For someone who only works part-time and is doing her Master's degree online (mostly) you'd think I'd have more time to devote to creating these film-poems, but I still manage to be busy almost all the time. And when I'm not, I've been passing out. lol Anyway, yes, busy for the past week. Yesterday turned into taking the kid to Princess Day at the Georgia Aquarium. Yeah, that's what I needed. To spend hours not seeing aquatic creatures because of the gynormous influx of royally clothed children and their parents. Literally, there were so many people that the majority of the places to view the animals were blocked. Honestly, have these people never heard of taking turns??!! So many would just stay right in front of an exhibit, starkly refusing to make room (often refusing children no less. lol) for 15-20 minutes. Really?? Who stands in front of any exhibit for that long, but especially when the joint is packed?? Anyway, I'll be done ranting. About that anyway. ;p

The other complaint I have is driving in midtown Atlanta on Saturday. I swear, it makes me wanna shoot myself. I spent at least 30 minutes driving basically in circles in an effort to find the aquarium parking deck. Let me be clear, I found the aquarium. Just not the aquarium parking deck. lol Admittedly, I am terribly directionally challenged and could probably get lost in my own house given the right circumstances, but still. Atlanta traffic/roads suck.

So, now that I've finished whining, on to cleaning and hopefully some film-poem production!

Poem: We All Fall Down

                                                                                                  
                                                                                       Inspired by cocorosie's song, Gallows

Judah loved us. His

fingers often  traced

the lines on our

throats, marking

the passage of blood.

He sat stranded

on a tree branch,

his dirt-curls sweeping

across his face with wind

and our breath.

We touch him. Two

pair of hands to unbutton

his coat, pull feet free

of socks like the ebb

of a small ocean, pulling

the tide of yarn back

from his pale beach-skin.

Two sets of fingers to

skim across his milky

collar, turning it down

neat as the line

of our stark fence

surrounding our house.

Tonight the townspeople

came, noose in hand,

their faces tied up

in a swelter of hate.

Their prickly words stick

to his bigamy as tightly

as their hands stick to him.

Flushed, they wrap

round Judah, dragging

him from our home

like the sun being pulled

from the sky, wrapped

in black

and eclipse

and loss

and his beach in

our hands, sliding away

with every wave

and his hair twining

with the bright grass,

slipping between

blades to cradle

his rock of a head

until his breath drains out.

We wrap arms around

each other, but it’s

no good. We lay down

beneath the willow

tree, his sepia photo

wrinkled between

our hands, our hair

clinging to rough roots as

though the tree might

keep us from

the ground. We eat

handfuls of Daphne

berries, the red

glowing as we drop

them into our

mouths and sleep.

Research

So I've been doing the research I mentioned previously and there is a surprising abundance of public domain film footage on the internet. I've been scouring The Internet Archive and there's just a mess of videos, audio files, and still images (not to mention The WayBack Machine, which allows you to look at long dead websites). Sadly, the large amount of available material almost makes the job of creating film-poetry more difficult because there's so much to sift through before you find something that will work for your poem. I suspect what I need to do is find some footage that speaks to me and write around it rather than trying to find footage that fits with existing poetry. At the very least, that'd be a less time consuming way of creating.

I've only done one film-poem before, and I actually dubbed it a digital elegy back in 2007. It was an elegy I wrote for my grandmother and it combined still pictures of her along with various musical tracks and some random footage I filmed myself. It took forever, but the end product got me an "A" on my Senior Project for my undergrad degree, so well worth the time. However, I really would like to get this process streamlined so I'm not taking months to do one project. A couple weeks, at most, is my preferred timeline for producing a single film-poem.

As to subject matter, oi, whatever happens to pop into my head and inspire me at any given moment. ;p As they say, the sky is the limit.

Ugg...

So, another day begins. Well, it began quite awhile ago, but it still feels unbegun. And unbegun sure is a fun word that isn't really a word. ;p Anyway, going to start doing some research and some digging in an effort to find some decent public domain footage that I can use for one of my poems. Hopefully this will be a successful venture and I'll come away with footage that can be used on a variety of projects. Who knows, it could happen. lol

Btw...

The purpose of this blog is as a display for the film-poems I intend to create in the near future, as well as traditional poetry, random bits of fiction, and any other oddity I feel like writing about at any given moment. Consider yourselves warned. =)

A Brief Touch

So, I randomly decided to respond to a tweet by Neil Gaiman. And holy fuck he responded back!!! Discussing this interchange with my husband, I went full on fangirl. I then decided it was a good thing it was only one tweet and not actually meeting him because I'd probably have cried. I suspect this based on prior actions. The event I'm referencing was years ago at DragonCon where I saw Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca, for those who aren't utter geeks like me) from afar and instead of making an effort to go over and talk to him I just drug my feet and burst into tears. Yeah. Apparently I'm one of those kind of fangirls. Somebody shoot me for my own well being, please. Anyway, so yeah, my one shot at impressing a twonderiffic writer like @NeilHimself and I went with a Winnie the Pooh reference. Sigh!

So, yeah... Now I'm all anti-climactic downer girl. Coming down from a fangirl high sucks. ;p