Pizzicati of Hosanna – update & videopoem triptychs

I was stoked to notice today that there are now 36 readings up at my new site, Pizzicati of Hosanna, and eighteen of them have videopoems associated with them! I’ve been working on linking the videopoem-ed pieces in triptychs at a new page on the site. It felt a bit weird initially to think of linking poems in different languages in this way, but after the first set came together, the differences in language began to seem minor and irrelevant. Warmest thanks to fellow videopoets Swoon, Dave Bonta and Rachel Laine for their wonderful video work on Pizzicati readings!

The first triptych, which I’ve called ‘Ashes Like Bread’, has a poem by Italian poet Primo Levi, one by American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a third by Bolivian poet Ricardo Jaimes Freyre. I’ve been haunted by Levi’s L’Approdo ever since I first read it, and in quick succession last week, I suddenly came across the Millay and the Freyre – both of which jumped out at me as deeply connected in feeling and metaphysical basis to the Levi, but each of which moved the joint narrative forward in different ways.

Once I’d made the initial intellectual leap (after all, why not link poems in different languages into triptychs?), other connections between the poems and their related videos began to leap out at me and these are the results. Representing, obviously, just one possible set of connections, since each poem could of course be meaningfully linked to others in different ways.

I have to say I’m enjoying the Pizzicati of Hosanna experience. After the Whale Sound experience, which was fast and contemporary and live, and filled with real-time contacts and connections with living Whale Sound poets, this experiment – working only with dead poets’ poems – feels more like doddering happily about among old books in a quiet library – a much more solitary and internal experience, and just as rewarding, I am finding (whether despite or because of the considerably less website traffic I am still deciding!).

After pretty much starting blind with French, Spanish and Italian poetry – finding pieces mostly through internet searches – I have now settled down to four resources:

Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
Twentieth Century Italian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
The Oxford Book of American Verse

A very random set, but working nicely for doddering and pressure-free reading selections, for the moment.

‘come live with me’ – videopoem using speech generator & laughter

videopoem – ‘anche tu sei l’amore’ by Cesare Pavese

Am finding I have a tendency to use certain footage two or three times, in different lengths or presentations. Like images in writing poetry, maybe – as when you find yourself repeating certain themes and images until you have written them out of your system. In this case, that eye (looking like a girl’s, an owl’s, a kestrel’s and who knows what else) and those Sufi girl dervishes (I always thought dervishes were always men – I was wrong!) are sticking with me, most definitely.

videopoem – ‘L’infinito’ by Giacomo Leopardi

Based on a recent Pizzicati of Hosanna reading.

Realized that so far it’s been mostly the Italian readings at Pizzicati of Hosanna that I’ve wanted to do video work for (hands-down favorite video so far: Forse Il Cuore by Salvatore Quasimodo). So far, we have three Italian videos, one Spanish, and no French. Still working out why this is so, especially since – knowing pretty much zero about any of those canons starting out – I am going for the obvious, the well-fingered and most-anthologized French, Spanish and Italian poems (whose authors are dead). The net result for me has been: very minor resonance with the French, somewhat more with the Spanish, and most with the Italian. They feel essentially very different to me. Foolhardy to generalize and stereotype, especially on so short an acquaintance, but I’ll stick my neck out and say the Italian ones have so far struck me as the most spiritually sophisticated. I’ll let you know if I still think that next week.

On a technical level, feel I may be getting to grips with layering. Still not able to get PowerDirector to do *exactly* what I want, but feel much more in control. This video stuff really “do by doing.” Impossible to lay out story-lines or visual narratives without getting hands on, without literally setting up the images and actually viewing them unfurl with the text. Neat sequences played out perfectly in your mind beforehand rarely work on the screen, I’m finding, and the process is essentially ‘well, that didn’t work, so how about this…?” repeated over and over again, until you get that right combination to which your whole body reacts. (Yeah – just like it reacts when you *know* you’ve found the perfect phrase or line for that poem you’re working on..).

review of ‘Forever Will End On Thursday’

Forever Will End On Thursday is reviewed at Verse Wisconsin by Sherry Chandler.

Frabjous! Very appreciative of the care and thought Sherry put into the review and particularly love that she focused on the multi-format nature of the collection – specifically, collection-as-paper vs collection-as-sound, and the fact that the poem-as-page is a different animal from the poem-as-voice.

Sherry writes: “The overlapping experiences of the two modes [reading & listening] served to illustrate how very different it is to see a poem and to hear a poem. My eye saw the strangeness in the verse; her voice enhanced the musicality of the lines. It’s not the same poem on the page that it is in the ear.”

Go read the whole thing and check out the rest of the riches (a great selection of poems, book reviews and essays) in this terrific issue of Verse Wisconsin.

Pizzicati of Hosanna update

Just getting these Pizzicati of Hosanna items into this blog’s archive:

Swoon made this terrific video of a Peter Quince at the Clavier reading and Dave Bonta made this great one of an H.D. reading (‘Orchard’).

New up at POH today: part II of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Marino by Vicente Huidobro. Ash Wednesday was a totally random choice and I chose part II because to be honest it’s the only segment of that whole piece I’ve ever really focused on. Now, of course, after paying proper voice & body attention to it, I want to read & record the whole thing. Voice truly is an organ of investigation – I started figuring that out with Whale Sound and am becoming progressively more dependent on voice to tell me what I think and like.

text animation – I’m in love!

look at this!

Made with Adobe After Effects. Which only costs $1,000. Boo.

videopoem – ‘Idrissa’s Song’

Still fiddling with text vs voice in videopoems. For this one, I wanted to make a videopoem using both text and voice and to start out knowing which parts would be voice and which would be text. I considered trying to make a video from one of the antiphonies in Dark and Like A Web (antiphony on the plain and antiphony in the hills). With two ‘voices’ clearly delineated in each poem, it would be easy to work the duality, I thought. But I ran into imaginative problems, in that I couldn’t think of anything but the most literal footage (giraffe, volcano, mamba, storm clouds, church bells) to illustrate either of the poems. Then I thought of using an epigraph. How about making an epigraph the text portion and weaving it through the poem body, which would be in voice? I used this Hugo of St. Victor quotation as an epigraph for a 4,000-word fantasy on place and belonging I have been working on forever, but for this project I combined the epigraph with a condensed version of a much shorter poem in the same vein. I continue to be very frustrated with the limited text animation capabilities of my software (PowerDirector, which is otherwise excellent), and have now decided to investigate ‘text animation’ as a separate capability.

*******
Text of videopoem:

‘The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place.’

- Hugo of St. Victor

‘Idrissa’s Song’ by Nic Sebastian

I
wake me, then, from sleep among the shrimp pools of Khulna, from mirrors at midnight and blueness in dark

under an owl sky, I will shed my sleeping mat and step to the bamboo frontier of my domain: a hut of thatch on stilts, bound in bamboo and reed, rising fragile over the jet and silver pools lying beneath my sleep

is not each pool a door

2
a jackal barks
and, freed, I stride away
to wild bee song
to the black dark of Sundarban honey
and the mangrove forest
to swarm beneath the twisted
naked root of the sea tree
and hear the Bengal tiger’s hunger call
and feel its rage upon me,
who am stranger and tall, and young, and hard

3
the heat of blood runs down my back and thighs
and the hills of Rangamati are steep
elephants roam these hills

in the teak forest, great shadows sear my rushing skin
and when I reach the road to Chittagong
I see I have been branded
with elephant mark

videopoem – ‘Un Sueno’ by Jorge Luis Borges

using text vs voice in videopoems

I wrote this a few weeks ago with the first text-only videopoem I made:

I remembered that in Tom Konyves’ videopoetry manifesto, he categorized videopoems according to their usage of text, with two key distinctions drawn between sound text and visual text. (He also asserted that visual text is ‘charged with leading’ the videopoetry genre, although I’m not sure I agree with that.) I realized that what with Whale Sound and Voice Alpha and now this interest in videopoetry, I’ve been engaged with ‘sound’ text almost exclusively for months now. The idea of making a videopoem without voice and with only visual text was therefore appealing.

I’ve now put together three vpoems with text only and no voice (links at bottom of this post). This is what I have learned so far, and, very interested, continue to ponder:

- Text is not a ‘poor relation’ to voice in videopoems. Not sure why or how I had absorbed this ‘fact’, but I had. Text is a different mechanism from voice. In videopoems text can be as strong (or stronger, if the voice alternative available is relatively weak) a mechanism as voice.

- Text used in videopoems is not like text on the page – it is more a text/voice hybrid, a halfway mark between both.

- This is probably because a) text on the page is a block, all visible, all together, in front of you while b) voice is a ribbon of sound unfurling for you – each word takes the place of the previous one, which disappears in front of it.

-Text in a videopoem takes on the ‘ribbon unfurling’ aspect of voice – each word takes the place of the previous one, which disappears in front of it.

- Text can be an active, communicative character in the performance that is videopoem.

- Text-as-ribbon can very competently (or more competently, depending on the strength of the voice alternative available) convey the nuances that voice-as-ribbon conveys – font, font size, text animation, sound/sense byte, pace – all these are elements that can convey feeling, cadence, tone, emotion.

- Text-as-ribbon, like voice-as-ribbon, is not a great respecter of linebreaks and other page-centric devices – the best way to present a sound/sense byte as text on the screen is not necessarily the way it is laid out on the page.

- Videopoem makers who are tired of or don’t trust the sound of their own voice need not be limited by the ‘voicings’ available to them, by whatever means – have at it with text, people!

Text-only videopoems:

the situation on Thursday by Nic Sebastian
you never thought by Nic Sebastian
No. XLII by e. e. cummings

‘the situation on Thursday’ – videopoem

videopoem published!

How awesome is this – my videopoem, ‘this time next year’ published at Tongues of the Ocean?!

Thanks, Nico!

videopoem – ‘forse il cuore’ – by Salvatore Quasimodo

pizzicati of hosanna – new project

Pizzicati of Hosanna
“dead poets’ poems read by Nic Sebastian in English & other languages”

Reasons for this project – One: Whale Sound was all contemporary poetry, so poets’ reactions to recordings of their work, our desire to promote that work, and real-time interactions with poets were ever-present considerations. Pizzicati of Hosanna will only tackle work by dead poets, positing a fundamentally different paradigm for exploration.

Two: What’s it like to read poetry aloud for an audience in different languages? Without being any kind of real polyglot, I have a modest working knowledge of French, Spanish and Italian, and a fair ear, although I’ve never tried reading any non-English poetry aloud for an audience (in my view the best and quickest way to get deepest inside a poem). So here we are, stepping out as usual in bright hope & deep ignorance, accompanied by a battery of dictionaries, translation tools and pronunciation guides…

I meant ‘closed’ not ‘on hiatus’

On second thought, ‘hiatus’ felt wishy-washy and indecisive. I meant ‘closed’ and should have said so: Whale Sound is now closed. Feeling a bit sad, but it’s time.

No. XLII by e e cummings

‘Whale Sound’ hiatus

It’s been a terrific year at Whale Sound but it’s time to take a break. Going forward, we may occasionally solicit a poem for reading, but we will not be accepting submissions for the foreseeable future. Activity on this blog and on Facebook/Twitter activity will slow down as well.

A few highlights from the Whale Sound year:

- Whale Sound started up a year and one month ago in August 2010
- Published readings of poems by 212 poets
- Published 7 audio chapbooks in multiple formats – website, e-book, PDF and print – most of them free
- Coordinated and participated in 8 group readings
- Established Voice Alpha, a group blog focusing on the art of reading poetry aloud for an audience (I will continue to post here occasionally and hope my fellow contributors will do the same)
- Collaborated on two videopoem tryptich projects with film-maker Swoon – Night Vision and Propolis (the latter also with Kathy MacTavish)
- Established videpoetry channels on You Tube and Vimeo (videpoetry is an area that continues to fascinate us and we will continue to post at these channels)

Meanwhile, these are the 20 Whale Sound posts receiving the most listener clicks – check them out!

1. ‘If You Were A Bird‘ by Aditi Machado
2. ‘Infinity‘ by Tess Kincaid
3. [a group of jellyfish is called a ‘smack.’ a group of lapwings is called a ‘deceit.’] by Chella Courington
4. ‘Something Brighter Than Pity‘ by Carolina Ebeid
5. ‘A Different Leaving‘ by Terresa Wellborn
6. ‘A Week Before You Die, You Are Singing’ by Erin Elizabeth Smith
7. ‘Sometimes I Still Dream About Their Pink Bodies‘ by Kelli Russell Agodon
8. ‘Lament‘ by Jill Alexander Essbaum
9. ‘The Trains‘ by Adele Kenny
10. ‘A Bigfoot Poem‘ by Dave Bonta
11. Group reading: ‘The Slender Scent’ by James Robison
12. ‘Ode to Drunkenness and Other Criminal Activities‘ by Rebecca Loudon
13. ‘At Ruby’s Diner‘ by Sherry O’Keefe
14. ‘Sink or Float [quick fix witch]‘ by Juliet Cook
15. ‘How To Fall In Love‘ by Susan Elbe
16. ‘The Way Back‘ by Kathleen Kirk
17. ‘In Which Christina Imagines That Different Types Of Alcohol Are Men And She Is Seeing Them All‘ by Christina Olson
18. ‘For The Woman On The Boulevard‘ by Emma Trelles
19. Group reading: ‘Acceptance is to her a phenomenon’ by Ann Bogle
20. ‘About a Fish‘ by Ana Božičević

‘you never thought’ – videopoem

 

you never thought
by Nic Sebastian

you never thought
that I could rear so high and bite
your head off your shoulders like
puffed corn that I could grab
your life like some

shirt from the dryer snap
shake out your life fold it so
small drop it off so
easily at the thrift store

striding by
on my high long legs
headed
for Jupiter

Animation: Sterling Sheehy
Music: ‘Reverence’ by Vospi and the Tunguska Electronic Music Society.

OK, this was awesome fun! I remembered that in Tom Konyves’ videopoetry manifesto, he categorized videopoems according to their usage of text, with two key distinctions drawn between sound text and visual text. (He also asserted that visual text is ‘charged with leading’ the videopoetry genre, although I’m not sure I agree with that.) I realized that what with Whale Sound and Voice Alpha and now this interest in videopoetry, I’ve been engaged with ‘sound’ text almost exclusively for months now. The idea of making a videopoem without voice and with only visual text was therefore appealing.

The quest for footage is never-ending. After having fun with Claus-Dieter Schulz‘s wonderful animation, which I used in part for yesterday’s Gabriel in Love , I began looking for material that was similarly abstract and came across Red Opus by artist Sterling Sheehy , and asked him for permission to use it. I initially thought I would write something in response to the footage, but after watching it several times, I decided I already had the perfect poem – you never thought, from Forever Will End On Thursday. To me the poem and the animation had the same sense of hustle and energy and kinetic making/unmaking/remaking. Red Opus is only 48 seconds long, so it didn’t take long to break up the text, place it, and animate it along that length. Then to the archives of the Tunguska Electronic Music Society at Jamendo for a similarly hustling piece that had the same feel (I swear they have a piece of music for every mood and have become my music source of choice). I particularly liked the way the animation at times looked like wacky piano keys, right when the music itself was at its wackiest piano-ness.

So there it is. I’m using Windows Live Movie Maker, so the text animation possibilities are fairly basic. I suppose one of these days I’m going to have to get serious about my movie-editing software.

‘Gabriel in love’ – videopoem

 

‘Gabriel in love’
by Nic Sebastian

granite tunnels do not scare her
nor does the hot streaking
of any blood

she knows the heft and scent
of the lines by which monsters
track her

her name is insistence
gates open at her will
questions follow her
like locust swarm

she has no need of the ground
beneath her feet
she fears neither cold
nor solitude

she is solitude
and cold, she is blue water
flooding, poison moonlight
in your veins

she wakes the ancestors
of your dreams in all their rage
she raises blue rain
and black leaves, heavy stars
of white ice

she is bright woven, Gabriel
a straight-flying dagger

and you, Gabriel, are simple fountains
of rainbow blood, mere castles
of fairytale pain

first published at Canopic Jar

Camera: C.D. Schulz & Martin Gurtner @machinima-studios.com

Music: ‘Pulsar’ by Max Loginov and the Tunguska Electronic Music Society

This footage made me happy for its abstraction.

‘this time next year’ – videopoem

 

this time next year
by Nic Sebastian

your name is Ladislaus
you will come to me

as small black boat
on thirst-red sea

your sail made of hurricane
and bougainvillea

I will ask you
suddenly

for September
for the tight promises

sold by the daughters
of the equinox

and you will grin at me
in your morning

handsome way
pass me cowrie shells

and solstices
laughing

Footage: ‘Discovery of Kepler-16b’ by NASA
Music: ‘Crotalinae’ by Xcentric Noizz and the Tunguska Electronic Music Society

This time I wrote the poem first then went looking for footage and ended up on the NASA website again (which is where I got the moon footage in this one). Happy that it’s only 57 seconds long. I wish there were more ‘abstract’ footage out there. Everything I find seems to be so definite and concrete. It occurred to me that I should perhaps submit the poem for publication before posting it here, but I realized at the same time that I’ve completely run out of energy for that whole submission dynamic, so I’m going to have me some lazy time.