Category Archives: videopoems

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collect for a dark evening, with video

beloved, you were like octopus
proceeding in pulsing clouds
of black ink

calamitous designs
sprang whole from your mind
and exploded into life
as flying steel and iron-toothed trap

it was always my bone, my muscle
they mangled and spat out

you hurled us into chill wars
fought in forests of spider trees
against aging warriors
whose battle rhythm was not ours
but you always fought longest
and fell last

now you cross
the miles of destruction between us
hunting my last thought, lamenting
in this derelict church

the flutes are silent
I say, weeping

you say: don’t fall into the moat
something lives there
and it eats

you say: death
is a blooming rose

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‘mrs death’

I don’t remember thinking about death one way or another when I was a child, so I have been surprised and curious about my sons’ attitudes toward death. When my older son was about seven, he developed a complete obsession with death and was forever making me take him to cemeteries all over the place. He eventually grew out of it. My younger son, now 12, seems by contrast to have a nonchalant, matter of fact and almost buddy-ish approach to the idea of death. Still working this one out, but this little piece recently showed up in the process:

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‘mine, the great spread of wings’

Got an idea for a project from this post, involving Helen in Egypt.

In other news, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Erica Goss at Connotation Press, on videopoetry and other matters, right behind the amazing Swoon.

In separate but related news, Swoon and I also just collaborated (with Swoon doing much the heaviest lifting) on a film-poem for Dave Bonta’s latest project. More on the latter soon.

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howling wolves x 2

Latest videopoem, one of the poems from Dark and Like A Web, using some of Flute Ninja’s wonderful music again, and continuing my obsession with space imagery – the ones here are from the Hubble site.

This lucky poem was also envideoed by the amazing Swoon way back when – you can watch that version just below. I love Swoon’s vibrant, urban take, especially the dark leitmotif of the solitary figure in silhouette with matching foreboding music.

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of course there’s an app for that…

Process notes for my latest videopoem, This is just to say by William Carlos Williams:

The reading had been up at Pizzicati of Hosanna for a while and is only 20 seconds long, so I knew I was looking for something very short in terms of video. There are still some wonderful Equiloud clips I haven’t used yet and it took me just a second of flipping through those to know that his gorgeous 28-second door-opening loop was exactly the kind of image/metaphor I was looking for, once I slowed the clip speed down by about half.

The music was the hardest part. I thought of the melody, Au clair de la lune, almost immediately. I knew I was looking for something that, while appearing simple and obviously straightforward, has nonetheless stood the tests of time and endless repetition and retains its charm even when presented inexpertly. So, Au clair de la lune, played simply by a beginner on a recorder or tin whistle or guitar, perhaps, or with just one hand on the piano.

I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it online as a solo instrumental. Everything I found had either vocals or lots of instrumentation and complicating harmonies, and was too fast and/or too ‘expert’ to serve. I kept wishing I had a recorder or piano or electronic keyboard in the house so I could do it myself. After an extended period of frustration, I was ready to give up on the videopoem altogether, when I thought: Hey, there’s an app for everything – isn’t there an app for this?

So I went to look and sure enough, there are a bunch of apps out there for this! I downloaded the free ‘Piano DX’ iPad app and tried that. It was perfect for my needs. It will pretty much only let you play one-handed (watch someone use it on You Tube), but that fit right in with what I wanted, while decades of not practicing the piano at all gave me just the kind of inexpert touch I was looking for. The rest is history.


 
By the way, Williams’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is also up at Pizzicati of Hosanna with a videopoem.

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new videopoem – ‘Humming Bird’ by D.H. Lawrence

I get such a kick out of people putting their creations out there for free non-commercial use by others. This happened thanks to generous Vimeo user, Equiloud, who has a clips channel offering his amazing video creations for free download and Sound Cloud user Flute Ninja doing the same. The reading itself was already up at Pizzicati of Hosanna.

More videopoems on You Tube / Vimeo.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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‘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.

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‘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.