Rain by Mike Hoolboom
No more taking turns on history’s wheel
trying to collect old debts no one can pay.
This time the country we hoped for
was each other.
Uploaded to Vimeo in May—and released under a Public Domain Dedication license that lets anyone modify it—this latest videopoem by Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has a distinctly prophetic, left-populist flavor. Hoolboom’s use of watery images provides an interesting point of comparison with Ian Gibbin’s Because We Can. If I find them tantalizing, it’s in part because we’re in a drought where I live, and in part because, in some ways, I do feel as if the currrent planetary malaise could be turned around if we could simply refocus on what matters, through mutual aid and democratic decision-making, but at the same time I see very little chance of that happening.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
This is so good. A quietly powerful counterpoint to the right-populist cacophony.