-bloggers making videos. Ren Powell recently launched a second blog to showcase her terrific poem animations, AnimaPoetics. I’m sure I’ll link to most of her videos at Moving Poems eventually, but do check out her site in the meantime. She’s posting new videos at the rate of roughly one a week.

Bell’s Gap

sawfly

The sawfly stood in the middle of the trail blocking our way, slowly moving its antennae like the arms of a martial artist, its wings too tattered to fly. “They don’t sting,” Steve said. I scooped it up and it we passed it from hand to hand before depositing it on a trailside tulip poplar.

A gang of us — three families — had gathered for a Memorial Day hike in Bell’s Gap, on the trail to Pancake Flats at the top of central Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Front. The trail is unsigned, as are nearly all the trails in our 1.4 million-acre state game lands system, the Pennsylvania equivalent of National Wildlife Refuges. So despite the fact that we’ve lived here for nearly 40 years, and the trail is less than ten miles away, I’d never hiked it before, not having been sure where the good trails are in State Game Land 158. It took a newcomer to the area — poet Todd Davis — to scout out this and other trails in the game lands above his house in his restless hunt for poems and for deer. Deer hunting is confined to the autumn months, but poem hunting is year-round, an open season.

Just because trails lack signs and blazes doesn’t mean they’re unmaintained. In the preceding brief video (which subscribers must click through to watch, I think) my mother demonstrates her famous high-speed log-footbridge crossing technique.

Canada mayflowers

Once across the creek, the trail — an old woods road — begins a gradual ascent of the southern side of the gap. We skirted the edge of a tiny pond just big enough for one pickerel frog and some lily pads. Canada mayflowers bloomed in profusion, which along with some other signs, such as abundant three-year-old rhododendron sprouts, confirmed what Todd had been telling us: that the local deer herd had yet to recover from the winter of 2006. The other common wildflower along the trail also had a name invoking our neighbor to the north: Canada violets. And near the top of the mountain, the birders in the bunch were thrilled to spot a Canada warbler — though they were even more thrilled when they heard and saw a Kentucky warbler on the way back down.

meadow rue

Meadow rue (above) was just coming into bloom — a flower that, despite its common name, tolerates the deepening shade of a late spring woods as well as anything can. This is actually eastern waterleaf (see comments). I found the unopened buds at least as intriguing as the blooms: a mass of feathery bracts reminiscent of some headdress from the highlands of New Guinea. Foamflowers and bishop’s cap were nearing the end of their run, while the last of the painted trillium had shriveled a few days before, by the looks of it.

broken oak

We passed stands of very mature second-growth oaks and tulip poplars, intermingled with hemlocks which still seemed free of woolly adelgid damage. It was a very impressive forest, especially for state game lands, which are often subjected to short-rotation timbering to help pay the agency’s bills. Comparisons with Plummer’s Hollow were inevitable, but a little unfair perhaps, since the exposure, elevation, and geology all differ greatly. Plummer’s Hollow Run follows the same, vertical sandstone formation for its entire length, while Bell’s Gap cuts through a layer cake of shales, sandstones, limestones, and conglomerates. This complex geology helps explain why, in the Appalachians, you never have to go very far from home to see something completely different from what you’re used to.

starflowers

And that in turn might help explain why Pennsylvania has the most stay-at-home population of any state in the union. Certainly in my case, being able to travel a few miles and see starflowers in the path is way more exciting than the prospect of ever visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I realize most people aren’t quite as attuned to such variations in the natural world, but Pennsylvania’s cultural diversity is also due, at least in part, to its complex physical geography: Slavic coal miners a few miles away from Mennonite farmers and Italian quarrymen.

hikers at Pancake Flats

Fortified with chocolate chip cookies, we made it all the way to the blueberry scrubland at the top of the mountain — Pancake Flats, so called I suppose because of the usual scattering of huge, flat boulders and outcrops of Pottsville conglomerate that cap the Front.

It was, as I said, Memorial Day. Some mark the holiday with parades and shows of piety, but I had no stomach to watch an enormous flag being carried through the streets of a town whose council had recently voted to despoil its own section of the Allegheny Front with a massive industrial wind plant right in the watershed for its reservoir. My own loyalty is to the land rather than the symbol, to crazy quilts rather than to the orderly subdivisions of a flag.

On the way back down, we passed another pair of hikers heading up — the first Todd had ever seen on this trail besides himself and those he brought with him. We exchanged smiles and greetings. “I walk up here every couple of weeks,” one of the men said.

walking fern

To anyone with an interest in plants, returning the way one came is rarely boring; you can’t step into the same trail twice. I found a flowering wood sorrel we’d somehow missed on the way up. And on an outcrop of limestone halfway down, Mom and I spotted a gang of eldritch, arrowy leaves spilling over the step-like rocks: walking fern, Asplenium rhizophyllum. It seemed to be in even less of a hurry than we were.

See the complete photoset (11 photos plus the video) or watch the slideshow.

Heralds: the making of a video poem

Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds) from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

I was idly poking around YouTube today, looking for more material for Moving Poems, when it occurred to me to see what might be out there for César Vallejo, generally regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. I couldn’t find anything other than a few boring videos of people reading his poems, so I decided to try and make a video myself. This will go up on Moving Poems eventually, but I thought I’d share it here first, by way of pointing out a few things I’ve learned about what I’m calling videoetry.

Process notes

I do think the above video is a significant improvement over my first attempt to make a videoem for someone else’s work — that one for the poem by Pedro Salinas using the snake orgy footage. This time I started with a strong reading, “borrowed” from one of the aforementioned YouTube videos, took some random footage of trains and turkey vultures I shot last week and filled in around it with a few clips from the open-source video section of the Internet Archive. Although “Los Heraldos Negros” isn’t an explicitly political poem, Vallejo was an ardent anti-imperialist, so I think he would’ve appreciated the shots of protestors at the School of the Americas, where so many paramilitary thugs have been trained over the decades. And the Peruvian religious procession seemed appropriate too; Vallejo always had a more nuanced attitude toward religion than his friend Neruda and most other left-wing intellectuals of his generation.

Once I had a rough match between images and spoken-word soundtrack, I went hunting for some music, also on the Internet Archive. I was delighted to find a piece by a contemporary composer, Andrew Bissett, in the style of Bela Bartok — one of my favorite composers, and also a contemporary of Vallejo’s. I’m not good at describing music, but somehow this piece seemed to have just the right dissonances and jagged edges for “Los Heraldos Negros.”

The final step was making the English subtitles. I’ll admit I got lazy there, and instead of using my own translation, which languishes in the back of a file drawer somewhere, I stole one I found online, changing just a couple of words. (I was a little rushed.) The other major thing I did wrong here was relying on the video editing software (Adobe Premiere Elements) to set the audio levels: the music was supposed to be a bit quieter than the way it came out, so it would underlie rather than compete with the reading. In the future, I’ll have to remember to set the volumes in the audio recording and editing program I use (Adobe Audition) before importing the soundtrack into Premiere.

I am also planning to redo the snake video at some point to try and improve the match between images and audio. I agreed with some of the commenters on that post that the inclusion of both languages in the soundtrack was a mistake. In doing so, I didn’t really have the best interests of the poem at heart. Instead, I wanted to make something as long as possible so I could use as much of the cool snake footage as possible. However, had I not decided to keep the video music-free, lengthy, distracting silences wouldn’t have been an issue. I could’ve easily parceled the Spanish reading into widely separated sections and kept most of the footage, I think.

Starting points

I’ve been fooling around with various kinds of video-poem combinations since last June (browse the Videoetry category to see them all), and not surprisingly, my experiments have been shaped as much by the tools at my disposal as by my own aesthetic inclinations. Until this past Christmas, when my family gifted me with a camcorder, the only way I could make videos was with the video setting on my regular digital camera, which imposes severe restrictions on length and other limitations. For video editing, I used the program I have on my PC — Windows Movie Maker — after checking to see whether there was any easy-to-use free software that had significantly more features. If there is, I didn’t find it. And Windows Movie Maker is actually pretty good at one thing: adding titles in a variety of fonts, sizes, and special effects. So that’s where my videoetry experimentation began.

If I were a Mac user, I could’ve taken advantage of Apple’s superior, free video-editing software iMovie. Given my initial inclination toward postcard-style, text-on-image videos, I might’ve ended up making videos rather like these by poet Susan Culver, who just got started on videoetry the other week. Mac users can also create soundtracks in GarageBand, which is I gather a very good audio editing program. Windows has nothing comparable. The best free option for Windows users is Audacity — a decent enough program, and certainly good enough for editing spoken word tracks.

Creating echos

One thing I think I did right with the snake video was avoid making too literal a match between images and text. I did revisit a favorite poem about mating garter snakes by Stanley Kunitz to see if it might fit the bill, but it only described a single mating pair; there was no orgy. Plus it was set in autumn (when some garter snakes do mate also) rather than in the spring. When I found that Salinas poem, I had an immediate sense of rightness about the match.

The trick is finding just enough semantic overlap, but not too much. I guess I’d liken the video accompanying a poem to an echo chamber rather than a mirror. I’m not saying that all successful video poems have to take this approach; it just happens to be the one I’m most interested in right now. My breakthrough in that regard was “The Good Question,” from early this past February. It was also my first to include the poem as part of the soundtrack rather than as text superimposed on the video, and I don’t think that’s irrelevant.

Unlike my previous efforts, where I had crafted poems essentially at the same time I edited the video footage, I didn’t intend “The Good Question” to be a video poem at first — it was just going to be blog-fodder. Only after I started working on a second draft did I get the bright idea of trying to blend it with a video I’d shot five days earlier of my friend Chris’s partner Seung throwing snowballs. Substituting a recording of the poem for the original soundtrack (which consisted mainly of wisecracks and laughter) tied the whole thing together rather well, I thought.

Writing poetry, for me, involves placing superficially dissimilar things in close conjunction and seeing what happens. Making videos is a fun way to extend the process of exploration into additional media. The end product does happen be something with considerably more mass appeal than a poem on a page, but that’s not so much the point for me. The more layers you can give a work of art, the more suggestive it tends to become.

High tech?

In addition to greatly democratizing the production of complex artwork, the modern digital revolution has made something very old seem new again. I don’t think poetry should ever have become as thoroughly bookish and separated from the aural and kinetic arts as it has in modern times. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have the time and the tools to translate poems into HTML and MP3s to share on the web — and then take it a step further and attempt video-poem remixes. Remix is at the heart of culture, is it not? But something like Italian opera or Japanese Noh drama has always been closer to my ideal of poetic presentation than a printed text in any case. Assuming, of course, that there’s electronic captioning above the stage.

Easter thrasher


Easter Thrasher from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

Not too many folks online today, but for those who do happen by, here’s a little video I shot on Friday and today. For some reason, the first brown thrasher to return to the hollow often really likes singing from the top of a small, nondescript walnut tree that pokes out of the barberry hedge next to the shed.

As I’ve mentioned here in the past, brown thrashers are close relatives to mockingbirds and catbirds, and like their cousins, go in for extreme vocal improvisation. The thrasher can be easily distinguished from the others, however, by its tendency to repeat almost every phrase. I like to think of it as a compulsive rhymer.

Psalm for the Rapture: the movie

I’ve just been reminded that it’s Oscars night. I was very pleased to discover this afternoon that the Internet Archive has a movies and film section, which includes some classic films (I just re-watched my all-time favorite comedy, His Girl Friday) and a lot of Creative Commons-licensed stock footage. I lost no time downloading some of the latter to illustrate an old poem — which I see I illustrated with snapshots the first time around. (For a straight-text version, see here.)

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Brent Goodman has just dipped a toe into the videoetry waters as well. Check out Meat to Carry Our Minds.