Banjo vs. Guitar and Out of Tune (videopoems)

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Two more videopoems in support of the new collection. I’ve included YouTube links because for me, at least, the versions on Vimeo are not entirely satisfactory. They sort of hesitate and pop at a few places. (Is anyone else getting this?)

“Banjo vs. Guitar” is the first in this series to use public-domain images from somewhere other than archive.org. I had the idea of using solar eclipse imagery, so went straight to NASA’s YouTube channel. There were some pleasant surprises in the editing process, for example the way the sun’s corona evokes a stringed instrument, and I liked the way it added a cosmic dimension not present in the original text. But as is almost always the case with me, I started with the soundtrack: a version of the famous Mexican folk song “Cielito Lindo” for clawhammer banjo and classical guitar from a guy on SoundCloud named Juan Cordero, who turned out to be very friendly and open to my using the piece. Here’s his original version.

The second videopoem, “Out of Tune,” presented an obvious challenge for the soundtrack, and I experimented with samples of bluegrass bands tuning up, but it just seemed too literal, and I decided I would have better luck with a very basic piece of music played very slowly. Again, SoundCloud delivered: “Slow Met De Banjo” by SoundCloud user David12801280, licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. The images are from an old home movie of a road trip across the U.S., much of it on the storied Route 66. Whoever shot it seems to have had ADHD, but there were plenty of interesting shots nonetheless. I’m worried that the truck-in-a-ditch part is too obvious and the rest of it not obvious enough, though the visual analogy of meteor crater to ear pleases me, and I like the ramshackle, wind-whipped roadside stands as symbols of breakdown.

Luck (videopoem)

I broke the mold a bit with this one — the first videopoem I’ve made in the slideshow or kinestasis style, which I’ve generally avoided in part because I don’t have the software tools to make it look like anything more than the low-rent copy and paste job that it is. But I’m excited about it anyway, because the text gave me an excuse to explore the rich visual legacy of a chapter in American women’s history I’ve just been learning about: the elevation of banjos into a symbol of (white) women’s social, political and sexual liberation beginning in the late 19th century. I’m indebted to the Penn State Press exhibition catalogue Picturing the Banjo, edited by Leo G. Matzow — especially the essay by Sarah Burns, “Whiteface: Art, Women, and the Banjo in Late-Nineteenth Century America” — for cluing me in about this. Some of the images that were most instrumental in creating this new market for banjos are in the video, including Mary Cassatt’s painting The Banjo Lesson and Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photograph of the Washington DC socialite Miss Apperson playing banjo beside a statue of Flora (a more traditionally Victorian representation of femininity). I had nary an inkling of all this when I wrote the poem back in 2010, so I’m pleased that it managed to evoke an interesting old meme despite the author’s appalling ignorance of it at the time of composition: “luck” indeed! Thanks to Steve Sherrill for loaning me the book.

This is the first I’ve actually used images of banjos or banjoists in this videopoetry series. I’m sure it won’t be the last, but I’ve been avoiding it just because it seemed like the obvious thing to do. (Not that including banjo music in the soundtrack is any less obvious.) In this case, it seemed worthwhile to use such images to suggest a historical dimension that otherwise didn’t make it into the poem, except possibly for the line about looking in the rear-view mirror. At some point, in other videos, I imagine I’ll have to deal with the more stereotypical, racist and classist images of banjo players as well. There’s really no avoiding them; they’re part of our cultural legacy whether we like it or not.

The soundtrack this time comes from my cousin Tony Bonta and his Towson, Maryland-based Bald Mountain Band. He extracted the vocal track from a short number they do called “Jenny Got Naked at a Party in 1989” and gave me carte blanche to use the instrumental version however I wanted. You can listen to the original version, which also happens to be spoken-word, on the band’s page at Reverbnation. Also, audiophile listeners may notice a dramatic improvement over the three previous videos in the quality of my reading here. That’s due to the fact that I got my old Zoom H2 microphone working again, thanks to persistent encouragement from Rachel, who used to work in radio and is sensitive to such differences. Eventually I suppose I’ll redo the other three videos with new voice recordings, but for now it’s more fun to work on new videopoems, which I guess I’ll keep doing until I run out of steam or out of banjo poems, whichever comes first.

You can watch all the banjo poetry videos I’ve made so far at their dedicated page on Vimeo. And of course if you haven’t ordered a copy of the print collection yet, visit the publisher’s website.

Banjo Origins (3): Jesusland

I made another short video from a poem in my new collection, Breakdown: Banjo Poems. If you missed the other two, I created a new album on Vimeo for Breakdown videos. Or simply scroll down through the latest posts in the Videopoetry category here.

The music for this one, found once again on SoundCloud, is by Tem Noon (tabla) and Christen Napier (banjo), one of seven improvisations they recorded, all licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

Thanks to the Prelinger Archives once again for the public-domain footage: a 1928 short documentary called Queerosities: A Negro Baptism (yes, the framing was ever so slightly racist) and two untitled home movies of church camps, one also from 1928 and one from 1970. I wanted to include both Southern whites and African Americans in the scenes of religious enthusiasm, since the banjo, like Pentecostalism, has such a potent history with both groups. I don’t know if it matters that the different source materials in the video are so easily distinguishable in quality. My hope is that that just lends it more of a documentary feel.

Thanks also to Rachel for critiquing an earlier version of this video. (If you’re one of the three other people who watched it before 10:00 PM East Coast time tonight, please watch again.) I think it tells a more coherent story now. I also turned down the volume of the music just a bit.

Where There’s Life

I made this videopoem entirely out of found text and footage from American television commercials of the late 1940s and early 50s. I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of collage in videopoetry ever since I saw what Matt Mullins did with a sermon by Oral Roberts in Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer). This doesn’t rise quite to that level, either technically or conceptually, but it was a fun experiment. Thanks to the Prelinger Archives for the material, all in the public domain.

(Update 9/30) I suppose I should add some notes about my process here. I’ve been downloading compilations of old television commercials for possible use in videos for poems from the new chapbook. While making poetry videos for pre-existing texts is fun, it’s easy to get sidetracked by a wealth of good material, and yesterday I decided to give in to the temptation. I went through one of the compilations, writing down all the good lines in a text document, in order as they appeared so I could re-find them easily. Then I wrote a rough draft with some of the most interesting lines, loaded the source material into Windows Movie Maker and began to cut and paste the snippets containing the lines I’d liked into the order I’d put them in the written draft. Once I had fully assembled the first rough draft of a videopoem, however, I found the words went by rather too quickly. I had the idea of using wordless or nearly wordless segments from a single ad both to give space to the lines of found poetry and to act as a sort of refrain.

At this stage, the working title was “Industry at Work” (taken from a clip that I subsequently removed). However, after a couple of hours of trimming and moving things around, it became clear that the refrain segments just weren’t gelling, and the video overall seemed too scattered and miscellaneous. I began looking at another compilation, and the very first ad in it — a commercial for Budweiser — had lots of wordless footage that I liked. It was only after pasting some of those segments into the draft project that I got the idea of using the first half of Budweiser’s then-slogan, “Where there’s life, there’s Bud,” as title and refrain.

I go into all this (hopefully not too boring) detail simply to show that the process of composition doesn’t differ all that wildly from the way regular poems are made. If I were teaching poetry, this is the sort of thing I’d make beginning students do. Of all the possible approaches to videopoetry, found-poem collage with public-domain (or otherwise free-to-use) footage has the lowest barrier to entry. All you really need is a computer with a DSL or faster connection and whatever video editing software the operating system came with. Moreover, this way of making videopoems comes much closer than the typical poetry video to Tom Konyves’ conception of videopoety as

the Duchampian “assisted readymade”. Consider the recorded image as the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover whether there exists something significant, yet still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface of the present moment.

The Fifth String (videopoem)

Another videopoem in support of my poetry chapbook, Breakdown: Banjo Poems. For this one, Steven Sherrill — the same Renaissance man responsible for the cover painting — supplied the banjo playing on the soundtrack. He uploaded it to SoundCloud, where I messed with it just a little and layered in my reading of “The Fifth String.” (I don’t have a very good microphone these days so the recording quality is a little primitive, but primitive seems all right here, at least for this track.) The footage comes once again from the Prelinger archive of ephemeral films, in this case two television commercials from the 1960s or late 50s, now in the public domain. I was a little worried that the result might be too weird, but Steve tells me he loves it: “The tone/look of the video is akin to what I paint.”

I might mention that, in addition to a sub-par microphone, I have been using very basic video editing software as well: Live Movie Maker for Windows 7! The version of Adobe Premiere Elements I’d been using before does not work very well in my new environment, and frankly, for this simple kind of remix, Movie Maker is almost good enough. It’s certainly a lot more versatile than the older version I had on my desktop. For audio editing, I use Audacity, which is free and open source — and so good nowadays I find I don’t miss Adobe Audition at all.

My thinking about these audiopoems and videopoems, by the way, is that they don’t necessarily drive more sales of the chapbook; if that were my primary reason for making them, I suspect I’d be disappointed. They’re just fun to make, and the publication of the book provides a handy pretext for spending many enjoyable hours exploring SoundCloud and archive.org. Plus, they will give me something else to do during a live reading besides just read from a podium. I do have this notion that audiences at poetry readings deserve first and foremost to be entertained.

Taking the Waters (videopoem)

This new film by Marc Neys (AKA Swoon) grew out of our shared experiences in Dunbar, Scotland at the beginning of August, where Rachel, Marc and I spent a great deal of time together, walking, talking, and taking the local beverages. (Unmentioned in the prose poem is the fact that a fairly major brewery, Belhaven, is located there. When we arrived at our campground that Thursday evening, the air was suffused with the sweet smell of boiling mash.) Since we were in town for the Filmpoem Festival, it seemed only fitting that a new filmpoem/videopoem should come out of it. However, Marc’s first attempt with footage he’d shot on the Dunbar shore used an old poem of mine with which I’d become somewhat disenchanted. In the meantime, I’d written the prose poem “Taking the Waters” and suggested he try working with that instead, and obviously that’s what he did — but with almost all new footage, shot not on the North Sea but high in the Austrian Alps.

Marc describes the whole process in a recent blog post at his new website. As he quotes me as saying in the post, prose poetry is closely associated with surrealism, but sometimes, as here, real-life incidents provide more than enough bizarre material to keep the prose from getting too prosaic. Rachel’s story about a man reading to the sea was obviously key to the success of the text, so I’m glad she has a major part in the videopoem as the primary reader. Marc himself is “our friend the musician.” It’s interesting that he ended up not using much of the footage he shot that weekend, but I think avoiding too close a correspondence between subject matter and film images makes for a more suggestive videopoem. There are still enough visual and auditory artifacts from that weekend in the film to make it an apt memento for the three of us without, I hope, coming across to other viewers as exclusive or overly self-referential.

It’s always hugely satisfying to collaborate with artists like this, despite or perhaps because of the fact that the results aren’t the sort of publications that more ambitious American poets climb all over each other to bag for their CVs. I can’t think of a filmmaker I’d rather have envideo my poems than Marc; he’s the most-published filmmaker on MovingPoems.com for a reason.

Banjo Proverbs (videopoem)

I made a videopoem in support of my chapbook Breakdown: Banjo Poems, which is now at long last officially out and available to order. Here’s the blurb from the judge, Sascha Feinstein:

These captivating poems unfurl from associative narratives about banjos, yet the series far exceeds merely clever variations on a theme. Since no instrument can choose its player, music connects humanity at its most diverse, and these poems take full advantage of that simple truth. Through unusual settings, believable personification, and strong movement, these banjo poems invite us to consider the origins of the instrument and its history, the diversity of its players, the politics of race and religion, and a great deal more. It’s a concert that’ll make you say, “Oh yeah” and “Wow.”

Click the PayPal button to order a copy here.

Mortal Ghazal: the videopoem

Via Negativa is proud to present a new videopoem by the Belgian artist and filmmaker Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, and Luisa A. Igloria, with a text from Luisa’s new poetry collection, The Saints of Streets. Like many of the poems in the book, it debuted here at Via Negativa, with a prompt from an entry at The Morning Porch (July 12, 2012).

Marc and Luisa discuss their collaboration in a new post at Marc’s blog. Marc notes that,

Along with her recording, Luisa gave me some ideas and pointers where to look for possible images. One of the videos she proposed was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90qcjBE-jlA. The film is part of a collection of motion picture films that John Van Antwerp MacMurray shot during the time he served as American Minister to China (1925-1929). The 16mm silent movie was shot during a trip to the Philippines in October 1926, where MacMurray and his wife spent a few days at Camp John Hay, Baguio.

For her part, Luisa writes:

After getting more directly connected with Marc, I recorded three short poems from the collection that I thought might be good candidates. Marc selected “Mortal Ghazal” and I’m really happy that he did.

The poem’s recurrent rhyme is the word “everlasting” – it had started out as a meditation of sorts on a flower indigenous to Baguio, the mountain city where I grew up in the Philippines. The locals refer to them as “everlasting” flowers, but they are strawflowers or Helichrysum bracteatum (family Asteraceae). Locals wind them into leis and sell them to tourists. One of my dearest friends from childhood recently returned from a trip to Baguio, and brought a lei back for me.

Around ten years ago, this friend lost her only son, who grew up with my daughters in Baguio; and she has never really recovered from that grief; she has also just had surgery, and thinking about her and about our lives in that small mountain city so long ago, before we became what we are now, led me to writing this poem which is also a meditation on time/temporality, passage, absence and presence.

Click through to Marc’s blog to read the rest of their remarks.

Luisa just passed her 1000th day of writing a poem a day here (not to mention some additional poems that she’s also managed to write in her far-from-abundant free time). Many of the poems in The Saints of Streets have appeared in more prestigious organs too, of course, but I am proud of, and humbled by, the role that The Morning Porch and Via Negativa have played in eliciting this extraordinary creative outpouring from one of our (and the Philippines’) most talented and hardest working contemporary poets. I haven’t received my copy of The Saints of Streets yet, but here’s how poet Kristin Naca describes it:

Luisa Igloria’s The Saints of Streets overlays the landscapes we see with many more vanished. Houses, town halls, and cathedrals are held up by spires of memory; the past erupts and spills over when the poet focuses on particulars, “…nose pressed to the doorway between worlds/ lit by the same fire that singes the wings of bees.” Igloria begins, as we often do, with a yearning: followed by question, meditation—but the power of her gaze sets these poems apart. Observation magnetizes worlds into radical juxtaposition, and in these poems, measured, intuitive music splendidly unleashes the bewildering in the everyday.

Please visit the Books page on Luisa’s website for additional quotes and information on ordering.

12 Simple Songs: the videopoem

What a wonderful surprise from Nic S. and Marc Neys (who periodically ducks into a phone booth and emerges as artist and filmmaker Swoon). I am gobsmacked. And I’m very glad I placed a Creative Commons license on the collection that explicitly permits derivative works. (Not that Nic and Swoon couldn’t have just contacted me for permission — but that would’ve spoiled the surprise!) I love the fact that listeners to the poems now have the option of hearing them in a voice other than the poet’s, and — especially interesting for love poems — in a female voice. I tried to include enough particulars to make the people in the poems (Rachel and I) seem real, but not too many to prevent identification from readers who don’t know us. This video hugely advances that. And by deploying images that complement the images in the texts without attempting to merely illustrate them, the film preserves and extends the poem’s allusiveness and essential freedom rather than leaving it tightly bound to the writer’s original vision and voice.

Marc posted some process notes to his blog. Here’s a snippet:

Nic send me the audiofiles of her readings. Very good readings.
I wanted a track with a simple melody that pops up a few times against the backdrop of atmospheric disturbance. I went for this one;

and added a stream of atmospheric noises, clicks and crackles.

For images I went for a combination of simple images of nature, birds, the ocean, movement and structures. Most of it I filmed myself and I added a few pieces of footage by Matthew August, H.Hattori, Swee Sin Eng.
In the editing proces I chose to let slowed down footage of in and out of focus images (with a small touch of ‘zen’) go into battle with a sometimes frantic and nervous way of editing against the reading and the background noises.

And back on March 23, Nic was kind enough to blog about Twelve Simple Songs as an example of multi-format poetry publishing, something she’s been championing for several years. Nic also happens to be one of my favorite poets, so I’m pleased and humbled that she thought enough of my work to record it in her own voice and talk Marc into making a video. Now I just need to finish tweaking the PDF for the printer and order a second proof. If all goes well, a dead-tree version of the collection should be available to purchase at cost by the middle of the month.

“Two Kinds of Boxes”: cliché and meaning in videopoetry

My first new videopoem of 2013 required more planning than is usual for me. The text is kind of the central poem in my Alternate Histories series. The footage speaks directly to its theme of rewinding and remaking the past. I’m also ridiculously pleased with myself for figuring out how to lie through video so as to make it appear that I am unwriting my footprints as I walk.

As curator of Moving Poems for almost four years, I’m all too aware of the fact that I am — as I say in my profile at Vimeo — a very amateur filmmaker myself. My command of the technical aspects of filmmaking is still pretty poor, and my image vocabulary is basic. But I do have the advantage — or is it a burden? — of knowing that some of the most obvious moving images have been done to death: shots from a moving vehicle, for example, or shots of walking feet (often female and barefoot). All my favorite contemporary videopoetry/filmpoetry makers have employed both these kinds of shots, some more than once. Hence, in part, my idea to include point-of-view footage (heh) of footprints rather than feet.

Is it fair to call such images clichés, though? Doing so smacks a little of the modernist scorn for writing about falling leaves or the moon. Moving through the world is a pretty inescapable aspect of existence, after all, and walking prompts thinking so readily it might as well serve as a metonym for it.

Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem. (One thinks of the French for “still life,” nature morte.)

A look at the entire second section of MacLeish’s poem shows that the poem itself is (irony alert!) rather more interested in movement than in stasis, proving once again that it’s difficult to say anything about videopoetry that isn’t just as true of poetry as a whole:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

Moving images have pretty much replaced celestial bodies as a central interest bordering on obsession in our culture, so perhaps it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to compare film in general to the role of the moon in this poem. Be that as it may, I think that makers of filmpoems and videopoems have long sensed a MacLeishian contest between stillness and movement as the ultimate expression of that creative juxtaposition between text and shot which distinguishes the true videopoem from other films or videos involving poetry. (Tom Konyves’ manifesto goes into some detail about the optimal sorts of text-image juxtapositions required for successful videopoems, but Konyves is far from the only poetry filmmaker to discover this principle.)

Immediately following the lines quoted above, in the third section of the poem, MacLeish writes: “A poem should be equal to: / Not true.” This too sounds as if it could be addressing videopoetry. Too close a match between text and image feels contrary to the allusive spirit of poetry (and of good film), but too random a match-up and that sense of “equal to” is lost. So in my video above, showing an actual black box, for instance, would’ve been absurd, but I thought I could get away with dark footprints. And when the poem talks about examining oneself, it seemed sufficiently suggestive to have the actor’s body move out of the frame and leave the now-unmarked snow bare for the closing credits.

Then again, that’s just the sort of move you’d expect from someone whose blog is called Via Negativa. It’s almost an apophatic cliché.