Yes, I know it should be called “Red Creek,” but that’s a different stream, over at Dolly Sods. This is a tributary to Otter Creek which one fords when following the main trail through the wilderness area.
Grave Dug by Beasts: The Movie, revisited
Watch on Vimeo
I’m due to give a poetry reading/multimedia presentation this afternoon in State College (2:30 pm at the newly reopened Webster’s Bookstore Cafe). Among other things, I’ll be reading all eight poems from my Temptations of Solitude series while projecting images of the paintings by Clive Hicks-Jenkins that inspired them (and, of course, hawking copies of the book in which they appear). I’ll also be showing a couple of Swoon’s videopoems from the Manual series, and I wanted to pair those with a couple of videopoems of my own — whence the complete overhaul of the one video I made for the Temptations of Solitude. The footage is the same, but the soundtrack is brand new, and features a reading by Rachel Rawlins which I recorded last night over the phone, in one take, and remixed just a little (along with fragments from her muttering first go-through, which she didn’t realize I was recording).
Heart
This almost belongs in the Manual series, but for the fact that I didn’t write it. The text, and the object to which it refers, came from the pen and knitting needles of Rachel Rawlins, and you can see both at twisted rib. While there, you can click on the conversari tag and browse her half of our on-going, inter-blog conversation in words and images, originating in more quotidian exchanges via email, IM, etc.: one of those sprawling conversations that just keeps sprouting new, sometimes grotesque branches and digressions, grows ever more firmly rooted, and seems as if it might go on forever.
I shot the footage of the garter snake ball yesterday morning, while rushing back and forth between the houses to bake bread. (A mention made it into the Morning Porch, whence, curiously, Luisa also derived the image of a heart.) I felt I had to make the film fairly abstract, since I already made a videopoem with more straight-forward footage of a garter snake mating ball two years ago. On that occasion, I also uploaded an 8-minute video of the orgy. This time, I grabbed my regular camera and managed to get one half-decent still photo:
It was a thing of beauty, albeit hair-raising as always. Incidentally, I’ve probably said this before, but our robust garter snake population in Plummer’s Hollow is, I think, a direct consequence of our decision to stop mowing the lawns. If you like reptiles and amphibians and want to encourage them around your own home, the best thing you can do is transition to a less-managed landscape. Call it Daoist gardening if you like.
Garter snakes usually form mating balls immediately after emergence from hibernation in spring, but sometimes they mate in the fall, too. The great American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about encountering one such coupling — “that wild braid” — in his iconic poem “The Snakes of September.”
Barbaric AWP
This videopoem happened in the usual way: I had some footage (of the Bean in Chicago), plus some other found footage in the back of my mind, and the text grew from that. This video took all of three hours to pull together.
At the academic writers conference I was pulled in many directions, talking and listening, buying and trading, mingling with 10,000 other writers at the world’s largest hotel. I watched my esteemed colleagues preen in the hallways and at the book fair, beautiful in their dark and denim plumage and expensive boots. Conscious of waste, I kept my plastic water cup and carried it from session to session until it developed a crack, and began to drip onto my hand like a squat penis.
Secret Santa (videopoem)
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!
October snow (video haiku)
watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube
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.”
Riches
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 S. 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…
Lorelei
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 S..” 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 S., 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.
Sonnet 65
watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube
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.
Terra Incognita
watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube
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.