Tag: Wolsak and Wynn

Video Gallery Half Way Lessons Learned

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

I decided to take a two week hiatus on the Canada Council Digital Originals video production. I’ve produced one a week now for six weeks and it seemed like a good time to take a pause and re-energize creatively as well as look back at what I’ve learned from the project so far. Here are the top five lessons learned so far. 

 

#5 A week to produce a video is a good constraint

I’ve found that it is pretty intense doing a video a week. I’ve started on Saturday night and not finished until late Friday afternoon when all the steps are taken into account. I’ve had a lot of research to do, questions like: how to make a book levitate or can I find a good font and background for the aesthetics of the Cormorants Diving video. The amount of material on YouTube (often by youngsters) on how to do some of the effects I’ve ended up using is quite mind boggling. When I have an idea and need to research I end going to a rabbit hole and then there are the frustrations of learning these techniques using the software I’m using (Final Cut Pro X) and the the satisfaction of it working. Anyhow, the good thing about the constraint is that it forces me to focus, there’s a point where I have to get producing which means stopping the research and practicing and actually make something. The constraint does that, as well sometimes means I must make what I’m doing simpler from the concept I have started with which is almost always a good thing and one of the best lessons learned.  

 

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Lac-Mégantic – The Art of Revision (Poem #6)

Posted on by Ross Belot
Picture taken from a Sûreté du Québec helicopter of Lac-Mégantic, the day of the derailment. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Generic

My poem Lac-Mégantic is a good example of revision and also trying different angles at the same poetic impulse until you find the poem. I’ll take you through my Lac-Mégantic poem revision story. I went to the Community of Writers Workshop in California in the summer of 2015 where you write a new poem a day and read it the next morning to a dozen or so excellent poets and a faculty member.  In the workshop only what is working is discussed, the idea being you will try new things in your work, take real chances. 

I made three runs that week at the topic of the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic after doing a lot of online research of in-depth articles written about the place, the people and what happened. I had a high level of emotion as well because of my work at Imperial Oil. But I wasn’t sure how to approach it as a poem. I was very aware of the problems around writing about tragedy, topics of high emotion and big issues like our fossil fuel addiction and its impacts. 

The first poetic attempt being a kind of experimental form that I read to Brenda Hillman’s workshop. Brenda seemed appreciative but nobody else in that group seemed to really understand what I was doing. Also it turned out this horrific tragedy was not well known in the US so it failed to resonate without more explanation. A poetic failure.

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Cormorants Diving – Poetics of Scent (poem #5)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

Uji River Cormorant Fishing © Uji City Tourism Association Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

 

This poem comes from a discussion in a class I was in where we had read and then were discussing Robert Hass’ wonderful book “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa ” and we were talking about the poetics of Bashō, who Hass calls “one of the world’s greatest lyric poets”. One of the key concepts Bashō, who was a master poet and teacher in 17th century Japan, developed in his lifetime was the idea of the “poetics of scent”. 

 

Traditionally in the linked poems of the time the mode that was used for linking verses were either “lexical”, words with classical or cultural association, or “content”, where the linked verse expanded or extended the material of the previous verse explicitly. But Bashō proposed that instead the linkage should be less direct, the linkage should be more of overtone or aesthetic. He called this linking by “scent”.  

 

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12 Dancers on 12 Tables (poem #4)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

 

This week’s poem, 12 Dancers on 12 Tables,  is material collected from watching and listening to  an MFA in Dance group rehearsing out in the middle of the quad of Saint Mary’s College of California. The area was used by many students for eating and talking.  And in the middle of this normal every day occurrence, dancers unexpectedly got up on the large tables and performed in the middle of the rest of us.  A surreal experience where the observers were in the same space as the performers and yet also not formally an audience.  In addition as the performance developed there were crows, who were always about, that seemed to become part of the performance, at least for me. 

 

The material of the poem includes description of the scene, found dialogue, observations about the crows. But the mixture of material is attempting to provide the reader with the experience of being in that place and watching that wild mixture of something unusual happening in a usual place.

 

On the page the form of the poem mirrors this disorientation.  It has unusual line breaks, dropped lines and some material is grouped into stanzas while others into single lines.  Also the dialogue is not indicated except for “here” “we” “go”, which means it is up to the reader on whether terms like “really beautiful” is from the dance choreographer or from the speaker of the poem.  This mirrors the experience, who is just an observer and who is a participant.  Like as if you were at a table with one of the 12 Dancers on 12 Tables. 

 

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On Leaving – 1st Video Gallery Poem

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

This is the first video I’ve made for the Canada Council’s Digitals Originals program. My plan is to release about a dozen of these over the next three months.  The goal is to provide an experience of my new collection, Moving to Climate Change Hours published by Wolsak and Wynn, through a video gallery of selected poems. As well I will provide a blog post discussing each poem, its poetics and something around my thinking in the making of the video for the video gallery. 

 

The poem On Leaving was written after hearing a discussion on the use of steep enjambment in poetry. Poetry Foundation gives us this definition of enjambment: “The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation”. Or another way to think of it is the line ends in the middle of a phrase with the continuation being enjambment on to the next line. 

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A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

Stuart Ross has been writing poetry for a long time. According to his bio, he “published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like ‘Writer Going To Hell,’ selling over 7,000 chapbooks.” He is now the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and essays. In preparation for writing this review I wrote him and asked if he had anything he wanted to say about his latest book, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent.  The only point he might make, he said, would be that he tried to write a book that is more accessible and personal than much of his previous work.

I’ve been thinking about that. The work is definitely personal, and we’ll talk about that a bit later.  But “accessible” is highly subjective.  I really love this work, soaked in quirkiness as it is. Does its quirkiness make it accessible or not? For some readers the idea of “accessible” means the work has less value, while for others “accessible” means the work has more interest.  I’ve had this discussion with people about Emily Dickinson’s work, how her imaginative take on the world is difficult for some to enter, while for many others it is energizing. In these poems Stuart Ross engages a Dickinsonian idiosyncrasy, projecting the real world through the lens of his imagination. Like Dickinson, Ross trains this lens on the big questions of death and immortality. So, accessible perhaps, original and strange definitely.  I went back to Stuart on this and he agrees that while probably his most cohesive work, A Sparrow Cam Down Resplendent is “still pretty wonky”.

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