YouTube Illuminations

Since the friend of Billy Collins created a YouTube animation of "Forgetfulness," I've been intrigued with the idea of matching video and text. Some people I know felt that many of the animations were too literal, but to my thinking these echoes made the poem more accessible.

Thinking about animating a new poem "Song for Sophie Clementine" I harkened back to a previous attempt. Years ago with a Super8 camera, a colleague and I tried to match a moving images of twin compasses to her reading of "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."

Here are some answers to a few questions I had before making my recent attempt.


What kind of a script or scenario is needed?
To make such an attempt, the idea of the poem must be clearly in mind.
Anything that conveys the main idea of the whole poem or each part of the poem can be used.

How many images does each poem require?

I believe this depends on the nature of what is to be shown in the poem. A simple lyric can get by with one image. A narrative like Billy Collins requires a series of images that erase. In a sense there is only one image but many variations on that images.

What kind of sequence did your video require?
Before reading the "Song for Sophie Clementine," I tried to set up one key image that would unfold during the audio reading and then to reread the audio while the text is visible. The clementine in a bowl of blueberries seemed to offer the right image to play off the reading.


How will the author know when the proper balance has been found?

When text and the images inform each other, the video offers an illuminated moment similar to what many people saw in the Billy Collins performance.


Why is this worth doing? I believe it will allow us to focus on some of the performer tricks that make each stanza or image more accessible.

Poetry's public display

Lawrence, MA--The Frost Foundation has begun a yearlong effort to transform this portion of the Lawrence Library into a gallery that presents the legacy of Robert Frost's early poems. The display flickers the image of XJ Kennedy presenting his memories of Robert Frost.

Enigmatic

The electronic book: enigmatic medium for poetry

Setting a book in type: a river runs through it

Making a book of Seamus Heaney's 2002 Frost reading and lecture has put me in the printer's catbird seat again. It has been years since I set a book in metal type or used the latest page making tools. So I bought a font of type and then tried to find a tool that allowed text to flow through the pages (as Quark and others had perfected), that also allowed one to fix the rivers streams and rivulets that developed in the type, and finally that allowed the minor jiggering that a book always needs-- usually at the last minute. That tool turned out to be right on my computer, Publisher 2003. The other tools that complement my bookmark tool box are pdfFactory, Adobe Reader, Hewlett Packard's manual print utilities. All of these tools handle digital type well.

With luck and loose ends tied up, that book should be available in the first quarter of 2008 in time for the New England Poetry Conference at UMass Lowell on Feb 27. Bookmaking is now such a pleasurable process with fine tools available on almost every laptop.

The electronic book as a medium for poetry

In the last few days of Autumn 2007 several friends who are scholars, teachers, and librarians have asked me my opinion of electronic books. They were mainly thinking of the new device from Amazon, but it turns out that they and I had other kinds of electronic books in mind. At least three of us had ordered the XO laptop, giving one to a child in a developing country and getting one for home. I haven't laid a hand on either the Kindle or the XO but my general opinion is that the laptop and the palm pilot are the best electronic book available for poetry today. Neither surpasses the paper book but both are gaining ground as a medium for poetry.

But because verse written strictly in these feet and by these principles will become same and tame the poets have brought in licences and departures from rule to give variety, and especially when the natural rhythm is rising, as in the common ten-syllable or five-foot verse, rhymed or blank. These irregularities are chiefly Reversed Feet and reversed or Counterpoint Rhythm which two things are two steps or degrees of licence in the same kind. By a reversed foot I mean putting the stress where, to judge by the rest of the measure, the slack should be and the slack where the stress, and this is done freely at the beginning of a line and, in the course of a line, after a pause; only scarcely ever in the second foot or place and never in the last, unless when the poet designs some extraordinary effect; for these places are characteristic and sensitive and cannot well be touched. But the reversal of the first foot and of some middle foot after a strong pause is thing so natural that our poets have generally done it, from Chaucer down, without remark and it commonly passes unnoticed and cannot be said to amount to a formal change of rhythm, but rather is that irregularity which all natural growth and motion shews. If however the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to mclude the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducmg or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answarble to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm. Of this kind of verse Milton is the great master and the choruses of Samson Agonistes are wntten throughout

Common English rhythm, called Running Rhythm(2) above, is mea­sured by feet of either two or three syllables and (putting aside the imperfect feet at the beginning and end of lines and also some unusual measures, in which feet seem to be paired together and double or composite feet to arise) never more or less.

Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. (3) Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in which the stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and rhythm in which the slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if the stress is between two slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms.

These distinctions are real and true to nature; but for purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief accent always comes first in a musical bar.

If this is done there will be in common English verse only two possible feet-the so-called accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. But they may be mixed and then what the Greeks called a Logaoedic Rhythm arises. These are the facts and according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.