~ Ephemeral Rift ~

Hunter’s Moon and Trapper’s Moon by Erica Goss

I’ve gotten a couple of months behind on the 12 Moons videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (words), Marc Neys/Swoon (concept and directing), Kathy McTavish (music) and Nic S. (voice), so here are parts X, “Hunter’s Moon” (above) and XI, “Trapper’s Moon” (below). About the former, Marc writes:

The wind in this poem led me to a film I used earlier; ‘Terror in the midnight sun’ (Virgil W. Vogel)

I created a ‘windy’ scape using blocks of sound Kathy provided me with, added Nic’s reading and started playing around with the footage. (Different grading, colours,…)

In the end I only used one sequence. Played with repetition… I added a light layer of flickering windows to emphasize the wind even more.

For “Trapper’s Moon,” Marc notes that

Kathy provided me with a beautiful soundtrack, full of nostalgia and melancholy. A perfect fit for Nic’s intense reading.

I wanted very simple and pure images to go with this music. Preferably nature. A forest. Solitude.

Ephemeral Rift filmed one of his winter walks, I edited out a few bits and played around with colouring and timing in a split screen.

As with the others in this year-long series, both films were featured in Atticus Review.

Ironically, one of the reasons I got behind on sharing them was because I took almost two weeks off to go to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in October… where one of the big draws was seeing all twelve films in order on the big screen, with both Marc and Erica in attendance to introduce them and answer questions afterwards. It was an utterly captivating experience; the films flowed really well one into another, which might not be obvious if you watch them individually on the web. I hope that won’t be the last time that the whole project gets shown in a theater.

Foretold by Luisa A. Igloria

Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, probably needs no introduction here. Nor was this the first time he’s ever worked with a poem by Luisa A. Igloria, though this may be my favorite of their collaborations to date. And their usual working order was reversed, because Luisa’s poem was written in response to a “first draft” of the video, one of the three prompts in the Poetry Storehouse First Anniversary Contest. Poetry judge Jessica Piazza selected Luisa’s poem as a runner-up:

Foretold

In that future which pressed
ever closer toward us, time was a room

whose shape we could no longer determine.
In every city, men stood on platforms

gesticulating and making pronouncements.
Armored tanks rolled into the last

encampments, leaving tracks in the river’s
boiled mud. We knew when to flee,

what to gather up, what to leave behind.
We walked deeper into blind forests,

climbed as high as our feet allowed
up the thinned hair of trees. They let us

cocoon there, they let us make hammocks.
At night, we watched as distant flares

limned the unnavigable horizon.
At night, some of us told stories,

making shadows with our hands
to mimic the movement of wings.

Marc explained how he put together the video used in the contest:

I had footage of several Psychic TV performances by Allan Chumak. Once, I re-edited a bunch of them for a collab with another poet, but that didn’t happen. The cuts were not wasted and waited on the shelves for another occasion.

I had also footage of an ASMR performance by Epehemeral Rift waiting to be used.

Around the time of the Poetry Storehouse contest proposals, I thought it might be a good idea to put those two pieces of footage together. For the purpose of viewing quality I added an extra layer of light and colour to the Ephemeral Rift recordings. Not really a match, but an interesting pairing.

I created a track and edited the different pieces loosely to the music, hoping it would give some writers an idea.

Luisa told us:

My writing process in response to Marc’s video, which resulted in the poem “Foretold,” was to open two screens on my computer: on the left side, Marc’s video, and on the right, the first page of a new (blank) Word document. I decided that I was going to compose—start immediately to write—as soon as the video started. Almost all of the poem’s lines were generated exactly in this manner, with very slight revisions afterwards (mostly having to do with lineation and spacing, tightening some of my word choices). In Marc’s film, the images—and their strategic juxtaposition—were immediately striking, as was his choice to strip them of sound and instead use music and ambient sound. Though I realized they may not have had anything specifically to do with each other, their pairing in the film’s sequences began to suggest an underlying narrative to me, filled with foreboding and portent. The occurrences of repetition in the film suggested that. The closeups of hands and mouths spoke to me of something both very intimate and very distant, and in some instances those mouths looked as if they could very well be on the verge of varying emotions: rage, for instance; or pleasure, or fear.

Marc added:

Once I got Luisa’s poem, it all came together perfectly. Suddenly these images and their pairing become very political. Nic S. provided a very suitable reading for the track. It all needed a bit of re-editing (in length and pace), but the main visual idea is still the same, but much more powerful because of Luisa’s fantastic poem.

The End or the Beginning by Jan Lauwereyns

The origin of this recent videopoem, Diving into Broken Bits (The End or the Beginning) by Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon), is a little complicated, so I’ll just quote his blog post about it:

A while back I made a video for ‘Het einde of het begin van een mensenleven / The end or the beginning of a human life’
This poem by Jan Lauwereyns (you can read about the videopoem) has an extended English version (published in the book ‘Three Poems To the Question of Four. 27+3 Drawings’)
Because they were so obviously connected I wanted to create a second video for the English poem; ‘The End or the Beginning’

I asked Michael Dickes to read/record the poem and he delivered a perfect (dark blue with bits of fading grey) reading. I created a very slow and deep track around that recording […]

This time I didn’t want to use IICADOM footage. No family memories. The video needed to be more abstract.
The first thing I wanted to use was an experimental performance/recording by Ephemeral Rift.
The mask and movements in this short video reminded me of bunraku. It was the perfect link to Jan’s frame of mind.
(Jan lives and works as a scientist in Japan)
This video was going to be the lead in my videopoem. I added a variety of images around this storyline. Hints of science, nature, death,…
A poetic storyline through images. It’s a flow of thoughts surrounding the poem, being a flow on itself…

I am very happy with this one, so was Jan. We started a journey together with this project. It will take us to other places, new ways of combining, crossing borders. More to follow in the future…