NaPoWriMo Day 6: When day and night merge

Day is late; it is too late. The latte evaporates,
dry coffee grounds lie in the cold mug. The
thump when the car hit your body remains, as if
the echo effect is broken and repeats, thump,
thump. Metal, soft tissue, bone splinter.
Concussion of my heart.

When antelope dance over rock, smudges of
charcoal. In the cave day and night, and I
wouldn’t come out.

You were alright. You walked away, a bit
bruised.

I bled internally in my dreams, the pillow, the
sheets, under the car tire grown large as a
ferris wheel. My blood sometime ran like
Van Gogh’s wheat fields, the residue of burnt
souls. The ferris wheel ran day and night,
even in deathly winter when everyone
was absent.

Each day the sun comes later; no, earlier.
The green fury of spring is nearing like a
virescent bush fire.  The sumacs are pregnant
with multiple birth buds.

Who is reading me on this day that is later than
all the other days slipping under the wheel
as the tire drags on.

This woven bone, these smudges
of burnt wood,
these buds of spring.

                                          

Dinosaur Book of Green Furor

direct link: The Dinosaur Book is Green Fury

And the dinosaur’s book is green fury.

Promethea's curls and flanks, her energy, combustible.
Promethea has been dancing on the 200 billion year old
dinosaur skull in the glass box that hangs on the wall
since the beginning. Petrescent, converting into stone,
from water. What isn't liquid suddenly flows.
Like lava. Boiling.

Ancient skull without skin, or legs, or beating organs.
Body without organs. The body whose. Stone. Whose
bones are petrified. In fine volcanic ash, for billions of
years. I can read pathways on your bones, a scored
map of the earth, embossed hieroglyphics. Your garrulous
breaking voice in the sparking dust of fireworks, like
millions of dancing fireflies, an exploding outwards.
Your carapace is prophecy, what bends time in on itself,
grounding. You are earth stilled to wisdom. Ancient,
shell of secret signs, messages from the eons.
Mesozoic creature. Who lived happily on the
banks of the stream that was blocked by volcanic mud
creating a 12 mile lake that lasted for another 80 million
years before volcanic eruptions buried it.

Where is your riverbank? Slow mulching of sweet
grasses, sipping freshest of fresh water, dear ancestor.
Another bit of corporeality in the drama that began billions
of years ago when we all, our possibility, came to be in
the expanding light and the fiery dust that settled
into our solar system, and into the earth, and into your
exoskeleton, with its oracular markings, star charts,
which is now rock, condensed history.

"I am writing it just behind the burning bush, by the light
of your blaze," says Hélène.¹

And I see you, remembering the warm fertile lush land
of 200 million years ago, growing a body, organs beating,
a fury of blood, following Promethea across invisible
mountains, down hallucinated valleys, into the heart
of the volcano that continually explodes,
bursting you forth.

From Poem Paintings

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A time-lapse art video: drawing in India inks in my beloved Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4; pulsing green kalaidoscope in the background; text of the poem moving slowly up the screen at a diagonal; and a voiceover poem. The world is a green furor of creativity - the green fire of life.

I shot the video with a Canon HF S100 and speeded up about 800%.

Twenty min of footage became a 2.5 minute video. A longer drawing would use a huge amount of space on the hard drive, and so, except for short films, I don't recommend this technique.

I edited the footage in Final Cut Express 4.0.1. Because of the camera angle, I rotated and cropped the sketch clip, and underneath added a layer of footage with a kaleidoscope filter, and also ran the text of the prosepoem over the paper at an angle, motion keyframing it, and changing the opacity from light to dark letters over the duration of the video.

I created the music in a cool program, the 'P22 Music Text Composition Generator (A free online music utility).' In this program, each letter has a sound. When you put text in, you can choose the BMP rate and instrument you'd like, and the program generates a midi file, with the sheet music. I layered my track in GarageBand 6.0.2 using different instruments, bmp, splicing and re-arranging.

Even the reading of the writing was speeded up, in Audacity 1.3.12, using the tempo filter.

From start to finish took about 12 hours, there were many layers, of image, text, and sound, each with filters, and I had to render a few times, which took hours, to see if what I had produced worked.

While this method for creating an art video works, my camera battery can only tape for 1½ hours, which is not long enough for most art projects.
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This video poem was featured at Moving Poems, an "anthology of the best videopoems, filmpoems, animated poems, and other poetry videos from around the web" (check it out if you haven't already): http://movingpoems.com/2011/04/the-dinosaur-book-is-green-fire-by-brenda-clews/


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Notes: ¹Hélène Cixous' The Book of Promethea

The Book of Promethea (University of Nebraska Press, 1991)

by Hélène Cixous, trans. Betsy Wing (quote used, p.23)

                                          

NaPoWriMo Day 4: Alicia Ostriker's 'Birth of Venus'

Venus, or really Aphrodite, for Aphrodite seems more sensitive, more of a fragile beauty, has been on my mind all day. I have taken out my unfinished manuscript, along with a pile of papers three times larger of research, and the poem which originally inspired me.

Alicia Ostriker's 'The Birth of Venus' (only a few lines I found on-line due to copyright restrictions):

I

Huge shell the remnant of my great-grandmother dragon,

Split open to form the world,

They have made a boat of it

And set me here.

The effect is of scarcely tolerable pleasure.

II

If I am anything I am young, so young.

As I arrive on this shallow scalloped sea

Zephyr huffs flowers at me, frowning.

The effect is to deepen my reverie.

My face emerges from another world

Behind the picture plane, a world

Of light and clouds, volumes of clouds.

The artist has set it at an impossible angle

Upon my impossibly swanlike

Neck, my impossibly sloping shoulders.

If I am anything I am un...

I will offer excuses and not give you a critique of the poem which inspired me to begin a series of poems in 2008 that I am now trying to finish.

In 2006, I met Alicia Ostriker at a conference, and as I was watching the book table, and she was spreading her books over a section, we chatted a little about how to arrange poetry books for sale. She was quite old, slender, in matte black, her hair, her clothes, her bags, a bit fussy with the books she'd brought to add to those of a local bookseller and whatnot, but very nice. It's not her personality that I remember. It was the darkness in her that surprised me, I guess. The density of energy around her. I don't think I've ever been in a room with someone who's energy was like that. I felt there was something raw about her connection with life. Alicia Ostriker had an emptiness to her that was yet full of intensity, poetic passion, a fury of living that I can't describe but that was remarkable. Later I bought the book with the Venus poem in it, No Heaven, but she'd already caught her flight home and so I didn't get an autograph.

Alicia Ostiker's poem about Venus, and my sheaf of research, is pulling me back to this project, but, still, no poetry. With apologies, for what is happening here at Rubies in Crystal during NaPoWriMo, the month designated to writing a poem every day.

Who knows, but I may write a long poem and so catch  up. Yah. Who knows. (Chews sugary gum and blows a real big bubble.)


Today I worked on a video, an unplanned exercise, sigh. I called it, 'The Dinosaur’s Book is Green Fury.' It is another 'learning' video, which is currently rendering, and I'm fairly exhausted with the work it's been, videoing, editing the footage, editing the writing, reading it a few times, editing the reading, and the music, and creating text for the video and title and credits, and the layers of tracks in audio and video have taken hours and hours, and I offer this by way of excuse.

The video should be up by tomorrow at YouTube or Picasa. I'll embed it here.

Botticelli's Venus, as I understood her, is figuring dimly and slowing in the back of my consciousness again.

                                          

NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Lawrence on Artists

As I tweeted, in exasperation, either something other than research happens tonight or I'm out of NaPoWriMo. My muse is unruly and apparently will not write on command.

And I guess I'm out. Though I would like to continue to post bits from the book I am currently into.

From Women in Love, Birkin, who probably closest resembles Lawrence himself, talking to Gerald:

'...every true artist is the salvation of every other.'
'I thought they got on so badly, as a rule.'
'Perhaps. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in.'

[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]

These few lines [in Chapter 16] sparked something. I am immersed in thinking about the 'gift economy' (as an parallel system to Capitalism, or what Capitalism is founded on rather), about the artist's life, the struggle to live, what has to be sacrificed for art, and why art continues when society seems in nearly every way to wish to abolish it by ignoring most of their artists' need for decent livelihood.

And in this economic predicament, yes, "every true artist is the salvation of every other." And they do get on "badly"? Surely!

But it is the last line, "only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in," that had the wow factor. I feel Lawrence himself is doing this for me, even as I walk up and down the streets and across the parks with my dog listening to Women in Love on audiobook.

And, you see, Venus, Botticelli's Venus, does create a vision of beauty that makes the world fit to live in.


from the VirtualUffizi


Sorry to be so sketchy. But I shall have to give up the NaPoWriMo effort as my muse is veiled, absent.