Performance Videopoems

I can recite from Tidal Fury for about an hour. Why have I undertaken to memorize my poetry? Originally, I had intended to memorize the whole book to have full access for any readings or open mics, but haven't gotten there yet. Memorizing is a good exercise for an aging mind. Being able to perform poems lets me connect to the audience. I have no acting experience and have never studied acting and so I wing it. I have no idea if these performances work for people or not.

Memorizing remains hard work, especially as the poems have to be duplicated exactly in the mind and retrieved in their all their convoluted syntaxes and words. Being untrained, when my mind collides a little, and I can't get the line, I simply stop and wait for the words to click in and then I continue. This doesn't bother me a bit - it's part of the process of a live enactment. About the only impediment I've found is when I am nervous I might skip a line. I also switch words with synonyms occasionally, and these are unconscious replacements. I only know due to videoing my readings and find this an interesting quirk of the way the mind retains a list of synonyms to use if the exact word is not recalled quickly enough.

I love hearing poets read their writing and have always enjoyed going to poetry readings - in fact, I've run a poetry series for 3½ years. In my community, there are some poets who memorize and perform their poetry - they are not slam poets, which is a different genre and the poems have rhyme and tend follow a format with a set rhythm to the spoken word which makes it quite different to a literary poet performing a piece. The literary poets I know who perform are marvellous, and I find I 'hear' their poetry with perhaps more texture and depth when they offer it directly to us, but they either have acting backgrounds or studied acting in university.

Sometimes I'm not sure what I'm doing. Without the feedback loop a director or teacher would give, I send what I do out into the darkened fields of the audience. I like to dress the part too - mask, snaky wig, gauze sack, kimono, jingly belly dancing belt. It may be that performance gives me a way to inhabit the writing, to hide in it. As an introvert, performing forces me into my opposite. The next day I am exhausted - the act of performing publicly is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

And yet I keep exploring it and pushing myself to go deeper, to enter the writing, to give to those listening from fragile and open and honest places within. I feel that exploring memorization and performance is a fruitful endeavour and I will continue to expand my comfort zones in this regard.

A collusion of forces left me in a private place of extreme worry and tiredness the day that I did the hour-long feature* and yet I strove to put aside my life, to step onto the stage as if it were a blank canvas, and create a poetry that carried itself through the air into the theatre and here, on the screen.

I hope I have done Tidal Fury justice. *You'll find the video with the hour-long performance I did at my Poetry and Music Salons in April 2017 on my Tidal Fury page and in the group of Tidal Fury performance videopoems above.

Videopoetry combines poetry with image sequences that unfold through time. A videopoem is not a literal rendition of the poem that inspires it, but a transliteration. Text is translated from one script into another, from page-oriented into cinematic. We get a 'verbal/visual' cluster, a complex, a nexus, a multiplicity composed of vectors that intersect. The videopoem casts moving images of poetry into a film stream in ways that enable it, the video or film, to become an independent visual poem. In this school of videopoetics, the author's words are the wind that sails the ship in a sea of images.

My videos, however, are not transliterations of poems. My pieces are composed of poetry, images, video, a costume with perhaps a mask, paintings or sculpture that form a muted multi-media dance. In my oeuvre, the components of a work arise from a singular creative process that finds expression in multiple approaches - poetic, artistic, filmic, kinetic - to a single unifying subject. Video is where the components of that singular creative process in a work can come together. Split Mask is an example of this, (and go here to read how the components- the mask, the painting, the performance, the video, arose from one burning image). I am not apologetic for writing the poems, finding, sewing or making the costumes/props, memorizing, choreographing, performing, and editing the video to reflect a performative core. In my style of videopoetic presentation, the visual enactment of the poem nearly always revolves around a figurative axis. For live performances, I remove the voice from the clip and perform the poem from memory and often in costume (mask, snaky wig, gauze sack, kimono, jingly belly dancing belt) while the video plays on a screen behind me. The poet, as it were, like Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, steps out of the videopoem into life, a breathing counterpart of the figure cast on the screen.

As a figurative artist who admires classical technique, the years of study it takes to master pictorial technique, I find the rise of the critic and the demise of the trained artist troubling. Our cultural aesthetic is still saturated with Conceptualism, where the text that expands on the art takes precedence over the art object. The artistry of the artist of long years of training is often dismissed in favour of simpler, more abstract renditions that either disintegrate form into near incoherence or merge slickly into commercial design. Once the mastery of the artist has been rendered insignificant, their work can be eulogized with critical theory so that the critic, instead, shines. The artist becomes a craftsperson for the critic. While not meaning to, yet being part of a 'Conceptual' framework that, unfortunately, is considered normative, the idea of what constitutes a 'videopoem' falls prey to a similar approach. One of the defining qualities of a videopoem is that it should not be a video of a poet reading or performing their poem. As with the fine arts, I find a videopoetics that advocates a disappearance of the poet from the videopoem denies the heritage and richness of the poet who embodies centuries of literature and wordsmithing in their writing. Let's have a visual poetry that enables and affirms the body of utterance, the gesture of the poet who wrote the words - who gives the poet recognition by including them in the videopoem.

I find the plethora of disembodied videopoems, while interesting filmically, and often quite beautiful in their varied ways, from scenic, figurative to abstractions, highlight the filmmaker at the expense of the poet, who is usually absent in a production that uses their words. Perhaps the author merits a voiceover, perhaps not. Their poems are inspirations for the videographer. Sometimes it is the author who directs the filmpoem and who inexplicably maintains an absence in the final product. While I understand that making a short film or video poem can be an exercise in craft and experiment for a film team who hope to create a moment of visual and poetic art, we must yet glimpse the poet embodying the poem they have written with their voices, gestures, movements, bodies. In this approach, I take cue from music videos, which embrace the appearance of the musician who has either written or enacts the song of another as crucial to the success of the visual production.

I have always loved poetry readings for this reason, hearing the poems read by those who wrote them, and perhaps that is why I incline towards an embodied videopoetics that includes the writer, and the many ways that they 'tell it slant.'*

©Brenda Clews
May, 2017, Toronto
_
*To refer to Emily Dickinson's famous and often quoted poem, 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant.'