A video adaptation of a poem I wrote back in 2006 and included in my online collection Shadow Cabinet.
This videopoem idea has been brewing for a while. I finally got a chance to shoot the contrail footage last week, on one of those days when some of the contrails remain and others quickly fade, depending I suppose on the elevation of the jet. As usual, though, the most time-consuming part of the video-making process was finding the right music. The wordless, a capella song is by a Belgian electronica band called Silence, who are generous enough to copyleft all their material. The track happened to be just the right length, so I didn’t have to alter it in any way.
I have always liked this poem. The video adds to it, at least after the initial screening. (I had to watch it twice in order for the video not to distract, but I think that would be normal for me.) (Heck, I’m distracted enough during my first read of any poem.) The lines, the sun (to me like the light of an oncoming train), and that five-legged spider . . .
Thanks for the generous reaction. There is a distraction element in videos like this, but I’d rather risk losing people than boring them with footage of the exact images described in the poem. Hopefully most viewers will feel drawn as you did to watch it a second time.
multimediapoetic.