On my Facebook page and in a few other places I have long been accustomed to posting poems that move me, speak to me, communicate my feelings or thoughts over particular experiences I am undergoing, sensibilities within myself I am confronting or with which I am grappling, poems that encourage and inspire me, those that are granting me company in a particular phase or place in which I find myself etc.
Notwithstanding, these poems are always the works of others. There is something beautiful and productive in so doing in that great writers must be and generally are even better readers, but I post other poets' works (and after my spiel last night, this should come as no surprise) mostly because I am very protective over my intellectual property. Sending out writing to be published et al is one thing, rendering them common by placing them on Facebook is another matter entirely. Plus FB is free...umm, no.
Anyway, whenever I post these poems I always find a graphic image that I feel complements, embodies, and advances that which is being expressed in the poem and I post it with the poem to complete the note I am creating. This merging, though, is nothing new to me.
I have been writing since a child and I have always envisioned the sketch or pinpointed the soundtrack (I write to music most often) that should accompany each work. Thus I would draw an image on the poem's page and/or make note of the song to be listened to when reading the poem for each and every poem I'd write.
I feel that the written words of a poem is but one hue in the collective rainbow of feeling, experience, understanding, insight, knowledge, spirituality, communique by The Muse et al that gives rise to the poem. Writing goes through the writer, but language is faculty not entity (like radio hosts and ushers and communicates sound but it is not Sound). It is like groundwater giving birth to trees. Groundwater feeds and fertilises flowers and grass as well; the tree is but one manifestation and one translation of the groundwater's presence- it as source, it as origin. A poem is much the same. It is like one finger on a hand. Image, dance, sound, texture (to be touched) are other fingers, are other manifestations of the inspiration that presented itself in the singular medium of poem. Thus I cannot feel complete or that I have done the source justice by unveiling it via one means.
** Consider "Poet on a Mountain Top" by Chen Zhou and Derek Walcott's sketches in one of his latest collections...confining expression, to great artists, is quite the oxymoron.
So onto my project: I intend to put one of my poems on film, pairing it with digital image and music.
-The work lies in finding pictures that I feel really capture what I am communicating in words, and in timing the music properly. This will be my first time attempting such but it is a practice I always envisioned myself inevitably adopting. Where better than this class...which is indeed why I took the class at all :-)
-My concern lies in "Disneyfying" my work...Disney, amongst its MANY other ills, robs children of their imagination. Reading is interactive. Children read and enter into easy communication with their imaginative faculty (which is crucial for many reasons). But Disney presents their ever weakening original, authentic, unique lens with ready-made images formulated by someone else's conceptualisation. I want others to enter into my work themselves. Though I write about self, I am you, you are me (Ubuntu)...and I do not want to supply others with sights that rob them of their opportunity to conjure, recall, attach their own. Yet, it may also be clarifying...who knows...so either way we'll see...
Either way what I will see, is my work cross over into another dimension...and to that I'm looking forward...here's to it being enjoyable work.
Cheers,
Camille
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