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.
Videohaiku and haibun at the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia
UPDATE (10/20/20): Here’s the full list of films for The Art of Videohaiku.
The folks behind the Weimar Poetry Film Award and the bilingual Poetry Film Magazine have launched an ambitious new festival, the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia, October 22-25. I’m pleased to have a minor role in its maiden launch—which, due to the pandemic, will be happening online: a program called The Art of Videohaiku.
Video haikus are small-format poetry films in which the form of the haiku is visually interpreted and adapted. During a workshop with the filmmaker Ana María Vallejo, the genre was explored artistically. In addition to the workshop results, the program shows video haikus and haibuns by the US-American artist and poet Dave Bonta.
They’ve chosen six of my videopoems, three videohaiku from last year’s Summer in the UK series, and three haibun videos from this year’s Pandemic Season series. Ana told me, “I wanted to have these two ‘realities’ before and after corona.”
They’ll also be screening the films made by the four students who took Ana’s weekend-long workshop last month. I had recorded a brief lecture for them (below). According to Ana, they found my haiku-writing and video-making practice inspirational, which is highly gratifying if also a little worrying.
The whole program looks wonderful — check it out. I’m especially interested in the focus on African videopoetry and the “Women in Resistance” screening. One 10-Euro ticket ($11.71 USD) gives you access to all the programs, and three weeks in which to watch them.
Two new pages for Pandemic Season, Pepys erasure project
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.)
Two haiku in Issue 20.1 of tinywords
I’m pleased to have not one, but two haiku in the currently serializing Issue 20.1 of tinywords, “climate strike…” and “steel band…” Both began life as the texts of videohaiku (here and here); “climate strike” was shortened following a suggestion by the editors.
I’m especially happy to be a part of tinywords‘ 20th anniversary year. As a web publisher myself, I know what’s involved in making it to that milestone — qarrtsiluni lasted all of seven years, and Moving Poems has only been around since 2009. Also, from a tech and usability standpoint, tinywords is one of the (sadly) very few online literary magazines that is doing nearly everything right, in my view. Here’s some of what Kathe L. Palka and Peter Newton wrote in the intro to the issue:
Here we are, nearly twenty years after Dylan Tweney started publishing tiny poems, one per day, like a daily vitamin for wordsmiths.
Dylan comments: “When I started tinywords in November 2000, I was bored, wanted to explore the possibilities of text messaging, and craved more poetry in my daily life. I never thought my little project to fuse these three impulses would grow so big or last so long. And I’m continually amazed by and grateful for the work that Peter and Kathe have done since taking over editorship of this site that I think of as ‘the world’s biggest, tiniest poetry magazine.’”
T I N Y W O R D S has grown over the years and now, as issue 20.1 begins, nearly 1,000 poets have seen their work appear in its pages. Today, almost 7,000 folks subscribe to and read T I N Y W O R D S each day, either through our email subscription list or via Twitter. We also get about 10,000 visitors per month on the website.
A remarkable achievement.
Pandemic Blues: a playlist
Listen on Spotify or Listen on YouTube (which includes two tracks not on Spotify)
A blues playlist for the Covid-19 pandemic is an idea only slightly less obvious than a metal playlist, though the results are likely to be considerably more popular. There’s no shortage of blues songs about being home alone, or about sickness, hard times and death. I used a very broad definition of blues here, including some jazz, gospel and R&B. And I grouped the songs thematically, so listeners may experience a bit of whiplash as it goes from sad to rollicking or vice versa. The one Sahelian track, “Djam Leelii” by Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, concerns the plight of refugees, so it’s only tangentially related but it’s such a great song with such deep blues feeling, I couldn’t leave it out. A similar logic dictated my inclusion of Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Word Blues.”
Crossing the Pond and three other videopoems featured at HaikuLife 2020
The Haiku Foundation’s Jim Kacian, a poet whose own haiku and haiku videos I admire, was kind enough to select four of my videos for their annual online HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival, which debuted this morning as part of International Haiku Poetry Day. Here’s the link.
It would probably seem churlish to offer criticism, so I’ll just say that this festival is clearly designed by someone with an archivist’s mindset, and as the son of an academic reference librarian, I couldn’t be more pleased to have my videos added to the Haiku Foundation’s digital library and uploaded to their own servers. More usability-minded librarians might give them a hard time over the number of clicks it takes to get to the content, however. And as is to be expected with independently hosted videos, they don’t scale down well for people on slow internet connections, so I will have to wait until I get back to London later this year to watch the other films in the festival myself, unless the local public libraries and coffee shops with good WiFi reopen in the meantime.
The main film of mine in the festival is Crossing the Pond, archived here. It’s a selection of 30 of the best videohaiku from the 80 I made last year, pulled together for a program at the REELpoetry festival in Houston back in January. If you’re on crappy internet, it’s probably easier to watch it on Google Drive (it was too big for my Vimeo account). Here are the other three links, accompanied by embeds of my own uploads to Vimeo:
Do check out the other videos in the festival if you can.
I’m not sure anyone has referred to me as an auteur before. I am feeling an inexplicable urge to don a beret and smoke Gauloises cigarettes.
Reading poems on “A Brief Chat” podcast
I was honored to be the inaugural weekly poet on my friend Jason Crane’s mercifully brief podcast. (Seriously, who the hell has time for hours of podcast listening a day?) I chose some older pieces that I thought might play well with a general audience: poems about religion, science, sex, war, and news consumption. If you have hearing issues, or just like to read along, here’s the text of the poems [PDF].
If you’re interested in contributing poems for a future episode of A Brief Chat, Jason says you can simply send an email to jason@abriefchat.com – and include a sample of your work, obviously.
Listen here (or wherever you get your podcasts). For archival purposes, I’ve also downloaded and embedded the audio below. (Please note that all my poetry is released under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, meaning that anyone is free to remix as long as I’m acknowledged as the original author and the resulting remix isn’t placed under a more restrictive license. Contact me if you’d like a higher quality, WAV version of any of these poems.)
Thanks, Jason!
“Failed State” in Failed Haiku!
I was chuffed to place two pieces in a special haibun issue of Failed Haiku, a journal otherwise specializing in senryu — humorous or satirical haiku. Guest editors Terri and Raymond French chose “School of Quietude” as well as the title haibun from my still tragically unpublished manuscript Failed State. (Which these days is feeling more prophetic than ever, I’m sorry to say.) Here’s a direct link to the issue [PDF]. My stuff is on pp. 40-41. The whole issue looks terrific.
I aspire to be a haiku poet, but most of the time I do feel as if I fail at it… in a kind of senryu direction, if I’m lucky: just a bit too unsubtle, a bit too arch. So while this was my first submission to Failed Haiku, I’m sure it won’t be my last.
One of the cool things about the journal is they don’t give a damn whether a piece has appeared anywhere else before, and they can’t be bothered to mention it if so. But I do feel compelled to point out that a different version of the closing haiku in “Failed State” appeared as part of a multi-author haiku-year-in-review broadside from Broadsided Press a few years ago. All the other haiku are new to the interwebs. I seem to recall I shared the prose portion of “School of Quietude” on social media (Instagram?) a year or two ago.
Apocalyptic Anthems and Memento Mori: Metal for a Pandemic
Listen on Spotify or Listen on YouTube (ideally with your ad-blocker on)
Heavy metal turned 50 years old on February 13, the release date of Black Sabbath’s self-titled first album — just in time for a global pandemic. That’s a grim coincidence, but it does give one indication of why the genre has had such staying power, in all its diverse manifestations (folk metal! Doom Metal! Progressive Metal! Stoner metal! Symphonic Metal! And on and on, for a total of approximately 666 distinct sub-genres): we live in grim and increasingly brutal times, and metal speaks to people like me who believe there’s value to looking horror in the face. Memento mori (“Remember that you must die”) is an ancient and very multicultural wisdom path, and I was fascinated to discover while pulling this playlist together that Lamb of God, one of the most popular and influential metal bands of the past 20 years, have just released a single (and stunning video) with that very title, adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Randy Blythe, their lead singer and lyricist, gives the background:
Continue reading “Apocalyptic Anthems and Memento Mori: Metal for a Pandemic”
Two haiku in The Heron’s Nest and one in Frogpond
Once in a while I summon the motivation to submit poems rather than just self-publish, and so once in a while I place poems in journals. Funny how that works. The latest success: two haiku in the March issue (Vol. XXII, No. 1) of The Heron’s Nest, an online quarterly edited by the excellent modern haiku poet John Stevenson. They’re both on Page 6. As in most haiku publications, I’m identified only by name and location (which is actually one of the things I really like about haiku culture; I hate how much mainstream poetry orgs focus on personality). Although I gave Plummer’s Hollow as my location, in fact both haiku were written in the UK.
I should also have a haiku in the latest issue (43.1) of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America, but since they don’t send out contributor copies and I’m not a member, I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, here’s the haiku they accepted last September:
bare hand
so lovely and cool
harvesting leeks
A memory from childhood. This was actually the second time they’ve published me, but the first was decades ago before I knew much of anything about haiku so it doesn’t count.