A Rusted Birdcage in an Otherwise Empty Field: Videopoem and Process Notes

Process Notes 

 

“In your loneliness, you hear the word from far away and then, in gratitude, look at it so closely that you cannot but drown in it.” ― Edmond Jabès

I have written elsewhere about the videopoetry form: its potential to reconnect poetry back to the body & the breath, and the ways in which its associative composition and overlapping sensorial elements mirror dreaming and larger creative processes. The editors @ Poetry Film Live refer to the practice as “a new way to poetry,” although experiments intersecting moving pictures and poetry can be traced back almost a century ago to dadaists, surrealists, and the avant-garde. San Francisco’s Poetry Film Festival (1975-1998) offered a crucial venue of support for videopoetry all the way to the edge of the 21^st century. However, the affordability of technology in recent years has led to increased accessibility worldwide, sparking a new wave of digital and smartphone-enabled filmmaking with a poetic slant. Online hubs like Moving Poems and film festivals like ZEBRA devoted entirely to the art have gained traction, and there are seemingly endless approaches to the form. Nearly a decade ago, Charles Bernstein prophesied this movement in poetry, writing in Attack of the Difficult Poems:

The second fundamental lesson of poetics is that literary works do not exist only, or even primarily on the page… there was a poetry and poetics before the invention of the alphabet, just as new poetries and new poetics will emerge from our postalphabetic environment of digital and electronic language. (“The Practice of Poetics”)

Although we’re not yet living in a “postalphabetic environment,” the emergence of the videopoem carries with it all the possibilities of pushing beyond the page into the future of poetics, while simultaneously bringing language back to its origins in speech and sound.

This work is already underway in the revival of spoken word performance converging with Internet culture and social media, and in some communities the oral will always reign supreme; the collaborative nature of many videopoem productions also speaks to transforming the experience of poetry from an isolated environment to one immersed in community. Of course, not all videopoems focus on oral transmission of language—many rely upon on-screen text, taking advantage of the form’s kinetic possibilities while also linking back to film’s historical use of intertitles. The underlying impetus uniting all these efforts is the centering of poetic language.

In true hybrid fashion, the videopoem sits at the precipice of the page and the screen: 1) by using something new (digital technologies) in the service of something old (seeing and/or listening to expressive speech); 2) creating as much or as little distance between the language/speaker and the listener/viewer as desired; and 3) increased transmissibility in the form of immediate streaming access across time and space. Perhaps, one day, writers will create multisensorial, multidimensional Virtual Reality poems which readers can interact with or co-create in Virtual Reality or the Metaverse. Indeed, future technologies might once again require a revision of what it means to “read” or experience poetic language. The videopoem asks us to do this same re-visionary work in the here&now.

This particular videopoem, “A Rusted Birdcage in an Otherwise Empty Field,” is interested most of all in collapsing distances by building intimacy and interiority in both the speaker and the listener. Even when exploring alienation, I am concerned with the poem’s potential for interconnectivity, bridge-making and revelation—never gatekeeping or backing consciousness or poetic form into a corner. It is for this reason that I’ve come to question the restrictions delineating the form as put forward in Tom Konyves’ “VIDEOPOETRY: A MANIFESTO.” I have a deep respect for Konyves, who has been producing videopoems since the late 1970s, and the essay contains that forward momentum and energy that I’ve come to appreciate in most manifestos that seek to articulate a problem/solution or outline the borders of a practice or politics. However, in making clearcut distinctions between videopoetry and other names for the form (i.e. 'poetryfilms', 'filmpoems, ‘cinepoetry’, 'multimedia poetry', 'e-poetry' and 'screen poetry'), an arbitrary line is drawn in the sand that narrows the field while simultaneously privileging a non-narrative approach to the form over others.

Videopoetry was never in need of a manifesto to delineate its boundaries. It is boundless. I say keep the form open. Let the words and images be free and free of limiting categories. I remain ever on the side of motion unencumbered. I hereby banish the “must.” Any manifesto or theory that preemptively diminishes the narrative or illustrative impulse from videopoetry’s definition and practice is unnecessarily narrow in scope and potential. Although I am keen to Postmodernism’s suspicion of metanarratives, I have never seen the benefit of conflating narrative with resolution, as if all stories (both oral and written) are de facto Aristotelian, or as if the nonlinear process of interpretation itself weren’t a story in its own right. Nor is the fragment inherently oppositional to narrative, meta or otherwise. Everything is storied.

While a reactionary stance towards narrative and on-screen illustration has its place and purpose, just because a videopoem doesn’t adopt such a stance doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t a videopoem by definition. Here is my hope: just like how we question Robert Frost’s rejection of crafting unrhymed poems as akin to “playing tennis without a net,” all of us weirdos in videopoetry will one day come to respect all approaches to the form as valid. Voices and communities that are narrative-oriented or who use “writing as testimonio” (Forché, 1993) don’t need to be defined out of existence any more than they already have. Further, some of us are out here making videopoems that engage both unexpected juxtapositions and illustration, narrative and fragment—the binary collapses. Hybrid works and permutations of videopoetry forms will rise and fall, just as they always have for over a century. Let us welcome them all. There is no need to squabble over ownership of “innovation,” categorizing whose work is “new” and avant-garde enough to count as a videopoem by definition, or whose work is too “traditional” (as if tradition weren’t always in flux). As if the two aren’t in relationship and conversation with one another. As if there are only two stances towards narrative, for that matter. If everyone is invited to the videopoetry feast, then no one will go hungry.

As for my videopoem featured here, it is always a matter of “making the darkness conscious” (C. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy”). The poem is itself a thinking process and a process of meaning-making; in this way, it contains the story of a person awakening and uncovering patterns of psychological programming. It alternates between more cryptic images and direct, unadorned language fragments in a way that mirrors the thinking and dreaming mind’s flickers of awareness before sinking back down into unknowing. Addressing harmful unconscious patterns and healing from abusive relationships often begins as a lonely, alienating process. “A Rusted Birdcage in an Otherwise Empty Field” is a reminder that others are peeling back their layers, too. The videopoetry form is especially suited for investigating such layers, particularly when you don’t know exactly where that creative process will lead you. Somehow, it always leads you right where you need to be. Even if you come across a word that drowns you, it’s never too late to come back up for air.