All that's needed now is PTV or MuchPoetry. The videopoem's day has finally arrived.
The one to mark on the calendar is Thursday when the most recent local production is screened at Pageboy Books.
A videopoem is, like its music counterpart, a visual accompaniment to a reading or live performance of a poem. Unlike its music counterpart, at least in most cases, the aim of the videopoem is to deepen or strengthen the literary content, not just act as a glossy TV brochure or eye-stunt to draw attention.
We saw an early low-stress version of the videopoem in 2007 when slam-poet Shane Koyczan spoke his iconic love letter to Canada straight into a stationary camera with the Vancouver skyline and the Coast Mountains in the background. We Are More has more than 300,000 YouTube hits so far, and earned Koyczan a feature spot in the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Now his list of videos is so numerous and his production value so much more complex that it's hard to find the original We Are More without directly searching for it.
Leading the videopoem industry in Prince George veteran scribe Al Rempel. It began in 2012 when Rempel collaborated first with visual artist Phil Morrison on a project called Sky Canoe. Morrison cut the lines of Rempel's poem into the hull of a canoe, but then they pushed it out into water in more ways than one. For the actual launch of the literal and literary vessel, Steph St. Laurent recorded the happening on high-quality camera including underwater footage. Experimental musician Jeremy Stewart was then approached about adding an appropriate musicscape.
Rempel was hooked, and St. Laurent was caught on the same line. They also rendered Rempel's poem Eloise the same year, a simple reading of the poem over a wash of blurry, what?, clouds in the sky? Grass in a field? The silhouette of tree branches through a window? It was hard to tell.
The two worked together again on Is This Beulah Land, adding the speaking voice of Teresa DeReis, with Stewart again providing soundtrack. This was more visually involved, the poem overlaid by footage of highway travel, still-life images, daily scenes, even some time-lapse videography and production value like capturing a fish snapping up a spider on the surface of still water.
Now, on Thursday night, the curtain is pulled back on Paper Clothes, their latest and most complex collaboration.
"This is a collaboration with Maureen Hamilton, Raghu Lokanathan, Steph and myself," Rempel said. "We incorporated shadow puppetry, overlaid onto a real-time background that Steph created, and the two were filmed together. There is some old-school components with overhead projector to do the shadow puppetry, but then added in is the high tech stuff like time-lapse photography."
St. Laurent is now an experienced creator of videopoems, and as the proprietor of Video Nexus and affectionately known by the nickname Steph Thevideoguy, he has a tall inventory of those skills and tools. But he is also a well-versed poet himself, so he thinks along the same lines.
"It allows me to understand when something is incongruous - when you have visuals that in no way work with the spoken word. I know it immediately," St. Laurent said. "Commonly I'll hear one of Al's pieces or read one of his pieces and think 'ok, lets work with this image and this image' and plan it out. It is not just a roll of the dice. I see the symbols he's working with and if I don't work with those symbols in a vague but metaphoric sense, then I'm not doing the work it's service."
Rempel said the process was a bit of a hand-over each time, to the interpretations of the collaborators, but that was part of the fun for him, and he trusts their skills with his poems. That said, he does have some expectations of his own of art in general, especially when applied to his.
"A videopoem is more than just putting pictures to the poem," Rempel said. "It is a new genre that blends the video, audio and poetry together, hopefully in a way that's more than straight representational. If your poem mentions the word tree, you don't necessarily show an image of a tree. It's adding another level to make it another art form."
St. Laurent agreed that art is purposefully about functional symbolism and metaphor more often than carving literal meanings out of stone or stage or page. When one artist, himself, is asked to bring his skills to a preexisting work, Rempel's, his job was partially the science of staying out of the artistic way.
"Al's work is quite accessible, and I do my best to make it inaccessible, to make it more open ended or ambiguous in the imagery," St. Laurent said. "Some of the most informative works that I know and respect is the Koyaanisqatsi Trilogy. [Started in 1982, this collaboration includes film director Godfrey Reggio, music composer Philip Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke.] My inspiration for the poetic vision is this three films. It is visuals with no narrative. They allow you to create the narrative individually, mentally. So while Al's work gives you words that provide you an idea of a narrative, the visuals will only allow you to decode for yourself what it means or what you should take from it. Good art shouldn't tell you what to think."
On Thursday at 7 p.m. at Pageboy Books (on Specialty Avenue, across from Zoe's Coffeeshop) Rempel, St. Laurent and their collaborators will screen Paper Clothes for the first time. They will preface the unveiling with a showing of some of those past videopoems, and there will also be live performances by Rempel, St. Laurent, Stewart, KD Taylor, Lisa Haslett, and other guests. Expect live music and refreshments as well at this event.
