There was a Dale Chihuly exhibition called “Reflections on nature” at Kew Gardens when we visited last week, but I was more taken with a jackdaw.
Eid in the park
Yesterday was Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, and I found myself in a north London park as public prayers were being offered. You can hear that faintly in the background. (This is shorter than my usual one-minute haiku videos because I decided to cut out much of an Islamophobic rant from a man behind me.)
summer sidewalk
Shot along Notting Hill Gate (confusingly, the name of a street) in London, from a bench facing away from traffic… toward the Art. Unlike graffiti, official street art only looks good after it starts to get grubby, I think. Abandoned shopping carts/trolleys, on the other hand, have that haiku-ready wabi-sabi quality from the outset.
cows on the common
The village of Brill in Buckinghamshire, where my father-in-law lives, has a unique program to maintain the common with a collectively owned herd of Dexter cattle. For this haiku video, I borrowed the idea of making a postcard come to life from the poetry filmmakers Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, who used it to great effect in an adaptation of one of my haibun, In West Virginia (which isn’t yet available for streaming on the web).
I suppose it was precisely the pro-biodiversity, feel-good quality of Brill’s cattle herding program that brought the baseline misery of livestock into sharp relief for me.
commuter train
A videohaiku shot on the London Overground, the tube’s less poetic, more sensible sibling.
I lived in Osaka for a year in the mid 80s, so that’s my other major experience with commuter trains. Back then, moving fingers belonged to businessmen taking advantage of the cramped conditions to feel up women. It was a huge problem. All my female acquaintances became adept at elbow jabs and insults in the local dialect. I don’t know how things are in Japan these days, but in the UK I’m glad that everyone just plays with their devices.
Grand Union Canal
The first in my summer series of haiku videos, shot near where I’m staying in north London, along the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal.
I’m not sure why I haven’t been sharing my videohaiku here, along with Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube. Possibly out of reluctance to supply titles to haiku (though that hasn’t stopped me from doing the occasional Pepys erasure haiku). But first lines will suffice, I think.
Pennsylvania Spring: a videohaiku sequence
Continuing on from Winter Trees, this cycle contains 24 videohaiku one minute long or shorter, all but one shot on an iPhone without any advance planning, just capturing things of visual interest and letting them prompt haiku a day or more later. (The exception, “coal country spring”, uses old home movie footage that came to me in a similar serendipitous fashion: via @HomeMoviesBot on Twitter.)
As with Winter Trees, I feel that these are best experienced as they unfold, scroll-like, in the video series (which Vimeo now calls a showcase—previously album—and YouTube calls a playlist), in part of course because the visuals and audio are meant to add an extra dimension to the haiku, as with any videopoem. I am composing as much with video editing software as with the pen, and some of the haiku fall a little flat on the page. But here’s a transcription of the texts for the visually impaired:
shedding its snow
the new
old mountain
*
March wind
the first rose-colored
vulture face
*
counting the rings
in the wood frog pond
another year
*
yellow-bellied sapsucker
tapping
its true name
*
former field
the ruffed grouse makes a drum
out of thin air
*
bee or not
the daffodils
keeping faith
*
sun-drenched woods
the first violets
are yellow
*
fake flowers
where they found his body
fly fishing
*
Good Friday
despite claw and knife marks
they’re no one’s beeches
*
wind flowers
the way Beethoven heard
an ode to joy
*
budburst time
the returned vet says he went
straight to the woods
*
spring rain
learning that Dad
has Parkinson’s
*
railroad ties
crowd the vanishing point
fiddleheads
*
such a rush
to come back from the dead
April heat
*
coal country spring
all her doll’s new
imaginary friends
*
tweeting
about the #MetGala
watch your step
*
red eft—
how salamandery
this path
*
painted trillium
already going limp
catch and release
*
this habit
of inhabiting hills
the ants and me
*
clouds lifting
the valley’s visible
clear to the bare earth
*
spring woods at dusk
a daytime firefly
flutters past
*
green green
the broken boughs hiding
that murdered girl
*
nitrous moon
your balloon voice gone
far and wee
*
hatchlings
do you miss the hard shell
of a perfect world?
Winter Trees: a videohaiku sequence
Watch on Vimeo or watch on YouTube
Now that winter is finally winding down here in central Pennsylvania, I thought I’d better wrap up a series of winter-themed videopoems I’ve been making. If you follow me on Twitter (@morningporch) or Instagram (@neotoma_magister), you may have already seen some of these (in lower-resolution versions)—indeed, one of the reasons I limited their length to a minute was so I could share them on Instagram.
Almost all of these were shot on an iPhone, with the exception of “cabin fever” which used footage from a game cam which our neighbors kindly installed in the attic of my parents’ house to try and determine how the bait was disappearing from a squirrel trap without triggering the trap. (Turns out an adventuresome short-tailed shrew was the culprit.) The footage that sparked the series was shot by Rachel from Amtrak as she neared Plummer’s Hollow in December; having upgraded to a newer model, she gifted me her previous iPhone, which is the source of almost all the footage here. All the extra sounds are from freesound.org, and all were public domain (CC0), because I wanted to avoid having to include credits in order to provide an uninterrupted, continuous viewing experience of the YouTube playlist or Vimeo album.
The haiku were prompted by the footage and exist in dialogue with it. I present the text below solely for the benefit of the visually impaired, and urge everyone else to experience them as part of the videopoems. This is partly because I think the video medium goes some way toward solving a problem that readers can encounter with haiku on the page (or screen): how to give each one enough time and space? At normal reading speed, much of their suggestive power is lost.
Winter Trees
winter trees
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers
*
January
the shrinking circle
of my needs
*
cold snap
the one-take tune I make
breaking icicles
*
snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker
*
subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake
*
Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow
*
cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood
*
meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering
*
cold moon
of the month I was born
ass-first
*
space
between night-time snowflakes
for warp speed
*
walking the line
on both sides the same
light rime
*
ice form fits
each body
of water
*
a flutter of snowflakes
a flurry of snowbirds
an afterlife of seeds
*
as above
so below
the color of absence
*
Presidents’ Day—
to build a fire
any refuse will do
*
no dark side of the moon
where a Chinese probe
is growing plants
*
unplowed road
someday the mountain itself
will bury us
*
white-footed
the way my memory places
mouse tracks in snow
*
porcupine squeezing
through a deer fence seems
somehow proverbial
*
winter sun
hoisting all its bristles
into the treetops
*
spider on the snow
the granularity of land
underfoot
*
you dance with everything you’ve got
wind
trees
Winter trees
A new videopoem using footage that Rachel shot from the Amtrak back in December. Do read her blog post about that journey, which includes a different clip from the same footage. I particularly liked this observation:
Trees! So many trees, their leaf-free branches strobing the setting sun when it was behind them, turning pink gold when it shone on them, revealing the geological contours through their branches of the land on which they grow.
Landscape scenes shot from moving trains or cars are so common in videopoetry, they’re almost a cliche, but this is a new variation on that theme, I think.
Selfie Conundrum
“You can make any expression to yourself except surprise.” A new videopoem. (Watch at 720p or higher if you can.)