My own videopoems, plus videos made by other people for poems that originally appeared at Via Negativa. This is a sub-category of Poems & poem-like things, but posts are also cross-listed to Video (which contains a few non-poetry-related videos, too). I maintain a separate blog devoted to videopoetry: Moving Poems.
A video adaptation of a poem I wrote back in 2006 and included in my online collection Shadow Cabinet.
This videopoem idea has been brewing for a while. I finally got a chance to shoot the contrail footage last week, on one of those days when some of the contrails remain and others quickly fade, depending I suppose on the elevation of the jet. As usual, though, the most time-consuming part of the video-making process was finding the right music. The wordless, a capella song is by a Belgian electronica band called Silence, who are generous enough to copyleft all their material. The track happened to be just the right length, so I didn’t have to alter it in any way.
It’s International Rock-Flipping Day, so I thought I’d try making a poetry video with footage of the underside of rocks, shot this afternoon in the woods above my house. The poem is a couple of years old, and may be found at my online collection Shadow Cabinet.
UPDATE: Here’s the complete list of bloggers who participated in IRFD this year.
There’s also an accompanying image at my photoblog. I’m not sure what the species is here, nor why they’re attracted to this bucket in which brushes covered with latex house paint have been cleaned out. If anyone can enlighten me on either score, please leave a comment.
This was shot with my regular digital camera (in the heat of the moment I forgot I had a camcorder), then speeded up to about twice the actual speed. I extracted, cleaned up, and selected a portion of the audio track — annual cicadas in full whine — to combine with my recitation. I dashed off the poem under the influence of alcohol for authenticity’s sake. Here it is, for the benefit of those on dial-up:
This is no moon, my poet friends.
Those are no crickets.
That cloying scent doesn’t come from a flower.
Whatever you’re trying to quench, it isn’t thirst.
I’ve been working on this poem for the last three days, thinking I could repurpose some video I shot back in March 2008 and only shared in black-and-white form at the time (see Rabid fox). The story has been simplified slightly, but most of that simplification is a consequence of memory’s alembic — I did not refer to my earlier post before completing the video.
(Transcript)
The gray fox was sitting in the driveway
when we got up. A blessing, we thought,
returning its gaze from the veranda.
To have found a place in the cool regard
of a creature so at home in the forest
& so seldom seen by day — it felt
like a message: that we belong here
on the mountain, that our presence
is acceptable. We were already
rehearsing the story we’d tell about it
as it got to its feet, that lovely animal
the color of ash & flame, & trotted
up past the garage & out of sight.
We’re still basking in the warm glow
of chosenness when later that day
we see it again, wandering in circles
around the stark sunlit field. Now
it wears a beard of bloody foam
& keeps shaking its head as if
something has it by the throat.
We watch through binoculars
as it sinks into the grass & disappears,
then rises again: undead. Rabid.
What we took for friendliness
is instead a violent kind of taming,
the virus robbing it of every wild instinct.
I get close & watch as long as I
can stand to. Its jaw works & works.
Its eyes close for long moments.
If my presence registers at all, I doubt
I’m anything but one more, minor torment.
The brief convulsion after
the bullet shatters its skull is almost
refreshing to watch — a return to
the expected order of things.
I dig a deep grave between the roots
of a wild black cherry, break the brick-
red clods with the back of my shovel
& trickle the soil over that shining coat.
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.
Several times a year, a black rat snake climbs the black walnut tree out back to get in my house and eat the rodents, for which I’m grateful. This video poem depicts its latest entrance.
(Transcript)
We were just talking about you crooked tunnel
the way you funnel your long freight up the walnut tree serpent
& glide out along one diminishing limb until you reach the roof
drop into the gutter & loop into a squirrel hole above the kitchen
We’d just found one of your old skins snagged on a thorn
I don’t think he’s coming back for it I joked
And my neighbor glances up into the tree & says
Well there he is now
And there you were son of a bitch
still & heavy as a tongue with bad news
waiting for a signal neither of us caught
to set you back into motion into path into limbless dragon
flicking your soft Y of flame
*
Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts and photosets to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival, which next month will be hosted for the first time by an India-based blog, Trees, Plants, and more. Details on how to submit are here.
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?
*
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.
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.
***
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.
***
I learned something about making poetry videos today: the addition of music can mean the difference between success and failure.
*
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.
