Video: Thoughts on recent projects

Why am I making videos like this now? Why this, why now? Why something that has no plot or narrative, that tells a story of a place and moment but not one you can adequately summarize? Why images in sequences that are half-scripted, mostly improvised on the spot? Why images that are captures from life rather than carefully planned and properly-executed linear narratives?

I'm making the films that I want to see. That no one seems to be making. It's not really about self-expression, it's about wanting to see certain kinds of art that are unfashionable, even taboo, these days. In the Age of Irony, sincerity is taboo. In the Age of Shallow Surfaces, diving deeper into the waters of the self is frowned upon. In the Age of Artifice, spontaneity is suspect.

All of that is wrong.

Murkiness and ambiguity presented in art, because life can be hard to articulate, are not the same things as obscurity and puzzle-box-making for their own sakes. It's not that art has anything to hide, it's that it wants to hide nothing. I want to know. I want to see the story. Even if the story is about stopping all stories, all narratives, and just being still, even for just a moment.

I'm making the kinds of films that I want to see, that I almost never get to see, because of their uncommercial nature, their unfashionable contents, their often less-than-slickly-perfect style. The artlessness of artfulness. Everyone who's ever written a story knows that fiction tells truths that life finds hard to tell; fiction compresses events into drama; it only seems realistic because it's so artfully put together. We want to be fooled. We want to be fooled, by art, into seeing something like a larger truth.

This is poetic cinema, often nonlinear as well as nonverbal. It can be oblique. It can be moody—in fact, driven entirely by mood and sensibility rather than plot. It's easy to compare this to how music works, often nonverbally and obliquely, creating emotion without the use of linear narrative or text. In fact, it's probably no coincidence that the videos I am making are more like music than they are like stories. Even Romantic program music—Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique for example—that has a scenario and story to tell is still more imagistic and nonlinear than prose. More poetic than prosaic. Even a musical program scenario bows to the actual melodies and rhythms and harmonies used to convey the emotion of the momentary experience.

In my experience, music is both abstract and visceral, realistic yet evocative without being literal. This is that much-discussed territory where music and poetry meet: on the lip of silence and the inexplicable. In the same way that poetry can't be summarized in prose, music can't be either.

I am well aware that the videos I am making are poetic in form and structure, in ways very parallel to how I often conceive of my poems, in terms of form and structure, as cinematic. I have often discussed how I view many of poems as sequences-of-images, nonlinear but evocative in the way music is: recreating an experience in the audience, evoking a mood or sequence of images and moods. I often think of my poetry as cinematic and imagistic. It only makes sense to think of the short films I am making as poetic. I think this may be another territory where the arts meet: just as with music and poetry, we touch here on the convergence of cinematic poetry with poetic cinema.

The Practicalities of Critique & Criticism 7: The Right Sandbox

Dissolving boundaries: pour acid on those categorical lines that separate the arts one from another.

The purists hate that.

I recently went back and visited a couple of online poetry workshop message boards that I had once been an active partner in. It was, shall we say, a learning experience. I had mainly felt drawn back for two reasons: 1. I was feeling somewhat isolated and cut off, by recent events in my personal life, and poetically, artistically; and 2. I had for some months thought to reconnect with one or two people in particular whose poetry I had always liked, and have always enjoyed chatting with. I always valued their critiques of my poems, and it always seemed mutual.

What I experienced upon this trial return visit was that a few people who had previously been friends had changed (as I have), and to say they were hostile and scornful of the recent poems I chose to post, to test the waters, would be a serious understatement. One or two couldn't even bother to address the poem, calling it unreadable, and calling the poet names. (Which is a clear ad hominem attack, which is against the stated Terms Of Service of virtually every poetry board there ever was.) I said to one person, who has clearly become a troll in the intervening time: If you actually want to comment on the poem, not the poet, I'll listen; otherwise, feel free to not read anything of mine, and I'll stay away from you, too.

The scorn I encountered was, however, a familiar scorn, one I've experienced often, but now it came from unexpected directions, some from people who used to know me better than that. Well, the board as it exists today is their turf, after all. I've gone away, and come back, while they stayed. It's their sandbox (I use that word precisely, as an indicator of emotional immaturity); I'm no different than just another interloper.

Some of these poets have apparently become more insular than is good for them, and have built up patterns of discourse and expectations that have soured the waters. So, having commented on a few poems, and having been scorned for my own recent poems, I'm going away again. The hostility was what was shocking. Granted, as I said, it's their sandbox. But it's become quite the closed and self-sustained world, it seems.

This is evidence of a species of insularity, of clique formation, that seems to be the end-product of many online poetry boards. (The one person I wanted to get back in touch with may be someone I can reconnect via private email. We'll see.) Boards do go through natural lifetimes; some die after a few years, and live on in an archived, sessile state. On other boards, I have seen many people leave in waves when a voice or a clique start to dominate all the discourse, rudely, intolerant of dissent, and the board owners and/or administrators do nothing about it.

In an ironic twist of fate, a couple of years ago, a well-known online poet wrote a long essay about these very issues regarding the online poetry workshop community—which generated a lot of healthy debate, for awhile, or so it seemed—only to himself, a year or two later, morph into the very kind of paranoid and insular poetry board administrator that he himself had complained about in his essay. He became guilty of enacting the very same sort of entropic autocratic bizarre behavior he had written about. It was a stunning reversal, as though he became possessed by his own shadow.

We become what we fear, always, unless we master our fears and overcome them. It seems many people don't even realize that they need to look in a mirror, when they complain about what they don't like in the behavior of others. We always project out onto the world what we dislike in our own selves, and the world obligingly mirrors it back at us; what we attack "out there" is usually just a reflection of what we don't like to admit is "in here" as well. We all contain the darknesses we despise in others: what makes the difference is knowing and acknowledging one's own inner shadows, so that one notices when they kick into operation. That's how you can prevent yourself from being possessed by the forces within your unconscious: by going in there, willingly, by choice, to work with what you have found.

Meanwhile, learning experience absorbed. Although it got me thinking.

Thinking, specifically, about the kinds of creative work I have been moving towards for several years, all of which exist outside the usual boxed definitions and closed categories that many artists put around their art-making. (Closed and locked boxes are dear to closed minds.) To call the multi-pathed I've been pursuing "multimedia" isn't really accurate, as that assumes the boundaries between media are still present in one's consciousness, when in fact one is looking for a whole new lack of boundary, or an ignorance about fixed category. Rather than "multimedia" it might be more accurate to say "recombinant," or even "rhizomatic variform." Or, better yet, abandon all categorical labels and just make the stuff. I am more and more inclined towards not defining what I do as anything other than "creative." More and more I just call what I write "writing," and don't try to categorize one piece as a "pure" poem, another as "pure" prose. Let the bean-counting purists decide if any of it meets their definitional criteria. Meanwhile, I'll just keep exploring. What I've been doing is a process of unlearning rules and categories that are fixed in many writers' minds. You enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it is said, by taking on the clear and uncluttered mind of a child; it is similarly said that the Tao is effortless and undefined, and that enlightenment consists of cleaning out the cobwebs.

I've tried posting poems-with-images, or maybe images-with-poems, before on poetry workshops forums, and been near-universally criticized for it. The purists of poetry are so word-centric that if you can't do it with just words, they won't even allow that it's a poem. (Sometimes not even then, if you offend their formal sensibilities.) They demand the discipline of using only words to convey experience, the only tools with which to make art. The worst of the word-centric poetry purists don't even allow for the possibility of enjoying visual art for its own sake, on its own terms: if they can't describe it in words, it's not real to them. Such are the purists one occasionally encounters.

Gods forbid you should try to present a prose-poem in a purist forum, then.

The purists willfully ignore the long history of paintings-with-words common to Asian practice in genres such as haiga. Maybe I'm being too harsh: amidst the hate there were always one or two poets who could see what I was trying to do, who were open to the possibilities of combining word and image. Only a few, though.

I'm not interested in making "visual poetry," or any of the other naive forms of visual art that (non-artist) poets have been trying to make in contemporary postmodernist circles. (Some of the earliest examples of typographic play, such as Apollonaire's calligrammes, remain among the most sublime, and more interesting than their contemporary heirs.) I say they're naive because in most cases the poets making the new VisPo have all the (digital) tools of the visual artist but none of the sensibility: the results are the results of experimental play, of the category of art-making that I call "gee whiz! look what I can do with my new toys!" A necessary category, and a necessary phase of development and tool-exploration for any artist. But what I don't see, as yet, from the VisPo poets are any examples that move beyond technical play and into something as artistically resonant and emotionally engaging as a Paleolithic cave painting or the old Zen poets with their painting-poems. It remains mostly intellectual play, mostly word-centric even when the words are manipulated in visual space, or used as purely visual elements (as in some Wordle word-clouds).

Of course, dealing with only words, dealing with only intellect, is emotionally risk-free. There's no danger of either too much self-revelation or too much self-analysis. All the mess and muck of life is kept comfortably at an arm's length, at a virtual distance. One doesn't have to wade into the "mire and blood" of genuine engagement.

There are a few poets on these old poetry workshop boards I revisited who are very interested in the various forms of avant-garde word-work currently fashionable, from theory-driven language-centric poetries to flarf to Oulipo to other ("post-avant") syntactical strategies that privilege the word as an object in itself, with or without interpretative meaning(s). Many of these writers make the usual mistake of defining as good that which they like and approve of—and failing utterly to be tolerant of other styles. Well, maybe their attention spans are stressed by the necessities of life, and they don't have time for anything else. Like I said, it's their pond to play in.

The harshest comments I received were very much about telling other poets what to write, based on what they write themselves, and like to read. The usual mistake of defining as good what you do yourself. In other words, a total and unconscious lack of tolerance for pluralism.

I am interested in a kind of poetry I have called, for lack of a better term, "cinematic." Its closest analog in cinema is the non-verbal film: a genre including Ron Fricke's films Chronos and Baraka, as well as probably the most famous film in the genre, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. The kind of poetry I am referring to as cinematic is, like some non-verbal films, constructed out of a sequence of images. There is no interpreting narrative, no voice telling us what to think or feel, or what a character in the poem (film) is thinking or feeling. We are given pure description, and must interpret the emotion for ourselves. Some moments are evanescent, crepuscular; others are gut-punches. The sequence of images in a cinematic poem can be built up in the reader's mind into a narrative, or a film played on the mind's eye. There may indeed be a story, a meaning to be revealed: but it's shown, shown very directly, not talked about, not described.

Maybe in some ways this kind of poetry is the ultimate extreme of the hoary poetry workshop adage, "Show, don't tell." On one level, I guess that's exactly what I've been trying to do: push the poetic technique of showing, not telling, as far as it will go. But I look back and realize I was writing these kinds of visually-oriented poems long before I ever participated in any writing workshops of any kind. It's something I got interested early on, being a very visual person at root. For me, the words were the carriers of the visual imagery, not anything valued in their own right into a reified existence of their own.

And that's probably the biggest heresy on my part that pisses off the most word-centric poets: that I dare to say that words have no value in their own right, except as carriers of content: a rare, for me, anti-McLuhan sentiment, in which I state that the medium (words) itself does not carry any message (massage) itself. (We need to remember that the original quote was "The Medium is the Massage," not the message; although McLuhan himself was okay with the usual misquote, and played with the resultant ideas in his usual thoughtful, multimedia manner.) That I dare to say that words are symbols and signs, with no intrinsic meaning or reality in themselves. Of course, I speak from the truth of my experience as a musician and visionary, in which non-verbal encounters with life have often proved to be more rich and resonant than those encapsulated in words. One of the reasons I am drawn to poets like Robinson Jeffers is because his use of rich and powerful language isn't pointing only towards language itself, but outwards towards a larger, often nameless Universe. (Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "She Unnames Them" is similar terrain.)

In a film such as Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, even though it is a narrative film containing spoken dialogue, the film's coherence is provided by recurring visual images, themes and colors, which overlap and recur in each of the film's three time-periods. The recurring visual linkages are what tie everything together; cross-fades between some of the key images emphasize these connections. The dialogue seems often of secondary importance compared to the visuals; and there are long sequences that are almost entirely wordless. When you put a small piece of critical dialogue in such a context, in which it's the only words spoken in a long visual sequence, the words take on extra power, extra meaning. They resonate more, they ring out as more important. The good use of words, as the historical bards knew, is to place them where they activate the most power. The Fountain is a remarkable film for these and other reasons. It pushes us towards something non-verbal in cinema, as well as non-linear.

So it is natural that I am drawn, like everyone else, to art that expresses my won worldview, my thinking. I find art to be exciting, to be stimulating in part because it reflects and expresses my own interests, desires, and explorations. I fall short of calling it "good art," just because it's art I like, unless it meets several criteria of craft and engagement that all good art is generally expected to meet. I refuse to make the same attack on others that others have made on me: I don't claim any moral high ground, I simply find such arguments wasteful of my daily energy budget. This whole experience has been a taste case in arguing for pluralism and against intolerance.

Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right sandbox to play in. Heavens know there are plenty of wrong ones.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 16: Cinematic and Poetic

When I write a poem like Yellow Sand, White Wind or this untitled poem or the way of leaves or antler or Slow gods moving between trees, gathering or even a shaman's critique of pure poetry, what I'm writing is a sequence of images. There may be a "voice" in the poem, but it's not my own voice, it's a character. (In any given poem, it's almost always a character.) More interestingly, there is no narrative, no story, apart from the sequence of images. These poems take the cliché dictum of "show, don't tell" to an extreme. They show but don't tell you what to think about what is being shown.

I get complaints about this from other poets, other writers. One complaint is that there's no ideating personality, no human presence, to hang onto, in the poem. But that's the point: this is the opposite of ego-personality poetry. It also questions, by its very nature, the supremacy in contemporary poetry of the "I" poem, the confessional lyric, the much-vilified workshop poem about the enclosed circle of one's own personal life. I always find it remarkable when poets complain about certain kinds of poetry on basically moral grounds, simply because something about the poem questions their assumptions about the nature of poetry. Where in this moralizing is there room for pluralism?

When I write this sort of poem I'm interested in reflecting life, in evoking an experience of consciousness, rather than describing or commenting on it, or telling what I think about it. Poems that tell me what the person in the poem is thinking, detached from the physical, wear thin on me very quickly. A lot of first-person poetry is distressingly narcissistic. A lot more poetry is cerebrally detached, keeping a safe distance from the guts of life. Far safer to talk about an experience rather than recreate it, and not stir the emotional waters too strongly. So we get a lot of tepid, undemanding, chatty poetry. Most of which reads like prose anyway.

The answer to this, by the way, lies not in the even-more-cerebral, even-more-detached extremes of language-based poetry. That's an artistically mannerist answer, an exaggeration of existing trends rather than a replacement of them with something genuinely different. Such poetry is even more Apollonian. The real answer lies in the restoration of balance between Apollo and Dionysus, wherein passionate language can evoke passion, not just talk about evoking it.

The poems I am discussing here are what I have called cinematic poems, the images sequentially making up a quasi-narrative. When filmmakers show sequential images that seem to be related, that are connected because they're set side by side, but with no usual dialogue or narration, people call those films "poetic." When a poem does the same thing with images set side by side, I have no better term than to call such a poem "cinematic."

Cinema such as non-verbal, non-narrative films like Ron Fricke's Baraka, Godfrey Reggio's Powaaqatsi, and Derek jarman's Blue—these films are often called "poetic."

Poems such as the ones I'm discussing here are also sequences of non-linear images, not linked together by traditional narrative, storytelling, or prose constructions of grammar. Images are linked together, rather, by parataxis, by being placed side-by-side. A sequence of images builds in the mind, and due to the persistence of vision, the persistence of memory, becomes connected.

Cinema operates via the principle of persistence of vision: images flicker at the rate of 24 or 30 frames per second, and because of the retinal and neurological phenomenon called the persistence of vision, the viewing experience seems continuous, not quantized.

A poem made of images can potentially operate the same way, based on the cognitive phenomenon of the persistence of memory. Short-term memory overlaps with itself in the small scale of immediate duration. Even if we don't store what we just read permanently in our long-term memory, while we are reading, what we just read hovers for a moment while we move on, creating the illusion of continuity. Or so it seems under normal conditions.

When reading the poem, let the images evoke whatever they evoke, and make up your own inner movie from it. I suppose that someone who's been to the same places on the planet imaged in the poem might find it more evocative than other readers, because of the shared experience. But there's no place in a poem like this for didactic generalities, for description rather than imaging, for telling the reader what's going on. I actually would prefer to be all show and no tell, in this kind of poem. There may be moments of standard syntax, standard grammar, but they are not normative. Shared experience might be good for reading the poem, certainly, but even if a poem is "too local to be universal" somebody's going to read it and get it.

And I'm fine with that happening, or not, as it does. I don't feel the need to control which reader "gets it" and which doesn't. Nor do I feel a need to make sure that all readers "get it." You can never do that anyway.

Many writers, many poets, really seem to believe that I care a great deal more than I actually do about what my poems mean, or that I want to direct the reader's experience somehow down pre-determined channels. The assumption here is that the poet's intention, my intention, is paramount, and that there is only one correct interpretation of the poem, namely, mine, the poet's. I don't feel that way at all. I really don't want to do any of those things. (Call it a differing poetic ethic.)

This attitude leaves out mystery entirely. Once the poem is set loose in the world, I have no control over how it's received, how it's interpreted, and I don't really want any control over that. In a cinematic poem, I want the reader to find whatever they find, and if it's all a bit mysterious, well, then so is life. I could say what I did see when I was making the poem, and in some cases I could link photographs to parts of the poem. BUt that would only be my own experience. Maybe your experience when reading a cinematic poem will have overlap with mine, and maybe it will be different. I am completely comfortable with that.

I am interested in sharing experience in the poem, not in pacifying it. I have no desire to impose order upon chaos—which it seems a lot of writers want to do, perhaps unconsciously, when they write. They construct narratives in part to construct, or discover, an order to life, which is essentially non-linear, I get a lot of negative remarks about this kind of poem from fellow writers, precisely because it's not ordered or non-mysterious enough for them. They want to find the key to the puzzle-box, but there isn't one.

John Cage once said, late in life, and I find this to be a real touchstone for this mode of my writing:

I want people to be mystified by what's happening. The reality of our life is mystery.

Cage made a lot of his creative work with the intent to evoke that mystery, to just let unpredictable things happen, to give up control, and also to provoke the audience, not soothe or reassure them. The Zen goal is to wake up, not be put to sleep. Not to be soothed, but to be challenged. A poetry that merely entertains is deadening, not enlivening. Art needs to be more than that.

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Update:

Film director and historian Peter Bogdanovich, auteur of one or two of my all-time favorite films, has recently posted on the topic of cinema and poetry on his blog. He cites Jean Renoir as probably the most poetic of all film directors, Few directors have addressed cinematic poetry directly, but Bogdanovich defines it this way:

What distinguishes the real film poets is their use of the camera to convey meanings and reverberations beyond the geography of place or the needs of the narrative. Camera placement, and therefore the composition, the lens choices, the lighting of the image, the camera’s movement, the particular juxtaposition of images, are all in the grammar for conveying hidden aspects of the tale or people—-exposing a part of the theme, or the true meaning beyond simply the plot—-endorsing, subverting, enriching the more obvious qualities of setting or performance. This is why the finest filmmakers are generally always remembered for certain of their unique and personal images. Among the other poets, D.W. Griffith comes to mind, and F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Flaherty, and Orson Welles.

These are some of the same elements that also define poetry in photography, of course: composition, angle, lens, lighting. What makes cinema poetic, I might add to Mr. Bogdanovich's thought, is timing: camera movement, certainly, but also frame rate, exposure, and other artifacts of filming than can moved in time and space. I urge you to read the rest of Mr. Bogdanovich's entry, in which he discusses further why he thinks Renoir is a cinematic poet. It's fine reading. Also, just on general principles, it's usually worth reading Mr. Bogdanovich, as he is a fine film historian.

Non-verbal Film

still image from Baraka by Ron Fricke

In the past few days I have edited together two segments of multi-frame video for one of my own ongoing DVD projects, Waves. This has been a long time in the making; it’s the last of four short films for a set called Dreamtime Ocean. I am experimenting with multi-frame, multi-window video and still montage, and the results so far are mostly positive. Occasionally a segment edges towards the sublime, often as a result of the content, the beauty of the shot itself.

The multi-frame aspect comes in when I have more than one video image onscreen at the same time. The simplest version of this is two moving pictures placed side by side. But I’ve expanded that to a palette of up to nine or ten layered positions possible onscreen at any given moment, including a full-frame image in the background behind a smaller window. Sometimes as few as one frame is present, sometimes as many as six. Positions change with shots. Sometimes shots are layered and duplicated in different positions simultaneously. The eye is called to move between frames, or to sit back and soak it all in as one larger overarching frame. One can focus in on one element in context, or use what in martial they call “soft eyes,” the relaxed vision that takes in all of the visual field at once, including the peripheral vision.

My first set of four short videos (can you label them films if they weren’t shot on film?), Basin & Range, was based entirely on collages and montages of my still photography, and also my visionary digital artwork done in Photoshop. This next set of short films was begun a year later, but I needed a lot of time for the project to mature to completion. In the interim, we began Liquid Crystal Gallery, our series of commercially-released DVDs designed to be both . We are gradually incorporating moving images in with the animated stills, to expand our palette and our horizons. I am probably not going to move entirely into moving pictures—unless I suddenly get a gig as a cinematographer, or have some similar reason—as I am too attached to the advantage that still photography has, of being able to contemplate a single image for a long time, without distractions. This is that boundary region between painting and cinema, sharing some qualities of both.


still image from Baraka by Ron Fricke

This morning I was looking through Mark Magidson’s book of still photographs taken while traveling for the production and filming of Baraka, one of the films he has produced with Ron Fricke. Baraka is one of my favorite films of all time. It’s all images and music, and tells its narrative without dialogue or traditional film structural narrative, using only a sequence of images and music. This is one goal for my poetry, one way of working, that I continue to pursue: a poetry of only images and musicality, that never tells you what to think, or what’s going on, and speaks without voice, leaving the reader/viewer to interpret the work how they will, and how they can.

Non-narrative is risky for both film and poetry: there are many who have expectations that will not be met. Some expectations that both audience and traditionalist art-makers have can be viewed as merely the products of inertia rather than necessity, however. Artistic inertia is never an excuse for closemindedness, although it is often the underlying justification. I do not promote newness for its own sake, either. What I promote is the appropriate approach the materials at hand, to accomplish the work as it needs to evolve. If that means using traditional verbal-oriented story-telling narrative, that’s all to the good; but if a project requires one to step outside the linear story-telling box of assumptions about how to structure time-based art, then so be it, and that too is all to the good.

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More and more this genre of film is being labeled "nonverbal cinema." It's tempting to want to generalize that towards a "nonverbal poetry." One immediately thinks of concrete poetry, visual poetry, and related cross-disciplinary genres. The difficulty of course is the words are the artistic medium of poetry. If you take away the words, make it truly nonverbal, is it still poetry? This could be debated in the same way that non-narrative art is debated. There are expectations about what artforms can and cannot do. It is obvious to say that, if you take away the words, all you have left is the music; but it might also be facile, a little too easy to say. This also gets us into the distinction between "poetry" as an artform and "poetic" as a descriptor.

Certainly films like Baraka are "poetic" films; but so are other films that do incorporate speech and narrative. I wrote recently about director Michael Mann, stimulated by an interview quote he given about the harmonic of human experience. Mann's favorite moments in his own films could easily be called poetic. But even some recent action-adventure films such as Bryan Singer's Superman Returns contain several poetic moments.

Music is often called "poetic"—perhaps a failure of critical language—when it achieves something sublime. We use the word "poetic" a lot to describe things that are liminal, numinous, transcendent, archetypal, and sublime. It is in some ways a cheap fill-in word, that doesn't really mean a lot. But can a non-verbal poetry be poetic? That is still an open question.