the old dog’s ribs
shift with each breath
these long nights
by James Brush
Year: 2014
This is a video remix of my poem “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea” made by NS. The poem can be found at The Poetry Storehouse, NS’s site that collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix” including a few of my own.
This is the first video made from one of my poems, and I was quite thrilled to see it. How fascinating and wonderful a thing to release one’s work and then have it come back like this. Truly, it made my day.
For those who may be interested, the poem was first “officially” published in August 2010 at Poets for Living Waters (along with two others) and was written in response to a prompt at the now-defunct Big Tent Poetry. Here are the process notes I wrote at the time:
This is for Big Tent Poetry’s weekly prompt. The form is called pantoum, and this is my first crack at one. I liked the repetitive spiraling nature of the form, which seemed an interesting fit for another of my post-apocalypse myths and legends poems (for want of a better term), though, I suspect pantoums are best kept short. The idea was to write in form about something that makes us angry so there’s some BP oil spill in this as well as a little bit of influence spilling over from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Using form to tame emotion is a good idea, I think. I’ve tried to write about the BP spill, but its hard to maintain control. Form helps. So does 3rd person narrative and walking so far down the chain of effects that I’m in a different world by the time I begin to write.
Thanks again to NS for creating The Poetry Storehouse and for taking the time and care to create this beautiful video.
the moon
cradled in elm
branches
plastic ghosts
sway on the wind
long autumn
shadows
full trees still
cling
to summer
a sulphur butterfly
rides prairie wind
late sunflowers
lean heavy
against a barbwire fence
everyone’s asleep
my footsteps in the dark house
the box fan rattles
autumn grass
sunglare scattered
in dry fields
This is a video I made for a Tim Suermondt poem at The Poetry Storehouse. The readers are NS and Amy Miller. The music is “Simple Delayed Guitar + Violin Loop” by Candle Nine from Soundcloud. All of the pieces that comprised the video had been released under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (the same one used here at Coyote Mercury). That license makes projects like this possible.
The video came about quite by accident. I was playing with Hyperlapse on my phone while at ACL Fest, just experimenting during Gaslight Anthem’s set. Later I came across the Suermondt poem and thought that some of the images might work with the poem.
I also liked the fact that the poem had multiple readings because I wanted to see what would happen with two different and distinct voices. I tried them both, and opted for NS’s as the front in part because it was shorter, and I didn’t have much footage.
I edited to the rhythm of the words and the video. Then went searching for music. I wanted something with guitars, and the Candle Nine piece at Soundcloud worked well, and was the correct length. This was a fun one to put together, and I’m pleased with the result.