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.

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..).

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.

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.

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

*******
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

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