it’s no secret that one of the key elements of procrastination and plain not getting anything done these days has to be using the internet. as an elemental time vampire it has no equal. any stray thought that pops into your head you can google it and follow it down and other blind alley that comes to mind. true, occasionally, results are yielded but more often than not, rather than following up on my ted lecture on astrolabes i’ll be watching reruns of old beavis and butthead videos or worse
rather than do that this week i’ve been watching alastair’s new rendering of a gerard rudolf poem ‘emily melting’. alastair asked me the other week for some thoughts on videopoetry and this video seems as good a place to start as any. i’m not entirely sure gerard’s poem wouldn’t have passed me by had i read it on the page (i’m no big fan of poems about childhood as much as anything tho there’s obvious qualification to that statement!) but watching it, listening to it, meant a different level of engagement.
Our extension of poetry into video seems only to ratify a deeper understanding, as poets and performers, that poetry rests in a continuous spectrum of expanded genres, each genre an amalgam, offering aesthetic expressions that conjoin text with some other creation. Poetry music. Poetry performance. Poetry theatre. Poetry film and video.
- Kurt Heintz
i like the notion of expanded genres. these last couple of years have seen me doing collaborative work with visual images, sound poetry etc and i’ve come away from each of these experiences with new insights, new ideas and a breaking down of my idea of writing as something that (needs) to exist solely on the page. and then there’s that whole crossover thing happening. a few years back i went thru a whole paper art phase. i love all that stuff but the effort and the time required were just beyond me. imagine my joy at finding this new zealand book council video
once you realise you’ve started the time vampire already has you. there’s as many different forms of videopoetry as there are clips, from the mellow text and image of this, to the sound and text of this. of course everyone likes a voice (at least i think they do), even corporations. part of me died that it was levis but even so, to hear whitman?
i could put down dozens of my favourite videos but then the time vampire would have its way and i’d still be sitting here trying to type this hours later. better then to go straight to the source. dave bonta, he of qarrtsiluni, a man for whom there appear to be more hours in the day than most of us, has and is collecting all these wee poetic gems so that we don’t have to. i’d absolutely recommend one of those rainy sunday afternoons on finding yourself alone in the house, switching on the computer, allowing the time vampire its full reign, sitting back with some mellow tea and watching your way thru this site.
what style you prefer is of course entirely up to you. you might complain, as ron silliman did, that one of billy collins’ (?) poems is no more than words spoken over a cartoon. if it works, so what? you might not like your text up on the screen, i kind of do, some of the time. you might listen in to the sounds or music used to augment what you’re listening to. and hopefully, eventually, you’ll be saying to yourself, i could do some of that.
obviously there’s restrictions but that’s what creative commons was made for. in computerland you can pretty much do what you want, pick a sound, an image, a stream of words and run with it. when alastair did the scene video he just picked it up and ran with it. what a surprise, what a treasure! not only that by indulging yourself in these collaborative efforts you get to meet new people who do things differently to you, who come from different and interesting backgrounds, countries, cultures and, more or less, there’s no publisher, deadline, competition, brief etc etc other than what you want there to be. so all of that is rendered superfluous. and that can only be a good thing.
so, time vampires. yes, staring at a screen can be a bad thing, but as a means to some form of creative expression, some interaction, something new you hadn’t even thought of? that’s a monkey on my back i’ll welcome. i could write more but i’m off to practise some guitar noise i want to use. i have no idea how to record it, what to do with it when i have done, but that’s all part of the joy.
i recommend it.
Re using poetry in conjunction with other media and one’s opinion of the poem when it stands alone. It is often said of classical music that song composers have frequently turned to “second rate” poems, feeling that they want to work with words that have a dimension missing which they can provide. A lot of opera libretti read pretty awful for the same reason: they weren’t written to stand alone.
Just a thought and not one, I hasten to add, that I would apply to “scene”!
i can’t remember what the opera was but i remember the first time i had a look at some opera ‘lyrics’ i was shocked at how crap they are.
i think, given the this collection experience and looking at dave bonta’s blog that the video poetry is the other way round i.e. it’s the words driving the visuals which is kind of handy for the film maker i think as they have well, the whole of literature to draw on!