Something you don’t see in a Christmas pageant: the slaughter of the innocents. But there it is, in the middle of Matthew’s account.
When Bethlehem’s young children were slain, Jesus was in Egypt. Joseph had been warned in a dream.
But Moses was already in Egypt. As an infant, he escaped by water, the means by which his pursuers were to perish.
Matthew’s baby Jesus is peripatetic, dodging bullets & fulfilling scripture. “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” “He shall be called a Nazarene.”
Luke: baby Jesus with the lambs. Matthew: baby Jesus on the lam.
Mourning dead blogs on Twitter
Like people, more blogs are now dead than alive.
The spirits of dead blogs. The necromancy of the Wayback Machine.
I grow old, I grow old
So much of what I’ve written before feels like innocence.
I could no more write it again than the earth could cool.How did I find this pencil? Was I reaching in the kitchen drawer
for a twist tie, or did I fish it out of my old shorts?
Hollow
I made a video for my friend Peter Stephens’ poem “hollow,” which I love — and not only because I happen to live in a mountain hollow.
Though I’m sure I read the poem when Peter first posted it, I must not have been paying very close attention, because it didn’t make any particular impression. I am grateful to Nic S. for rectifying that with her wonderful reading at Whale Sound, and for letting me incorporate that reading into the video. As Peter said in an email, “Nic’s rendition of ‘This cold has eyes’ gives the line life (death?) I never knew it had.”
Making a video for a poem that already exists is a different undertaking from making a poem in response to footage one has taken or discovered online. I most enjoy filmmaking as a kind of discovery; setting up shots, much less writing a screenplay, is much more calculating and deliberate than what I’m interested in doing right now. With this video, serendipity still played a large role: I looked at some footage I’d shot on a whim, turned it upside down, and immediately thought of Peter’s poem and Nic’s reading. I was afraid that my footage itself wouldn’t constitute a sufficiently interesting short film, however, so I decided to see if I could find something to add to it in the massive Prelinger Archives of so-called ephemeral films. Using the search term “hiking,” I stumbled on a wonderful short documentary which, among other things, showed some people taking peyote and climbing a mountain.
Though the poem has nothing to do with recreational drug/religious sacrament use, I decided that the film could. I also liked the images of hollowing I found in the 20-minute source material. Perhaps it’s an imposition to add meanings like this, and I’m certainly not arguing that the result is great art, but it does exemplify what I’m looking for both as a videopoem maker and a curator of a videopoem site: films that suggest additional meanings and avoid a straightforward illustration of the text.