~ October 2013 ~
The Ocean by Robert Krut
A videopoem in support of the forthcoming collection This is the Ocean by Robert Krut. Nick Paonessa of lowercase productions directs.
This is one of five poetry book trailers included in Erica Goss’s latest column for Connotation Press.
When is a video poem more than a video poem? When it’s a book trailer. Authors promote their books with book trailers, short films meant to entice a buyer, just like a movie trailer is meant to advertise a movie. Movie trailers show a condensed version of the film, including cuts of the most exciting parts without giving away the plot, while book trailers tend to focus on the author’s credentials first and the story second, especially if the author is well-known. A video poem meant to promote a book of poems, literary fiction or non-fiction, however, is often a complete work of art, its connection to the book somewhat tangential.
About Krut’s video, Goss writes:
Robert Krut’s second collection, This is the Ocean, due out this month from Bona Fide Books, was preceded by videos of two poems from the book. “The Ocean” shows a coastal city all but abandoned in the early morning light. Robert Krut told me that he and filmmaker Nick Paonessa shot scenes at Venice Beach, California. “It’s a completely different world at dawn,” Robert said. “This sounds impossible, but you can drive from Burbank to Venice in about twenty minutes” – a trip that normally takes at least an hour. The video for “The Ocean” shows an alternate Southern California in an Edward Hopper-esque mood: a skateboarder has the whole park to himself, a empty lifeguard tower faces the sea as the sky turns pink, and the smooth wide beach is alone with its secrets as we hear the last lines of the poem: “There may be nothing for miles and miles, / but I have come from the bottom of the ocean, / and I am here to tell you about it.” The Pacific Ocean is the unreliable narrator in this video, elemental, beautiful and dangerous.
Be sure to check out her other selections. And for more videopoems that do double duty as book trailers, browse the book trailer category here. (It’s relatively new, so it doesn’t necessarily include all of the book trailers on the site.)
Why bad poetry videos suck
https://vimeo.com/74755473
Watch on Vimeo
The fact that I love the Wendell Berry poem makes this unimaginative video all the more painful to watch. It adds nothing to my understanding of the poem, and instead works to reduce it to a few, too-pretty images. And since it will be seen by tens of thousands on PBS, it sets a very bad example. YouTube is already infested with home-made versions of this poetry video, I guess because too many poetry fans would rather put poems on a pedestal and worship them as idols than take the risk of engaging them in dialogue. Add in the redundant images of the poem’s text while the poet reads it to us, and the over-all effect is of a poetry video that talks down to its audience. In a misguided effort to make poetry accessible, it has pretty much destroyed the poem.
(Please note, however, that the Bill Moyers interview, taped to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the publication of Berry’s landmark collection of essays The Unsettling of America, and due to be broadcast beginning October 4, sounds very worthwhile indeed. All the more irritating, then, that they would promote it with such a lousy poetry video.)
