This is the videopoem I made for “drylung” by Clayton Michaels. It comes from his chapbook, Watermark, winner of the 2010 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest.
About a month ago, Dave Bonta and Beth Adams, co-managing editors at qarrtsiluni asked if I would be interested in doing a video for one of the poems from Watermark. They sent the manuscript, which proved to be an embarrassment of riches. I read it a few times, went back and forth with a few and settled on “drylung.”
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Last Summer we were on the tail end of a two-and-a-half year drought here in central Texas. The lakes were drying up. The aquifers were emptying. Austin and San Antonio were imposing harsh water use restrictions and through all those 105°F days, there was the underlying sense that this was the future. Those in the know—politicians and policymakers, the few who try to think long term—claim that water will be the issue in Texas in the 21st century.
Parts of Lake Travis that hadn’t seen the sun in decades were exposed, and docks and boats were marooned hundreds of yards inland. Everything shriveled as the ground compacted and cracked so slowly it could almost seem normal at times.
In October, the rains came and the drought ended. We had one of the wettest, coldest winters in a long time. Memory of such things is short and so water, or the lack thereof, was soon forgotten.
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Mars.
Ever since I was a kid in the ’70s in Washington, DC where the Air & Space Museum was my favorite place, Mars has fascinated me. I can scroll endlessly through the images beamed back by NASA’s rovers. Mars is beautiful and stark. It is the subject of a few of my poems, one published earlier this year at qarrtsiluni and another here at Coyote Mercury. I’m even writing a novel (slowly, too slowly) set on Mars, that world from which all the water really has left (actually, it’s possibly still there, trapped below the surface in a layer of permafrost, but I digress).
Texas and Mars collided in “drylung.” In my mind, it sounded like prophecy such as one might hear between channels on a weather radio. This summer had been (it isn’t now) unusually mild. Mid-90s and regular rain. It was easy to forget the previous year. “drylung” forced memory and took me to Mars where ancient water likely flowed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to make this video. Thanks to Beth and Dave for inviting me to do this and for their suggestions on improving the final edit. Thanks to Clayton for his wonderful poem and reading and for allowing me to interpret his work like this.
Watermark will be published August 30th. You’ll be able to read it and listen to Clayton read his poems at watermarkpoems.com, and you can order it from Phoenicia Publishing. I’ve got a few of Phoenicia’s books, and they’re tip-top all the way and speaking as someone who’s had the privilege of reading Watermark, I recommend buying a copy. It’s an incredibly good read, the kind that makes me want to be a better writer.
Yesterday, whilst engaged in some offline analog projects, two literary sites were kind enough to publish some of my work.
The first, Poets for Living Waters, “a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster,” featured 3 of my poems. The poems “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea” (thanks for the prompt, Deb!), “The Desert Years,” and “Galveston, Last Summer” all appeared in slightly different form here at Coyote Mercury.
Thanks to the editors of these fine online journals for publishing these poems, and as always, have a look around. There is wonderful work to be found at both of these sites.
Three o’clock in the afternoon,
central Texas summer day,
over a hundred degrees out.
I know there will be no birds,
nothing but grackles and vultures.
I still go out, and I’m not surprised.
Only grackles seem to like this heat.
The other birds hold still like
knots in the trees, silent waiting for dusk,
trying to keep their colors from melting
into the brown grass and faded leaves.
Overhead a few vultures soar on
steady outstretched wings,
folding sky and letting it move
around and over them as they ride
thermals up to more temperate
atmospheric zones. Meanwhile,
the grackles and I enjoy the heat
until the other birds begin to stir
and it’s time for me to go home.
Yesterday what with celebrating Joey’s birthday and all, I forgot to link to a handful of stones. My poem “Highway 73 to Port Arthur” is up over there, though I submitted it untitled and that’s how it appears. It’s an attempt to describe the scene along highway 73 in southeast Texas after the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which came only 3 years after Hurricane Rita did a number on the region.
In other cool news, two of my poems are included in Austin-based Virgogray Press’s latest chapbook anthology: America Remembered. The poems, which first appeared here at Coyote Mercury, are “Trickle Down Hope” and “Deeper into Texas.” The former was a response to a Read Write Poem prompt. In fact, I think it’s the first prompt I did over at RWP. The latter was also a response to an RWP prompt, though parts of it where taken from a draft of an older poem. I originally called it “It’s Like a Whole Other Country.” You can order copies of America Rememberedhere.
This is my first attempt at a video poem. I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.
Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic ap, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.
The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.
Here’s the text of the poem. The title is from a bumper sticker I saw twice last weekend while driving through the hill country outside Austin:
God Bless Johnny Cash
I drove to the river;
it followed me home.
Sweated the night surrounded
by lesser freshwater demons.
Sang pelagic chantys
heard second hand
from deep-gulleted
birds plucking a thunder bass.
The earth ate the moon,
broke the fall of morning.
Twisted roads passed tallgrass hills
that can’t remember trees.
In the morning, I prayed
the dusty pick-up truck petition,