Erica Goss on how poets experience videopoems
This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss takes a look at how videopoems made by others are seen by the poets whose texts they use.
“Sometimes I feel like I have to watch the videos between my fingers,” says Howie Good. “I don’t feel like it’s my poem anymore.” Howie is a professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz, and the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dreaming in Red from Right Hand Pointing. “It’s flattering, and brings recognition for the poet, but the poem is a creation in itself. I want it to generate its own pictures in the reader’s mind.”
Howie told me that “the poet and the filmmaker have different goals. The video is a separate object. It’s good that a poem inspires the filmmaker, but then it’s not my poem. Now it’s out in the world, away from me.” Howie doesn’t feel that videos diminish poetry. “They don’t enhance poems either. They are simply different things.” The worst thing that might happen would be if the video “pre-empted the imagination. We need our consciousness liberated. Poetry does that.”
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
I think Howie’s point about the video or film not preempting the imagination is an important one. Videopoems that attempt to mirror or illustrate the images in the the text risk doing that for me.
Making film to poetry is fraught with such issues. Poetry most often elicits imagery, and movie work can obliterate the readers imagination where this is concerned.
Oddly enough, audio is less usually invoked by poetry and therefor that is an excellent way in.
Centering on the audio; having the poet read their own poems; orchestrating sympathetic music and/or general sound leaves the visual interpretation more in the hands of the viewer – as happens when reading poetry. Making the pace of the reading of the poem lead the audio – that way the audio will compliment and not fight with the work.
This approach may not give the best ‘films’ but does give the most faithful ‘movie poems’ to my mind.
Words first. They are the most important thing that a poem has to offer. Movie poems can help them along, but should never lead them! Well… in my opinion, anyway.
I agree that audio is an excellent way in (and in fact, that’s been the starting point for most of the videopoems I’ve made). But there are some excellent films that confine the text to words on the screen, too.
I think it’s difficult to issue prescriptions for successful poetry videos. For any rule one can suggest, we can probably think of exceptions. It’s easier to point to what doesn’t work — though I’ve been very reluctant to engage in that kind of criticism here.