I decided to envideo a poem by Emily Dickinson (#413 in the R. W. Franklin edition of the complete poems), written in 1862.
Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –
‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –
While this obviously isn’t one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, it does encapsulate, I think, one of her core beliefs, and is therefore a useful key to understanding her work as a whole. I couldn’t resist adding an ironic visual reference to one of her most famous poems.
And I must admit I picked a short poem because I didn’t have that much footage. I spent some time going through Franklin looking for poems about Heaven and Nature, and almost went with #721, which is more apophatic (and still pretty short), but it wasn’t as good a fit.
Apparently my process notes about yesterday’s videopoem gave Cynthia Cox the nudge she needed to take the leap into videopoetry herself. This morning she messaged me on Facebook:
I need a male voice to read a poem for my very low-budget, first-time video/poem thing. Would you be willing to record it and send it to me, or do you know of a male who would be willing do so?
She did her best to lower my expectations:
All I have is a little P&S camera & video of me undressing some dolls, so don’t expect much (I am cheap). And, I don’t think the poem is my best either – it’s just the one that came to me when I got the idea.
So of course I said yes, did the reading (four takes), and sent it off. Here’s what she came up with. This is way better than my earliest videopoetry experiments (also done with a point-and-shoot camera and Windows Movie Maker):
Watch on YouTube.
Cynthia Cox is a long-time online acquaintance whose poetry I admire, and she’s currently blogging poems for a new chapbook manuscript as part of her editing/polishing process — clearly a poet-blogger after my own heart.
My other poetry reading-related contribution today (aside from the usual podcast at qarrtsiluni — a poem called “Neon in a Jar” by the amazing Susan Elbe) was a new post at the group blog Voice Alpha, “From bookstore to telephone: the incredible shrinking poetry reading.” It was just going to be a simple link-post, but, well, you know how it goes. I talk about the success Heather Christle has been having with her offer to read poems over the telephone for anyone who wants to call (which includes coverage at the BBC!) and speculate that perhaps the era of chasing big audiences at bookstores is over, and we should instead concentrate on more intimate “microaudiences” — telephone, video chat, door-to-door readings… Because who are we kidding? Poetry is never going to be even remotely popular in this country. We’re freaks. Even videopoems on YouTube struggle to amass 100 views, with a few notable exceptions. If you don’t write to amuse yourself and entertain your friends first and foremost, you’re screwed.
Yesterday, my dad spotted a cecropia moth — newly eclosed, from the looks of it — on the side of one of the black walnut trees in the yard. This is the largest moth in North America, and it’s in the same Saturniidae family as polyphemus and luna moths (which have appeared on this same tree or its immediate neighbor two years in a row, in early August). I shot some video footage of it right away, but figured it wouldn’t be flying until after dark, so I went back at dusk with a flashlight to shoot some more footage.
This morning, it occurred to me that the nighttime footage might make a good fit with one of Nic S.’s poems from her recent nanopress chapbook, Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, edited by Beth Adams. Nic had given me “blanket permission to use any and all of my stuff out there, any time” in a comment on my post about the new videopoetry album, so I didn’t have to worry about the fact that she’s off on vacation somewhere and probably not reading emails. The poem I had in mind, “on being constantly civil towards death,” is very short, but I’ve made at least half a dozen videos for haiku poems, and this is twice the length of a haiku. Would the text and the footage make a good pair? Maybe. It would depend on what I did with the soundtrack.
I downloaded the MP3 link off the chapbook’s website and listened to it a few more times. Due to the poem’s brevity, each line does a lot of work, so the first order of business was to make sure they didn’t go by so quickly that they wouldn’t register with a viewer. I could have slowed down Nic’s reading — my audio software has a function that lets you change the speed of a track without altering its pitch — but unlike many poets, Nic already seems to read at just about the right speed. So instead I lengthened almost every pause, a strategy that seemed to work well with the first poem of hers I did a video for, “the wanderers’ blessing.” This made the poem half again longer, though it was still pretty brief.
After listening to a bunch of Creative Commons-licensed pieces of music at Jamendo.com and ccmixter.org, I decided not to use any background music this time — it just didn’t seem to fit a poem dominated by a “great black stillness.” But from one death-metal track with a telephone ring in it, I got the idea of turning the poem into a phone call. It seemed appropriate for the overall theme of Nic’s chapbook — attempting to commune with a perhaps unreachable Other. This was good, because I conceive of the video not just as Moving Poems material, but also as something akin to a trailer for the book. (It helps that, as a paying customer of Vimeo, I now have the ability to conclude embedded videos with a clickable link.)
But yes, I did briefly consider using death metal in the soundtrack. Which is why you should probably be very careful about giving someone like me blanket permission to monkey with your work.
I realized this morning that my most recent videopoem was my 100th upload to Vimeo, so in celebration I created a new album for my videopoems there. It contains 45 videos so far, including those I’ve made for poems by others (Nic S., Dick Jones, Peter Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Czeslaw Milosz, Cesar Vallejo and Juan Ramon Jimenez). The Flash player at the head of this post (probably not visible to RSS or email subscribers) displays everything in the album in reverse chronological order. Once you start viewing videos, it will continue playing them in order unless you click on something, which allows you to resume browsing. (If it starts giving error messages, refresh the page.) I’ve also stuck this player at the top of the Videopoetry category page here, since I do store almost all my videopoems on Vimeo.
Vimeo calls this a Hubnut widget, and says it offers “a TV-style viewing experience.” I guess being able to change videos with one click of the mouse is kind of like changing channels with a remote, assuming there’s someplace with 45 channels devoted to poetry.
Speaking of channels, I do still also maintain the amazing Undiscovery Channel for wildlife videos, though many of my best are actually hosted at YouTube. (Since until recently I didn’t have a paid account at Vimeo, it was faster to get videos processed at YouTube, and like most bloggers I’m often in a hurry to post. I still think YouTube is a great free service and an indispensible website, albeit increasingly junked-up with ads.)
As time permits I’ll be making and uploading higher-definition versions of some of my older videos, and maybe even fixing some problems with soundtracks, sub-par readings and the like. One of Vimeo’s chief virtues is that it allows one to swap in a new file for an old one while keeping the same URL and embed code, and without losing accumulated statistics, comments and likes. And see, this is why I prefer the freemium model for web services: once I’ve committed to paying $60 a year for something, it makes me want to get my money’s worth and stop being so goddamned slap-dash about everything.
I’ve shared videos of the May 6 poetry reading for The Book of Ystwyth, but the main event was the opening of Clive’s 60th birthday career retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales the following afternoon. And fortunately I didn’t have to worry about videoing that one; they had a professional filmmaker there to do it for them. This is the result.
Following Andrew Green’s introduction, Clive’s own remarks focus on the central role of place, love and community in his work:
Being a painter isn’t just about standing in the studio and making still lives and landscapes and narrative paintings. It’s about the people you surround yourself with, people who cluster around you, the people you love.
Would that all gifted artists and writers took their social obligations so seriously.
More footage from the algae exhibit at the Kew Gardens. The garden eels were fascinating to watch: shy creatures, but more or less habituated to the steady stream of humans on the other side of the glass. Rooted as they were, they were clearly very far from home indeed. I somehow got the idea of pairing them with a poem by Nic S. from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday, which I read and wrote about in April. Fortunately, Nic saw the logic in my seemingly bizarre choice, as she wrote in an email and subsequently blogged:
I would never have thought of pairing the footage and the poem, but the footage speaks to the themes in the poem — solidarity yet separateness; deep wariness and alertness to the environment; the need for camouflage and the longing for connection — all things that characterize the ‘order of strangers and interlopers.’ The music resonates as well – made me think of yearning and unfinishedness. It’s an unexpected connection you made, but I think it works.
This is the third videopoem I’ve made with a Nic S. reading in the soundtrack, but the first for one of her own poems. If you only know her as the editor and main reader for the audiopoetry magazine Whale Sound, you’re missing a real treat: her own poems are wonderful, too. I hope this video helps win her a few more fans.
In lieu of a podcast this week, here in video form is the full, hour-long poetry reading I flew to Wales to take part in last month. This was a group reading in support of The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose launch coincided with a 60th birthday retrospective exhibition of, and monograph on, the contemporary Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (who I interviewed in the two most recentepisodes of the Woodrat podcast). All six of us — three Yanks and three Brits — had written poems in response to his paintings, and The Book of Ystwyth includes a generous selection, illustrated with full-color details of the paintings in question.
In the reading, ably MC’d by Damian Walford Davies, as you’ll see, each poet appears twice, once on either side of a break (which occurs in part 3), so that the first poet is also the last, the second is the penultimate, etc. Here’s a key to who appears in which video:
Anita Mills was the camerawoman. I take the blame for the sound and all the editing. The bookstore’s set-up had the podium in shadow, which meant that the camera often focused on better-lit bookshelves behind our heads. In the process of lightening and increasing contrast on the videos, the color turned spotty, whence my decision to make it black and white. I assure viewers who have never been to Wales that it is a fully modern country now, and almost everything is in color all the time.
As for the book: quite apart from its contents, which are of course scintillating, it’s a beautifully designed object with high-quality paper and image reproduction, retailing at a very affordable $15.95/£9.99. It was published in the U.K. by Grey Mare Press in association with Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales, and in the U.S. by Carolina Wren Press. Click on either link to order.
The world’s longest-running — and probably only — blog carnival devoted to all things arboreal, the Festival of the Trees, turns five next month. Its very first edition appeared on July 1, 2006 right here at Via Negativa, so it seemed fitting to bring it back for edition #61. The theme is open, but I’m especially interested in new discoveries about trees and forests, either of a scientific or personal nature.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a blog carnival, think of it as a homeless links blog which crashes on a different blog-couch every month. Or as my FOTT co-conspirator Jade Blackwater puts it (see What’s a Blog Carnival?):
A blog carnival is a recurring, theme-driven publication which congregates content from many sources in one place online.
A single issue of a blog carnival reads just like a great big blog post filled with links to many other blog posts (or photo galleries, or videos, etc.) that talk about the same subject.
The purpose of a blog carnival is to engage with the world wide community to celebrate subjects of common interest (in our case, trees and forests).
So contributors post material on their own blogs or websites and send the links to the host of the upcoming edition. For FOTT #61, email your article permalinks to me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, and be sure to put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line so I’ll know it’s not spam. The deadline is June 30.
We have much more information about the Festival at our coordinating site, but I think the easiest way to grasp the concept is to browse some of the past editions, started with the most recent edition at Rubies in Crystal. This was Brenda Clews’ first time hosting, and she did something very ambitious: ask participants “to record an engagement with a tree or trees, preferably in video, but any form. To talk to the trees and bring back what transpired.” The response was impressive, and included 12 videos. (Note that video embedding is really just a fancy form of linking, and is therefore encouraged in blog carnivals.) Check it out.
I didn’t get around to making a video in time for Brenda’s edition, I’m sorry to say, but I was so impressed by a poem she reprinted from Dick Jones’ blog, I decided to ask Dick if I could make a video for it. He not only agreed, but recorded a reading for me to incorporate. I’ll be sharing this on Moving Poems next week, but here it is for those who can’t wait. (Note that HD is off by default; click on “HD” in the lower right corner if your internet speed supports it.) To read the text of the poem, refer to Brenda’s post.
I’ve compiled a Memorial Day playlist on YouTube, which you can watch there on auto-play if you like. It’s one hour and four minutes long. For those who prefer to pick and choose or listen in increments, the videos are in order below. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader or email inbox, you may have to click through to the post to see the embeds.)
For non-Americans who may be unclear on the holiday, there are three things you need to know about Memorial Day: 1) it used to be called Decoration Day, and it’s traditionally a time when families decorate gravestones and mourn the dead — something we aren’t always very good at doing — then eat lots of potato salad and barbecued chicken; 2) as the country has swung to the right in recent decades, it’s become more of a patriotic holiday, a time for especially celebrating the sacrifices of dead soldiers, which are generally regarded as more significant than the sacrifices of dead school teachers or dead coal miners; and 3) it’s generally regarded as the beginning of the summer vacation season, not that most Americans really know how to chill out. We like to think we do, though.
Anyway, here’s the mix, lightly annotated. Feel free to post links to your own picks in the comments. And remember, don’t eat potato salad that’s been sitting out too long in the hot sun, or you may be joining your dear departed sooner than you’d planned.
2. John Prine: “Paradise”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bDCsc3CU5ww
If you’re from a military family, I respect the fact that the deaths of soldiers hit especially close to home, and perhaps epitomize sorrow and loss for you. I’m from a family of nature lovers.
O.K., here’s where it gets a little more political. My conservative friends might want to just scroll down to #14.
6. Billie Holiday: “Strange Fruit”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
When people talk of “sacrifice” in the context of building America, here’s what I think of.
Yes, it’s a poetry recitation — but by a four-time winner of the Poetry National Slam. Let’s just say Patricia Smith is one poet who knows how to rock the mike. “We reached for the past like it is food and we are starving…”
As probably anyone in their 30s or 40s will recognize, the video is a parody of an MTV video for “California Girls” by David Lee Roth (q.v. if you have a strong stomach).
Jello Biafra is the Phil Ochs of my generation, I think. “Kill the Poor” was my first choice of a DKs video for the mix, but this Elvis cover had the better video (scenes from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It also seemed like a good way to set up the following video — yin and yang.
Time-travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Shortly before I left, I heard a mention on the radio about the effects of jet lag on memory — it sounds worse than marijuana by far. I heeded the advice to expose myself to plenty of sunshine, though (I was fortunate that my visit to Wales and England coincided with an unusually sunny period) and managed to reset my body clock fairly quickly. What I didn’t get used to was the longer day. I would wake up when the blackbirds started singing at dawn and discover that it was only 4:30 in the morning.
Traveling home, of course, I got back the time I lost on the flight over. It was just about the longest morning of my life, starting at midnight when I was en route on the express train from London to the Birmingham airport, continuing for many hours at the airport lounge (I didn’t bother getting a motel room), and then on the flight itself, which left at 9:00, lasted for seven and a half hours, and arrived at noon. I had a window seat at the very back of the plane, and spent much of the time gazing at the tops of clouds from 35,000 feet in a state of mild stupefaction, the combined effect of sleep deprivation, a recently contracted head cold, and the sheer wonder of it all.
The plane was a Boeing 767 and bucked and heaved a lot more than I remembered from my previous intercontinental flights on 747s, and this combined with the wave-like tops of the clouds made it feel almost like a sea voyage. From time to time I’d switch on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me to check our position and verify that we were, in fact, hurtling along at 500 miles per hour. I thought back to my very first day in Wales, when I got a chance to ride in a small, flat-bottomed boat known as a coracle, a version of which the Irish St. Brendan supposedly crossed the North Atlantic in. Thousands of newly hatched mayflies were rising off the river as we took turns trying to pilot the rudderless, slow-going craft against the current.
The boat had just been made two days before by John and Cathryn Warren, the next-door neighbors to my hosts in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Wakelin (that’s Peter in the coracle after me; Clive’s voice is in the soundtrack, and he did the filming while I took a turn in the thing). I had simply happened to mention that a good friend of mine in the States was crazy about coracles, and asked if they knew where I might see one.
Somehow the unreality of flying across the Atlantic in a few hours was balanced by the unreality of having my desire to see a coracle instantly granted, sitting in it and finding myself unable to go anywhere very quickly except in circles. In fact, at that moment, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. Though the ancient ocean-going coracles did probably have rudders (and according to The Voyage of St. Brendan, could be fitted with a sail), their relative unsteerability constituted part of their attraction to Celtic monks, for whom the ideal form of travel involved surrendering to the will of God and going wherever the winds and currents took them. Some of the more God-besotted ones set off without even an oar. I could see their point. Almost everything — trees, wildflowers, birdsong — was new and miraculous to me, and I wanted nothing more than to stop and soak it in.
*
UPDATE (5/19): I’m honored to report that this post has spawned not one, but two responses from my friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott. Check out “Coracles and Communication,” which includes a poem called “Coracle of Prayer,” at her personal blog, and “Coracles and Currents” at Liberation Theology Lutheran.
As for the book: quite apart from its contents, which are of course scintillating, it’s a beautifully designed object with high-quality paper and image reproduction, retailing at a very affordable $15.95/£9.99. It was published in the U.K. by