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First came this brilliant clip on Instagram by UK poet and artist Janet Lees. I wrote this poem in response, as our mutual friend Marc Neys in Belgium was beginning to compose electronic music in response to the same clip. I suppose it was inevitable that the three elements would eventually merge. Janet helped Marc decide which composition worked best, and they surprised me with a draft of the videopoem last Saturday.

I’m not sure my poem quite does justice to the awe I felt the first time I watched the clip… which I might still prefer without either of our additions. Nevertheless, I think this is a fairly compelling thing that we’ve made. It is always so deeply satisfying and humbling to be able to tap into the creative power of the universe like that. Especially in collaboration with other artists equally attuned.

I love this new videopoem by Belgian artist and composer Marc Neys. The fact that it’s based on one of my own poems is gravy.

Speaking of gravy, here’s a very meta few seconds of video I shot a month ago on a whim: a snippet from Marc’s previous adaptation, SOME FACTS ABOUT PARADISE, viewed at the very spot where I wrote the poem:

I’m quite taken with this new videopoem, based on one of my own recent poems, that my friend Marc surprised me with yesterday. It happened in the usual way: I write a poem in an afternoon, Marc spots it on my blog or in social media, a lightbulb goes off, and he spends another afternoon composing a new film, music and all. Two solitary older guys in different parts of the world living for that absorption into the creative zone.

The text of the poem is on Via Negativa.

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“I’m a sucker for dream poems,” Marc Neys told me when he sent along his latest video adaptation of a haibun from Failed State. The mix of imagery here, all of it drawn from the online cache of anonymous home movies known as The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories, is especially dreamlike, I think. And as an poet, there are few reactions to one’s work that are more gratifying than a brand-new creation from a brilliant artist.

Marc opted for text-on-screen rather than voiceover for the entirety of the text, and wisely left out the footnote that I included in the printed version. Let me paste in the complete text below:

Killing is My Business

I dreamed I drove a sprayer truck along the berm of a road in prayerful silence. The staghorn sumac leaves in their autumnal red turned brown behind me and my rubber gloves shone like the udders of a cow, all for the sake of the crown vetch and its hateful pink.* I dreamed of skinning feral cats and selling their meat at auction: Fresh mutton, I hollered. They were slick with the fat of tanagers.

curled leaf—
you can tell I’m asleep
when I start to twitch

*Originally a foreign infestor from Europe, now a cultivar developed at my alma mater Penn State as a gift to the interstate highway system. Its wire-tough tangles smother all competition and hide the scars of erosion, which it does nothing to prevent. It swallows our litter better than the sea.

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Filmmaker and composer Marc Neys surprised me yesterday with this great new adaptation of one of the haibun from Failed State. He may be semi-retired from making videopoems, but he doesn’t seem to have lost any of his mad skills. His impressionistic style really fits the poem, I think. I was also chuffed to hear the poem read in someone else’s voice. Here’s the text:

The wolves have finally come to me for advice. Avoid making eye contact with saints and ranchers, I say. Stick to the suburbs where no one else goes to hunt. The wolves are tired; their tongues glisten like the neckties of bankers crowded into a London tube carriage at rush hour. In the window of the building opposite, a white cat levitates on a sudden carpet of arms. The headline in the Evening Standard reads, Is Your Child a Psychopath? It’s More Common Than You Think. My love has taken five sharp sticks from her bag and begun to knit me a sock. What big toenails you have, she says.

autumn lake
gang members lower
their voices

*

Pasting this in just now, I discover a typo, the first I’m aware of in the book: voicies. Nuts! Guess I shouldn’t have blown off Blurb’s typo-finding tool (which seemed tedious because of course it was flagging every word not in its apparently quite limited dictionary). Live and learn.

Speaking of Blurb, some people might’ve noticed the irony that I didn’t in fact include any blurbs on the book. I sort of feel like blurbs are superfluous on physical books of poetry in bookstores or at live events, because people can just leaf through a book and make up their own minds. If sales are mainly or exclusively online, the author and/or publisher can just update the book page(s) with favorable quotes as they come in from readers and reviewers, and I’ve started to do this on Failed State‘s page here. I’ve also added some more of my own video adaptations to the bottom of the page: Killing Time, Ornithology, and Falling, the latter two newly edited to include the haiku. You can also watch all eight videos on Vimeo. (I’ll add the two films by Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg, In West Virginia and Flag Country, when they’re made public. Right now they’re both still making the rounds of festivals.)

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Let’s say you make a videopoem in response to some intriguing footage, but then years later you change the text: add a few lines, decide it’s really a haibun in disguise, and tack on a haiku which fundamentally reorients it. What to do? Find that original footage and re-make the video, of course!

It’s not as if Failed State needs another video, but this one was kind of obvious. (I’ve actually been working on one for the title poem as well, but I’m not very happy with it so that may never get released.)

Here’s the text:

A voice in my dream said: Don’t be so eager to find yourself. The deer rolls her eye in panic at your approach, birds take flight, the rabbit freezes then bolts.

Consider the possibility that they’re right about you, these creatures who we know to be capable of predicting earthquakes. Stop trying to dot your I’s — broken columns from a Greek temple where no one now remembers the name of the god.

Get lost, because the found are insufferable.

bed-shaking tremor
everyone running out
into the street

In the meantime, there’s a fabulous new film adaptation incorporating several haiku from the book. Eduardo Yagüe, a filmmaker friend from Spain, has just released his appropriately dark and disturbing interpretation. He included some process notes in his email which I’ll paste in below. Rebeca Minguito is the actor, and the music is by Hinterheim.

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[Scroll down for the Spanish original.]
This project has been with me for a long time and for me it is very special. I always liked the title a lot and I wanted to bring it over to my own domain: “What would happen if the failed state were a person, what would it be like?” Then your haikus became the memories of the protagonist, in a kind of delusional inner monologue.

The production was lengthy and I had to cancel the recording several times, change the script, the location, the actors, the expectations. Until I found Rebeca, who lent me her house to record in, and she herself was a brave actress to investigate everything I proposed to her through your texts. Then came the pandemic and confinement and we had to wait again, and in the end (in the final shot) it was noticed. Somehow the entire failed state of the world in which we have lived this year appeared.

I know it is a hard video, difficult to watch, in a rather harsh mode. I hope it does honor to your poems, which I find extraordinary. I wish your book a long and successful track record.

Este proyecto me ha acompañado mucho tiempo y para mí es muy especial. El título siempre me gustó mucho y quise llevarlo a mi terreno: “¿qué pasaría si el estado fallido fuera una persona, cómo sería?” Entonces tus haikus se convirtieron en los recuerdos de la protagonista, en una especie de delirante monólogo interior.

La producción fue larga y tuve que cancelar la grabación varias veces, cambiar el guion, la localización, los actores, las expectativas. Hasta que encontré a Rebeca que me prestó su casa para grabar y ella misma fue una actriz valiente para investigar todo lo que le proponía a través de tus textos. Luego vino la pandemia y el confinamiento y hubo que esperar de nuevo, y al final (en el plano final) se notó. Apareció de algún modo todo el estado fallido mundial en el que hemos vivido este año.

Sé que es un vídeo duro, difícil de ver, en cierto modo áspero. Espero que haga honor a tus poemas, que me parecen extraordinarios. Le deseo a tu libro una larga trayectoria de éxitos.

The half-hour film I made with 33 of my videohaiku from 2019 now has its own page here, thanks to the Internet Archive, which unlike my Vimeo Plus account, doesn’t limit the size of uploads, so I’m able to embed it from there. Previously, I could only share the link to Google Drive, which doesn’t have an embedding option. And YouTube requires extra verification measures to upload files of that size, doubtless to try and limit illegal uploads of full-length movies.

This was the first time I’ve used the Internet Archive to host video, but I suspect it won’t be the last. It’s a bit geekier than other video hosting platforms, but the degree of control over metadata is impressive, and the upload and conversion process wasn’t clunky at all. (I don’t know why I thought it might be.) Pretty impressive for a nonprofit. Other appealing features include the total lack of advertising on the site and the ability to attach a variety of Creative Commons licenses. Also, they automatically generate a torrent file — how cool is that?!

Anyway, here’s the new page. I’ve included a transcript of the haiku and links to each of the four seasonal sequences from which it’s derived, which allowed me to remove those pages from the navigation menu and simplify things, so all in all, I think it’s a wrap.

In other videopoetry news, it appears the haibun series that I’m still calling “Pandemic Season” will continue for a while longer. I had thought it might be done in September, but no. After my hiatus making a renku video in October, I’m right back into haibun — so much so that I’m pushing myself to finish up and publish my collection of earlier, more experimental haibun, Failed State, so I will have a clearer picture of where I’m going with this new collection. Funny how that works.

Watch on Vimeo.

In contrast to my usual single-haiku or haibun approaches to video micropoetry, this more ambitious effort incorporates cell-phone footage and lines or stanzas I’ve been working on all month. Basically, it’s a one-person, modern, 12-verse renku in video form. I’ve been surprised and flattered by some very kind reactions to it from people I admire.

See Via Negativa for the text and process notes.

This feels like one of those essays that school teachers used to require on the first day back: What Did I Do On Summer Vacation? Because I’ve been on vacation from this blog since last spring, it seems. Damn.

Well, mainly I moped, like everyone else in this goddamned covidious shitstorm. But I did make a lot of videopoems, as well as continue to plug along with (almost) daily erasure poems. So today I was all set to create a new page for the Videopoetry section of the website on my just-concluded (I think) video haibun collection Pandemic Season, only to find that I’d already done so back in July. Oops. Since it embeds the whole Vimeo showcase for the collection, which is 24 videopoems long, that will do for now. Currently I’m giving it a rest so I can go back and look at it with fresh eyes in a couple of months, and decide whether I want to mess with any of the films, make a book out of them, or just let it be. For now, the series archive at Via Negativa is probably a better way to engage with the collection, since there’s a transcript of each as well as extensive process notes.

I didn’t get to be a complete slacker today, though. Seven years after starting the Pepys Diary erasure project at VN, it finally occurred to me that maybe that deserved its own page here. Among other things, it gave me an excuse to highlight a few videopoems made with texts from the project. Check it out.

(I initially created a project page, experimenting with a custom content type designed for use in a portfolio-style site, because I still tell myself that one day I’m going to re-design this website to foreground a portfolio of projects, rather than continuing to pigeon-hole work by medium, print vs. video. But that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Bizarrely, though, the project page auto-posted to Twitter, while the page-page did not. All of which is way more geekiness than either reader of this blog probably cares about. Sorry.)