~ theory ~
Some thoughts on collage videopoetry
Over at Via Negativa, I shared a new videopoem I made on a whim last night. This morning I added some process notes, which led to a few further reflections of possible interest to writers and poetry teachers looking for an easy way to get into videopoeming. First, the video:
I made this videopoem entirely out of found text and footage from American television commercials of the late 1940s and early 50s. I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of collage in videopoetry ever since I saw what Matt Mullins did with a sermon by Oral Roberts in Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer). This doesn’t rise quite to that level, either technically or conceptually, but it was a fun experiment. Thanks to the Prelinger Archives for the material, all in the public domain.
Process notes: I’ve been downloading compilations of old television commercials for possible use in videos for poems from the new chapbook. While making poetry videos for pre-existing texts is fun, it’s easy to get sidetracked by a wealth of good material, and yesterday I decided to give in to the temptation. I went through one of the compilations, writing down all the good lines in a text document, in order as they appeared so I could re-find them easily. Then I wrote a rough draft with some of the most interesting lines, loaded the source material into Windows Movie Maker and began to cut and paste the snippets containing the lines I’d liked into the order I’d put them in the written draft. Once I had fully assembled the first rough draft of a videopoem, however, I found the words went by rather too quickly. I had the idea of using wordless or nearly wordless segments from a single ad both to give space to the lines of found poetry and to act as a sort of refrain.
At this stage, the working title was “Industry at Work” (taken from a clip that I subsequently removed). However, after a couple of hours of trimming and moving things around, it became clear that the refrain segments just weren’t gelling, and the video overall seemed too scattered and miscellaneous. I began looking at another compilation, and the very first ad in it — a commercial for Budweiser — had lots of wordless footage that I liked. It was only after pasting some of those segments into the draft project that I got the idea of using the first half of Budweiser’s then-slogan, “Where there’s life, there’s Bud,” as title and refrain.
I go into all this (hopefully not too boring) detail simply to show that the process of composition doesn’t differ all that wildly from the way regular poems are made. If I were teaching poetry, this is the sort of thing I’d make beginning students do. Of all the possible approaches to videopoetry, found-poem collage with public-domain (or otherwise free-to-use) footage has the lowest barrier to entry. All you really need is a computer with a DSL or faster connection and whatever video editing software the operating system came with. Moreover, this way of making videopoems comes much closer than the typical poetry video to Tom Konyves’ conception of videopoety as
the Duchampian “assisted readymade”. Consider the recorded image as the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover whether there exists something significant, yet still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface of the present moment.
Two new essays on videopoetry
I have been doing much thinking about Visual Text in a videopoem. Unfortunately, at the rate that my fingers touch the keyboard, I haven’t had much to show for it. But Litlive just posted my essay, Visual Text/2 Case Studies, in which I comment on two of my favourites from the finalists for their VidLit Contest, both in the Visual Text category: “24” by Susan Cormier and “Profile” by R.W. Perkins.
This past year I was also invited to participate in the Zebra Poetry Film Festival Colloquium in Berlin, but had to cancel the visit due a family emergency. A few days before the event, it was suggested I write something to contribute to the discussion. My good friend and former Vehicule poet, Endre Farkas, read it aloud at the Colloquium. It’s now been posted at http://www.academia.edu/3474487/Address_to_the_Colloquium_Berlin_Zebra_Poetry_Film_Festival_2012. In it, I argue that, among other things,
A good videopoem is not predetermined from a script juxtaposed with illustrative elements – it is produced during the editing stage, when the elements are brought together, positioning and duration of text are determined, images and their duration are selected, and sound is chosen, the work is constructed segment by segment, as if they were raw materials in a cauldron. The role of “chance” in this process should not be underestimated or absent.
Editor’s note: For more on Tom and his work, go to TomKonyves.com.
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.”
Two-part interview with “ambassador of cinepoetry” George Aguilar in the Atticus Review
This is not to be missed: Matt Mullins interviews George Aguilar at Atticus Review: Part 1 and Part 2. From Part 1, here’s Aguilar’s take on what makes a compelling videopoem:
The core elements I find most compelling are works that are multi-layered both visually and poetically. They usually feel experimental yet are supported by an expert sense of editing, sound, timing and tone. These types of works draw me in deeply and often leave me wondering what I just saw but also wanting to see it again. Sometimes I don’t get the full meaning of the work until after I’ve watched it a few dozen times. Even then, I still might feel there is something else new to catch the next time I see it. Of course the viewing of it over and over again feels “joyous” even though it hasn’t changed. Isn’t that the essence of the poetic? I also enjoy works that exude a sense of passion and inspiration, whether it is dark or light-hearted.
The breadth and depth of Aguilar’s understanding of cinepoetry/videopoetry and its historical origins are impressive. I’ll be sure to share some of the films he recommends at Moving Poems in the coming weeks.
“We add meaning to culture by remixing it”: Rick Prelinger on the value of preexisting material
Rick Prelinger, creator of the invaluable Prelinger Archive of ephemeral films which so many videopoets have drawn upon, has issued a newly updated and expanded version of his evolving manifesto at Contents magazine: “On the Virtues of Preexisting Material.” (There’s also an interview with Rick and Megan Shaw Prelinger in the same issue.) There are so many good points in this essay, it’s hard to resist the temptation to quote it all. But here are a few passages that stood out for me:
I don’t at all mean to criticize experimentation, but I think we need to experiment harder. Let’s ask more of ourselves rather than asking more of our software. And, while this is really hard when working with appropriated media, I’d suggest that we stop trying so hard to criticize existing media forms, and let them die by themselves. Instead, what might future forms look like? In other words, redeem recycling from a reactive mode and move it into a formative mode. Can we think about recycling as a point of origin?
My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical, and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth.
Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists—the idea that we can touch and appropriate records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
We add meaning to culture by remixing it. Putting something in a new context helps you see it with new eyes; it’s like bringing your partner home to the parents for the first time, or letting a dog loose to run in the waves.
While not shrinking from remixing the present, let’s enjoy the freedom that comes with working with public domain material. The public domain is the coolest neighborhood on the frontier. Use it or lose it.
Read the whole thing. And if you’d like to get into remixing public-domain and Creative Commons-licensed material to create your own videopoetic works, see our compilation of web resources for videopoem makers.
“Another new kind of poem is made”: Michelle Bitting on the making of poem-films
In an interview at Connotation Press, American poet Michelle Bitting, author most recently of Notes to the Beloved, answers a couple of questions about her poem films:
Second, I see that you have created poem-films. Does the strong visual component of films influence your poetry? Is it the other way around (does the visual element of poetry influence your films)? Or is it both? Or that you’re (like me) a very visual person?
I made the poem-films in much the same way I believe I want to make poems. Going intuitively on what I want it to feel and look like and then seeing what actually falls in my path as I go along. So, the illusion of control and then surrender to what’s happening. That’s a truly fun tight-rope to walk. I try to be willing to fall, meaning fail, and I do, a lot. Sometimes the chemistry just ain’t happening and sometimes it’s an alchemical triumph. To me, the films are poems made out of images and sound. Then, informed by the text, another new kind of poem is made. When it’s working right, it’s all poetry.
On the subject of poem-films, how do you approach and understand them? Do you have expectations for them?
I’m pretty much called to create a visual text for a particular poem and then I just start to see it and keep following the thread that spins out of whatever I’ve begun. I let what naturally falls into my lap (or lens) enter into the conversation. For instance, in the film I did for my poem “In Praise of my Brother, the Painter”, at one point, I took photos and filmed bits of an exhibit on Houdini that was showing in my city (Los Angeles) at the time. Later I wanted a particular person to be in the film as a kind of muse-slash-nod to Houdini. Eventually, I realized I was supposed to wear the top hat and so the configuration of Brother, Houdini, Me and the final images led me to a new understanding of what the piece was trying to tell me, or I was trying to tell myself, in the first place. I could never arrive at that stage of revelation without just simply putting one creative step in front of another into the unknown.
Read the rest of the interview (and scroll down to read the poems). (h/t: R.W. Perkins)
Cliché and meaning in videopoetry
I don’t share videopoems of my own work on Moving Poems; that’s confined to my literary blog Via Negativa, where earlier this week I got a little carried away with introducing a new video. In fact, I’d been meaning to say something about common videopoetry images and strategies, and it occurred to me that the popularity of at least a couple of them — moving landscapes from a train or car window and P.O.V. shots of walking feet — may suggest that something deeper is going on:
Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem.
Videopoetry classification: a Russian system
A Russian videopoetry classification scheme shows some interesting parallels with British and North American thinking about the hybrid genre, which — I’m guessing from the name of the site — is called Videopojezija (Видеопоэзия) in Russian. Since the site includes foreign as well as Russian videos, I assume their classification is meant to be universal, and as the closing note indicates, they welcome criticism and suggestions.
Here’s a Google translation of the page, amended to reflect the word choices in a summary at the Text in Art blog (which is how I learned about it). I’ve done my best to render Google’s amazingly good machine translation into something resembling idiomatic English, but this has invariably involved some guess-work since I don’t know any Russian. I invite Russian speakers to suggest corrections and improvements, and I’ll amend the post accordingly.
Classification
Depending on the purpose, videopoetry can be categorized in various ways: by content, by technical devices employed, on a territorial or chronological basis … Plus one can also add all the known classifications for each of the included arts and combinations of these. But in the synthesis of two arts there is at least one base, which describes the nature of communication of one art with another. Let’s try to identify this classification, and since it seems most interesting to the authors of this resource, it will form the basis for the structure of the site.
Note that in any art it is very difficult to strictly classify anything — there are too many variations, and our case is no exception, so any one videopoetic film or video can be assigned to multiple categories simultaneously.
So, in our view, taking the nature of the poetic text and the visual aspects into account, videopoetry should be divided into:
- documentary (dokumentalnaja)
The reader is at the center in this videopoetry type. It can move in a certain space, its image can be combined with other visual images or alternate them, but most importantly: reading is the main object of the image. It is very difficult to distinguish this case from a simple video-recording of poetry recitation. Usually videopoetic clips contain additional meanings introduced into the text by the video. Whereas simple video carries no additional imagery.
We think that such works can be called documentary because they contain a particular record, a real-life act of reading the poem.- textual (tekstograficheskaja)
In the center of the clip: the image of the written text. It can be superimposed on a shaped video sequence, can pass in a running line or move, as titles. May be reproduced in sign language or even as a physical object is made of a material and filmed. In this video a written text is always present in the frame. A feature of this species is that it can be free of audio or only contain music, without sounding text.
- illustrative (illjustrativnaja)
In these videos, visuals are almost a verbatim repetition of all the images of the poem. These clips are called “akin” (?) because they are made on a “what I see, I sing” basis. Technically, this method is embodied in different ways: through drawings or photos illustrating every word in a poem, or by picture-stories very similar to the plot of the work.
- conceptual (konceptualnaja)
Here the storyline visuals are associated with a poem on the level of ideas, while making it more meaningful. In the video and in the text of such a project, the different images used relate on an associative level. The video may contain a completely different reality than the ones described in the verse, but they look like an organic whole, complement each other, creating a new one.
- story/plot (sjuzhetnaja)
In this film, the poem itself is pushed to the background, giving way to a video scene. The sound of the text in this video may take even less than 50% of the duration. Usually, this is more like a video/short film containing poetic inserts.
- musical (muzykalnaja)
The focus of the film isn’t the poem, but the music to which it is put. Visuals are rhythmically linked to a greater extent with the music, part of what’s lost without words (?). These are close to music videos.
- visual (vizualnaja)
This is a special genre of videopoetic movies from which a poetic text is absent. Poetic quality in such videos is achieved by other means. Rhythm is present directly in the video.
This classification is not definitive. Constructive criticism and additions are welcome.
When using this classification, please refer to us.
Close readings/viewings at The Third Form
This month’s “Third Form” column by Erica Goss features close readings of three videopoems: Profile by R.W. Perkins, The City by Marie Silkeberg and Ghayath Almadhoun, and I-poem 6 by Pablo Lopez Jordan. A couple of snippets:
Jordan is a filmmaker, not a poet, but he states that “to use a poem as a script for a video is a great exercise of liberation. When you work with a poem, the structure is more open and increases the chances of experimentation.”
[…]
“I wanted to show little things from ordinary life; words make those insignificant things grow in importance,” Jordan said. The poem appears as text on fragments of torn paper at the bottom of the screen, where it becomes part of the visual collage of shadows, graffiti, trees and sky. Jordan writes that he stayed away from high definition for this video, preferring what he calls a “domestic camera.” This gives the video a handmade look, like that of a very well-done home movie. This was to honor the poem, which Jordan describes as “very emotional, bright and totally real.”
New paper/videopoem on “Videopoetry: The Hegemony of Image or Text,” by Alison Watkins
Via a link from Tom Konyves on Facebook, I was delighted to discover this presentation, which takes the form of something quite like a videopoem (rather than using the dreaded Powerpoint). It includes one of the most thorough responses to Konyves’ Videopoetry: A Manifesto that I’ve seen. While Alison Watkins acknowledges the effectiveness of poetic juxtaposition between textual and filmic images, she also argues that it isn’t always sufficient or even appropriate; sometimes a more literal match might well better serve the viewer.
Diversity of viewpoint is of course essential if this nascent field of what might be called videopoetry studies is to really get off the ground. Watkins made the presentation for NYSVA Annual Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, 2012. Her description on YouTube frames it as follows:
This video takes a look at what’s become of word and text in a visual world. The power of image, in particular moving images, in collaboration with words has unleashed an avalanche of new media artists, and videopoets who have let loose a jumble of poetic text, sound and images on our omnipresent computer screens. Have words and text been turned into mere accessories?
