A Videopoem: Tones of Noir

direct link: Tones of Noir
music: Alex Bailey, 'Piano Improvisation No 7.'

Do poems wait to be born? A poem whittled out of thundering mist at Niagara Falls. The roar of the Falls, music, voice.


I wanted the voice to be as light as the mist, and as strange as a dream with noir elements. (Don't worry if you can't hear all the words -it's meant to be a bit ghostly, and you can read the words here.)

Tones of Noir

Numinosity
     washes the sky.

Poems rise
     out of thundering mist.

I think it is a crime.

She rushes by.

The water, 
     the power in falling.

Begin when it's in motion
and stop before it ends.

Mystical crystal spikes
     of sun.

He waits.

We walk quickly
covering ourselves against the watcher.

_
Video I shot in Niagara Falls, Canada, a few days ago, edited in Final Cut Express, Video I shot in Niagara Falls, Canada, a few days ago, edited in Final Cut Express, and layered a few recordings of the poem I wrote for this piece.

Niagara Falls is magnificent!


Still from video:



_
I'm entering this in Big Tent Poetry's prompt this week. I read the prompt Wednesday night (had only 6 hours sleep since then, video poetry does that to me, sigh) and thought, hmnnn, enough? ...maybe.

::Smiling:: Thanks!



                                          

Ravishing Light: A Solar Videopoem (1½ min)

direct link: Ravishing Light: A Solar Videopoem

After watching many hours of NASA's amazing SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) footage of the sun at the Internet Archives, I downloaded some short videos and from them distilled the clips you see in this video. I am delighted to find this footage and to create a solar videopoem.

A vision of such power that what went before falls away in a rapturous death. A rapturous death of the ego. An unerasable enlightenment. That Rubicon. I was inspired to write this piece after seeing the movie, 'Sunshine,' which also uses footage from NASA's SOHO Observatory.

-

prose poem written in 2007

These are the videos I finally chose and downloaded. I used clips from some of them for my short videopoem: 

wave- archive.org/details/CIL-10079
SOHO_TRACE_Intro_YouTube- archive.org/details/GMM-10421
recon- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPreconSTRIP
quiet20010310ntscarchive- archive.org/details/SVS-2766?start=4.5
EITflameszm- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITflameszmSTRIP
304blow- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIP304blowSTRIP
archive.org/details/SVS-3286
EITbulb- archive.org/details/SPD-SOHO-STRIPEITbulbSTRIP
flarezoom640x480- archive.org/details/SVS-2496
helio_fleet_v1.1- archive.org/details/SVS-3570

                                                        

White Fire on a radio show...

(which be forwarned is almost 22 minutes long).

Backtrack to go forward.

In 2000 I began what I hoped would be an epic prose poem exploring the concept of love in our culture through the mythology of soul mates. While I had done much of the research (an unfinished interdisciplinary thesis on light being the core of it), I had a course list of books to read on the changing conceptions of love in Western culture but sadly lacked the funds not only for time to research and write the epic poem but even to buy the two dozen books I thought would be most helpful. So nothing more was written beyond this fragment.

And perhaps that’s all it was ever meant to be. A fragment. The fragment almost became a performance of about 8 dancers, singers and musicians in 2001, but that show collapsed at the last moment.

I was invited by Nik Beat at the suggestion of our mutual friend Mikala to read it on his Sunday afternoon radio show on Toronto’s CIUT FM in November 2000.

An old friend, Christopher Reibling, kindly and without being asked, recorded the show and gave me the tape, otherwise it'd be lost to the fires of time. :-)

And that is what I have uploaded. Because recently I resurrected this prose poem in a videopoem called, ‘Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière, which I’ve uploaded to my website’s Videopoetry page along with a link to the full text of White Fire. I thought that perhaps for the one person in the next 10 years who might be interested in hearing a reading, that, rather than producing a new one, this rather charming radio show would be more fun (lol, everyone who stops by is unique and honours me by their presence!:-).

So, unique one-of-a-kind reader of prose poems/listener of poetry radio shows/watcher of YouTube videopoems, enjoy!

With blessings.

A Poetic of Light/Une poétique de la lumière

This meditative video poem is dedicated to all of you. With thanks...



Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is addressed to the lover, the soul mate, you, the viewer.

My videopoem is finished. After a week of nearly nonstop work, most nights till 3 or 4 am and up again at 7 or 8am and working right through, I am happy with it. For your enjoyment, I have uploaded both the final version with poetry, and the silent version too.

I searched through my writing for nearly a whole day to find what might work. I decided on 'White Fire,' a meditation on soul mates since I had been vaguely dancing with that poem in mind on the day that I taped this, and had printed it on fine paper and threw the pages in the air and danced on them during the videoing of my dance session last June.

White Fire now has a web page at my Art & Writings website, where you may read the prosepoem in its entirety. In the video I have only used a few quotes on the creation of the universe out of light. I wrote this prose poem nearly a decade ago, and at that time I was invited to read it on the radio and it nearly became a performance with 8 dancers and musicians!

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in the album, 'Piano Paintings' by the brilliant Russian composer and pianist, Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova). Lena came by my website, since I had left a note at her site on Jamendo that the music in my videopoem, Venus Enroute, is hers, and wrote: "I am impressed by your art and happy that you have found inspiration from my music. I am looking forward to see how the Spring dance will evolve....with warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland, Lena." How wonderful.

One of the challenges I set myself in this videopoem was to create a self-contained movie. I have, therefore, included the text of the prosepoetry being recited in the movie itself. You will see that I have worked very hard to produce this video in a way that the text becomes a design element in the video itself.

Except at the end, where I felt darkness was most effective.

I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

Earlier version without words: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière (a poetry without words) at Vimeo.

Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress

This clip isn't finished yet. I hope to add poetry -I'm thinking of not just voice, or maybe no voice at all (that piano so beautiful), but having the words float down the screen, especially during intervals when I 'disappear' from the 'room'- I'm sharing this earlier version because it has charm... when I finish this video I'll upload to YouTube... but I thought you might enjoy this stage in the creation, a little clip, this simplicity.

If you'd like to see a screenshot of the Final Cut Express window with the filters I used, you can see it at TwitPic (press the + sign to see full size). This video, taken in June 2009, was shot with an older DV camera, a Canon GL2.

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in 'Piano Paintings' by Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova).

______
I also tried unsuccessfully to upload this video to Blogger for two days! I'm hosting it from Facebook. Yes, I have a YouTube account, but I prefer to keep that site for finished videopoems. I don't think a Facebook url will work, but you can try: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress (will work for fb 'friends' & send an invite if you're there- I'd love to connect.) The embedded video doesn't travel by email, and so I like to offer a direct url. I may upload to Vimeo when my 'new week' starts.

Lucubration

.......................... The woman became spirit in the differentiated dawn. By an attic window of diffused sun with which she's not merging but emerging as light. Dust floats scintillating like myriads of reflectors. Bright as the birdsong of the world, her spirit an unburning flame, a panoply of sparklers, a cluster of luminophor, a throng of stars.

In secret transforming into spirit in the quiet of the dawn hidden in the turret of an old house.

I saw her when I lay down to rest, and remembered so that when I came back I could write of her for you.

Sometimes it's like that, the light burning behind your closed eyelids, the woman becoming spirit.

___
Lucubration: that which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.

fields of light

encrypted first draft of a poem

_______________
Click for larger size. There is so little time for the hours a photopoem takes that surely it's not quite, but then maybe. On the other hand, the next day now, I see the colours are not so good - it was taken with the camera on my phone & maybe should re-do with a better camera. The little poem is also part of a larger stream of thoughts that I recorded during meditation and which drifted into the strangeness of time. The clustering of molecules and why motion and life/birth/death occurs. Oh, and then how our solar system's magnetic field is warped, asymmetrical, which was in the news. And then I thought, maybe time is issued forth from the great burning fields of the sun itself. And I saw photos of sun spots that were so large the entire earth could fall into them. And how close-up images of the sun resemble Van Gogh's last painting, of the wheat fields. That's how the sun's surface looks - like Van Gogh's burning fields of light. And in the movie, Sunshine, how the crew die rapturous deaths in the sun. And how I've always been a worshipper of the light, mystical and real. And it's all intriguing and thus very exciting to me. But to weave it all into a prose poem! Oh, la!

Lights in the Pre-Dawn

encrypted first draft of a prose poem

Burning Brightly in the Night

Because this poem is under consideration for publication, I have encrypted it so as to keep the comments intact and as something easy for me to find in the great archiver Blogger is.

Encrypted poem.

Magi-Gold Lushness of the Early Hours

encrypted first draft of a poem

Light Catches Diamonds

encrypted prose poem

Falling into Light...

encrypted first draft of a prose poem