View on Vimeo.
There was a Dale Chihuly exhibition called “Reflections on nature” at Kew Gardens when we visited last week, but I was more taken with a jackdaw.
jackdaw in residence
View on Vimeo.
View on Vimeo.
Eid in the park
View on Vimeo.
Yesterday was Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, and I found myself in a north London park as public prayers were being offered. You can hear that faintly in the background. (This is shorter than my usual one-minute haiku videos because I decided to cut out much of an Islamophobic rant from a man behind me.)
summer sidewalk
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Shot along Notting Hill Gate (confusingly, the name of a street) in London, from a bench facing away from traffic… toward the Art. Unlike graffiti, official street art only looks good after it starts to get grubby, I think. Abandoned shopping carts/trolleys, on the other hand, have that haiku-ready wabi-sabi quality from the outset.
cows on the common
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The village of Brill in Buckinghamshire, where my father-in-law lives, has a unique program to maintain the common with a collectively owned herd of Dexter cattle. For this haiku video, I borrowed the idea of making a postcard come to life from the poetry filmmakers Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, who used it to great effect in an adaptation of one of my haibun, In West Virginia (which isn’t yet available for streaming on the web).
I suppose it was precisely the pro-biodiversity, feel-good quality of Brill’s cattle herding program that brought the baseline misery of livestock into sharp relief for me.
commuter train
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A videohaiku shot on the London Overground, the tube’s less poetic, more sensible sibling.
I lived in Osaka for a year in the mid 80s, so that’s my other major experience with commuter trains. Back then, moving fingers belonged to businessmen taking advantage of the cramped conditions to feel up women. It was a huge problem. All my female acquaintances became adept at elbow jabs and insults in the local dialect. I don’t know how things are in Japan these days, but in the UK I’m glad that everyone just plays with their devices.
Grand Union Canal
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The first in my summer series of haiku videos, shot near where I’m staying in north London, along the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal.
I’m not sure why I haven’t been sharing my videohaiku here, along with Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube. Possibly out of reluctance to supply titles to haiku (though that hasn’t stopped me from doing the occasional Pepys erasure haiku). But first lines will suffice, I think.
Pennsylvania Spring: a videohaiku sequence
Continuing on from Winter Trees, this cycle contains 24 videohaiku one minute long or shorter, all but one shot on an iPhone without any advance planning, just capturing things of visual interest and letting them prompt haiku a day or more later. (The exception, “coal country spring”, uses old home movie footage that came to me in a similar serendipitous fashion: via @HomeMoviesBot on Twitter.)
As with Winter Trees, I feel that these are best experienced as they unfold, scroll-like, in the video series (which Vimeo now calls a showcase—previously album—and YouTube calls a playlist), in part of course because the visuals and audio are meant to add an extra dimension to the haiku, as with any videopoem. I am composing as much with video editing software as with the pen, and some of the haiku fall a little flat on the page. But here’s a transcription of the texts for the visually impaired:
shedding its snow
the new
old mountain
*
March wind
the first rose-colored
vulture face
*
counting the rings
in the wood frog pond
another year
*
yellow-bellied sapsucker
tapping
its true name
*
former field
the ruffed grouse makes a drum
out of thin air
*
bee or not
the daffodils
keeping faith
*
sun-drenched woods
the first violets
are yellow
*
fake flowers
where they found his body
fly fishing
*
Good Friday
despite claw and knife marks
they’re no one’s beeches
*
wind flowers
the way Beethoven heard
an ode to joy
*
budburst time
the returned vet says he went
straight to the woods
*
spring rain
learning that Dad
has Parkinson’s
*
railroad ties
crowd the vanishing point
fiddleheads
*
such a rush
to come back from the dead
April heat
*
coal country spring
all her doll’s new
imaginary friends
*
tweeting
about the #MetGala
watch your step
*
red eft—
how salamandery
this path
*
painted trillium
already going limp
catch and release
*
this habit
of inhabiting hills
the ants and me
*
clouds lifting
the valley’s visible
clear to the bare earth
*
spring woods at dusk
a daytime firefly
flutters past
*
green green
the broken boughs hiding
that murdered girl
*
nitrous moon
your balloon voice gone
far and wee
*
hatchlings
do you miss the hard shell
of a perfect world?
Winter trees
A new videopoem using footage that Rachel shot from the Amtrak back in December. Do read her blog post about that journey, which includes a different clip from the same footage. I particularly liked this observation:
Trees! So many trees, their leaf-free branches strobing the setting sun when it was behind them, turning pink gold when it shone on them, revealing the geological contours through their branches of the land on which they grow.
Landscape scenes shot from moving trains or cars are so common in videopoetry, they’re almost a cliche, but this is a new variation on that theme, I think.
Snowflakes (videohaiku)
View on Vimeo.
Did you know that some people use “snowflake” as an insult? Apparently being unique and sensitive—i.e. being human—has no place in Trumpland.
Up until now, my attempts at videohaiku have mostly consisted of single, long shots followed by the text, in imitation of the stereotypical composition process: contemplation leading to an ah-ha moment. The much more popular approach is to make a video with three shots in imitation of the three lines into which haiku tend to be arranged (outside of Japan, where they’re traditionally written in a single line). But it occurred to me during a bout of insomnia this morning that two shots would better represent the grammatical structure of a haiku, which is nearly always broken by some sort of pause (often represented by a dash or colon in English). The interplay between this two-part grammatical structure and the three lines/units of morae is essential to the rhythmic effect of haiku.
Both the shots here were filmed with an iPhone 5S.
Puffballs (videohaiku)
Just a quick videopoem using a few seconds of footage I shot with my iPhone on this morning’s walk.