Category: Video

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Lorelei


Watch on Vimeo

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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Kay Ryan on nonsense, poetry, and knowledge


Watch on Vimeo. The Lannan Foundation has also uploaded a video of the reading that directly preceded the conversation.

I usually share other people’s videos only on Facebook or (for poetry-related stuff) Moving Poems, but the length and via negativistic content of this conversation might make it a better fit here, I thought. I love what Kay Ryan has to say about poetry and knowing, and about knowing and making stuff up. You have to watch the video to really get a feel for how unseriously she takes herself, but I spent some time this morning making a transcript of a few of my favorite parts of this conversation, which occur somewhere near the middle. This helps me understand a little bit better what I do myself in my writing — especially the part about the need for coldness.

*

Kay Ryan: “I think nonsense is extremely close to poetry. Nonsense — I figured this out when I was fairly young — nonsense operates by rules. You cannot have nonsense outside the context of sense. It, uh — it’s in tension with sense.”

Atsuro Riley: “You like to make a statement in your poetry. You’re quite willing to do it, you like to do it, you seem insistent upon it — ”

Ryan: “A lot of them are bogus, though. They’re bogus. You know. I like the fake — I think you pointed this out! — the sort of, you know, the pedant, the mock polemic. Yeah. And they’re just ridiculous, you know. Like uh, oh, what’s the one about the, uh, extraordinary lengths… Oh yeah, right — I don’t know, uh, ‘Extraordinary lengths are always accompanied by extraordinary distances.’ And, you know, that’s just such a stupid thing to say! I just love to say something like that. I, uh —

“Well, let me explain that. I like to make — well, boy, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I think that I’m really interested in something that is so hard to perceive. Like light coming from the furthest star. It’s, it’s, it’s very frail when it gets here. Very frail. But looked at another way, it’s incredibly strong, ’cause it’s gotten all the way here from the furthest star. So it’s something incredible strong, but we’re getting just a little bit of it!

“So what I do, what I try to do with this thing that I can just barely perceive, is to jack up the intensity like crazy. Make a cartoon out of it? You know. Make a diorama, have puppets do it. You know — overdo it. I’ve gotta magnify it because it’s — and I have to sound more sure than I am. Because — because I don’t know. I only a teeny tiny bit know! Maybe. I’m trying to know. So I build up — I build something that I hope has a lot of, uh — well, as my step-daughter would say, flavor-punch. I like flavor-punch. I love Southwestern food! But I like to give a lot of color. And reality. Of course it’s all specious, but, uh, you know — ”

Riley: “But to help you think through the question.”

Ryan: “To help me think, yeah. It’s like setting up — and I think you said, too — ”

Riley: “Magnified conundra.”

Ryan: “Yeah. And little, uh, models. You know? Einstein — and I always like to connect myself with Einstein! — Einstein, you know, worked in the patent office. Before he was — before he thought his really great thoughts. And I think it shaped his mind to a certain degree. That business of seeing in terms of models. And I think that that’s what we do in poems. (I mean, not just me, but — ) We make a model, and it’s really a model for something different. I mean, this is the model, but it’s really trying to talk about that starlight somehow. That little thing we just know with some interior part of our brain, to which we have very little access.”

Riley: “Let’s talk about coldness. What is it in a poem — I’m not sure I exactly understand — and, um, why do you like it?”

Ryan: “Well, I mean I think it’s just constitutional. I think — I think one of the things that we do when we write, or one of the things I’ve done, is try to make a world I could live in. You know? I make in my poems a world that is, uh, congenial to me. ‘I like how she thinks!’ You know? It makes me feel at ease to articulate those things. It, uh — I can make a world that has the rules that I want. And I think that, as most people here [in the audience are], I am sensitive. I feel under… I am too stimulated. There’s too much coming in all the time. There’s too much heat. There’s too much closeness. There’s too much personal. There’s too much giving away of secrets. There’s not enough, ah, distance. There’s not enough chill. And if I can do my small part to add a little coldness and distance to the world, I will not have written in vain.”

[…]

Ryan: “I discovered a long time ago — and it seems so counter-intuitive, but I found that I had to start writing about things when I was just on the front edge of knowing about them. I mean, just — I hardly knew about them. If I waited, I would be paralyzed by knowing too much. And I, I couldn’t write. There always has to be a large sense of, ‘Oh, I’m just inventing this.’ But then later you can look back and say, ‘No actually I wasn’t inventing it. I still think that I, that there’s something there that I will stick with.’ But I always have to write it before. And if I’m overwhelmed by knowledge, or feeling, or something, it’s just no — I just can’t write.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Protecting the environment from the Department of Environmental Protection


Watch on YouTube

So as luck would have it, the Juniata Valley Audubon Society‘s first lawsuit is happening under my watch as president — this despite the fact that in my personal life I avoid confrontation like the plague. Fortunately I’m not the point-man here, and today I was happy to use my presidential authority merely to insist upon shooting a video of the real heroes of this fight (as well as to record some audio, which I hope to share eventually as a Woodrat Podcast episode).

The video wasn’t very eptly shot, but what the heck. It’s JVAS’s first official video, and I figure we have to start somewhere. It features Mollie Matteson, Conservation Advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, and Stan Kotala, JVAS Conservation Chair, member of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey’s Herpetological Technical Committee, and general bad-ass.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wild Nights (videopoem)


Watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube.

Usually I would wait till morning to post something completed so late at night, but this one needs to get its first few views from my fellow night-owls. It occurred to me that Emily Dickinson might well have envisioned a male narrator for her poem “Wild Nights…” (1861).

I first watched the silent footage used here on CreatureCast last year and was entranced. Fortunately, they license everything Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, God bless ’em. You can watch their original, higher-resolution version here. “This footage shows what a remotely operated submarine was seeing at about 600 meters depth in the Pacific Ocean.”

The music is “Soundscape #3” by Ithaca Audio on SoundCloud. Oddly, as I was taking a break in putting this together to surf the web a few hours ago, I happened on a blog post about the guy behind Ithaca Audio and his approach to creativity and sharing. There’s serendipity for you.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

“We were tentative”: how to make a videopoem by accident


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I made this videopoem sort of by accident, which was good because it led me to break some of my own rules and branch out in a new direction. This is the opening poem to Nic S.’s nanopress collection Forever Will End On Thursday, and “condense[s] seemingly out of nowhere,” as Amy King has characterized Nic’s approach to storytelling. It’s a great poem, even if it isn’t what I originally had in mind.

Process notes

I spent all morning and half the afternoon under the impression that I was going to make a video haiku today, which for me typically means about 45 seconds of footage followed by the haiku in text form. I was going to use this great footage of a tiger swallowtail I’d shot around 9:00, and I even wrote the first draft of the haiku. But when I finally went to look at the footage on my computer, I discovered it wasn’t there, and the two clips I’d uploaded earlier consisted mainly of blurry, accidental shots of the ground. Clearly I had pressed the record button when I shouldn’t have, and what’s worse, had failed to press it when I should have. So there went that idea.

I’d already spent an hour locating some music I liked, though: a couple pieces from a series of electronically deconstructed studies of various instruments by a guy named César Alvarez, who uses the handle musicisfreenow on SoundCloud. I had been searching for Creative Commons-licensed clarinet tracks, but I liked what Alvarez did with the banjo even better. Then I noticed that a section of my blurry driveway footage was visually kind of compelling, and on impulse started typing the text for the second stanza of Nic’s poem overtop it. I applied a simple animation effect to each line and found I liked the result, even though I often find text-only videopoems tiresome to watch, and text-plus-voice videopoems annoyingly redundant.

I figured I’d work out the inconsistencies in my approach later, though, and concentrated on finding other clips from video I’ve shot over the past few months. Footage of a juvenile indigo bunting shot through a screen door seemed to work well for portions of the poem. I remembered a video of a London street performer, and found a four-second clip from that which seemed like a particularly good match both for the choppy music and for the edgy content of the poem. It didn’t take a whole lot more poking around to find two more clips that kind of made oblique reference to the imagery in the poem. I did the text animations and cut the video to fit.

Finally, the most laborious part: chopping up Nic’s reading to fit the video, which itself was modeled after her arrangement of lines on the page. Since her line-breaks don’t normally track with her pauses for breath, I knew this would be a challenge, but again, the choppiness of the music seemed to license it. At some point it also occurred to me that, since the text would appear on-screen, I could leave the music at normal volume, something I’ve never been able to do for a videopoem with spoken word before. The result: a strange hybrid of poem-as-text and poem-as-voice, a bit of a hippogryph.

My usual procedure, of course, is quite the opposite: I make the soundtrack first and cut the video clips to fit. I like to tell myself that this is the best way to go, and perhaps it is, but it also happens to be far easier and less time-consuming than the approach I took with this video. It doesn’t hurt to do things the hard way sometimes.

In defense of my method here, I would note that, to the silent reader, the line-breaks in unpunctuated poems like Nic’s do help create a kind of uncertainty or anxiety about meaning which is a fruitful part of the reading experience — and which a naturalistic out-loud reading does away with. Why not try and preserve some of that semantic uncertainty in the video? If I ever re-do it, though, I think I may use a more legible and somewhat smaller, narrower font. Having to break the two longest lines in the middle damaged the integrity of Nic’s poem-as-text, and rendered this experiment a little less successful than it might otherwise have been, I think.

UPDATE (August 11): Nic made me a fresh recording with ample pauses between the lines to avoid some of the abrupt cuts in the original, so I’ve re-done the soundtrack. I took the opportunity to re-do the title and credits with a more legible (filled in) version of the Courier font, but decided not to mess with the font otherwise. I think this is a keeper now.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cuba, Coltrane, and videotape


Watch on Vimeo – Watch on YouTube

I made another video with one of Nic S.’s readings, this time for a poem by Nicelle Davis, “Cuba and Coltrane,” from her Whale Sound audio chapbook, Studies in Monogamy. I may not have any personal familiarity with marital discord, but who can’t identify with a relationship built on a shared longing to be elsewhere and otherwise than we are?

Process notes

As is almost always the case, this started with me noticing that something looked cool and needed to be filmed: in this case, the cattails blowing in the clear morning light with my new pink flamingo garden ornament slightly out-of-focus in the foreground. So I set up the camera on Saturday morning, knowing too that at some point someone would drive up the road and pass between cattails and flamingo. Once I had the footage, I began looking through Nic’s Whale Sound material for something appropriate, and “Cuba and Coltrane” immediately struck me as the best fit. Cuba, after all, actually hosts a breeding population of flamingos, unlike — say — Florida. And the blowing cattails were nothing if not jazzy.

I contacted the author for permission before I got too far along in the editing, gave her a rough outline of what I wanted to do, and linked to my videopoetry album on Vimeo. When she wrote back, she mentioned that she and her 3 1/2-year-old son had watched all of my videos, which was astonishing, and added that her son actually requested more of them this morning in preference to cartoons! High praise indeed. I remember just how addictive cartoons were when I was that age.

Maybe it was the mention of cartoons, but I got the idea of putting in some clips from slapstick comedies of the silent film era to illustrate the domestic conflict a bit more graphically. This may be a bit of overkill, I’m not sure. But it gave me a good excuse to browse through the online Edison Motion Pictures collection on the Library of Congress website.

I also thought it important to include some Coltrane in the soundtrack, and one way to do that without breaking copyright laws was to find a cover of a Coltrane tune licensed for remix/reuse under the Creative Commons. I decided to try SoundCloud this time, and hit paydirt right away with a great cover of “Naima” by a group called The VIG Quartet. SoundCloud has advanced search capability within Creative Commons-licensed material, so searching for tracks with the word “Coltrane” in the title, description or tags was quick and painless. I duly added SoundCloud to my page of web resources for videopoem makers at Moving Poems.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Stepping into the heat


Watch on Vimeo.

A small, volunteer sunflower growing alongside the footpath between my house and my folks’ house has attracted a huge following, from mordelid beetles to flea beetles to some kind of plant bug that lurk on the back side. Add to that the small wasps and bees coming in for shorter visits, and it’s quite a happening little scene.

That’s what tempted me to stand out in the sun for ten minutes yesterday evening videoing it. But when I brought up the clips on my desktop monitor, it was the sun-struck footage rather than the footage focused more on the insects that seemed the most striking. I hadn’t had anything specific in mind when I shot it, but I picked up my copy of Nic S.‘s book Forever Will End On Thursday and quickly found a nearly perfect fit: the poem “homesteader,” which begins:

I step into the heat
as into a dress

the sun fits me, it is
my size

and the heat is
face-shaped…

Every time I make a videopoem, even one as simple as this, I feel I learn something new. This time, I discovered that the natural sound from the video itself made a perfectly satisfactory soundtrack, as long as I was careful, in my couple of splices, not to cut off the field sparrow in mid-song. I’m also refining my technique for massaging the poetry reading. In general, I find it necessary to lengthen the spaces between phrases when adapting a sound recording for use in a videopoem, in order to counteract the distraction-effect of the video images and give the words time to sink in. Nic’s readings lend themselves especially well to this kind of spacing, since her readings are already slower and more clearly articulated than most other people’s. On the other hand, there’s nothing that says a viewer or listener has to catch every word on the first listen. We certainly don’t have that expectation with music!

This is my third video so far for a poem by Nic S.. In case you missed them, the other two were “on being constantly civil towards death” and “the wanderers’ blessing.” Two other videos used Nic’s readings (originally recorded for Whale Sound): “hollow” (text by Peter Stephens — possibly my best videopoem to date) and “A Bigfoot Poem,” Nic’s rendering of one of my own pieces.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eating roast ox at the outhouse races


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday I went to Martinsburg, Pennsylvania with a couple of friends to take in the newly-revived tradition there of outhouse races, a fundraising event sponsored by the local firehall. This was my first exposure to an activity of apparently quite widespread popularity: a Google search for “outhouse race” turns up photos, videos and articles on events from the Ozarks to Michigan to Alaska. One of the outhouses in attendance (and the one that won) bore a painting of the Confederate flag, which led me to wonder whether outhouse racing is seen as a Southern thing originally.

Contestants were judged on design as well as speed, and each outhouse had an occupant and four pushers. There weren’t that many outhouses this year, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. It was, among other things, a rolling display of folk art, notional shithouses with painted-on names — The Midnight Dumpster, The Boss’s Office. They ran multiple heats and everyone yucked it up. One of the outhouses lost a wheel, but otherwise there were no NASCAR-style crashes. I suggested they have a pit crew next year, but making a pit stop in an outhouse might be kind of redundant, come to think of it.

Afterwards, we joined the crowd at the pavilions in the park, where the firemen were cooking cheap dinner fare — roast ox sandwiches for $2.00, barbecued chicken for $4.00. I had the former: a round, brown patty in a bun. It wasn’t too bad slathered with condiments. We sat with a friendly couple who, seeing our photographic equipment, peppered us with suggestions of cool things to go see in Pennsylvania. He had worked for Conrail, he said, but quit after “the rebels” (meaning Norfolk-Southern, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia) took it over and ran roughshod over workers — a story I’ve heard before.

Afterwards, we sat out on the main drag until dusk, talking and watching a steady stream of classic cars, tricked-out Harleys and other outlandish vehicles go past. It was an all-American kind of day, I thought. I was led to muse about how, as a people, we are in love with speed and consumption. The result: when we gotta go, we gotta go.

*

I got home to discover my night-blooming cereus had opened, filling the room with a pungent, aromatic scent. By morning, it had already deflated, consigned, as it were, to the midnight dumpster.