Emerging Genres of Video Poetry

As poetry intersects with online video, we are seeing the emergence of new hybrid genres. Here is an attempt at surveying those genres. But before I get to my categories, I invite you to dive in and watch a video poem. Later on, at the end, I will come back to it for analysis. If you don't watch the rest of the sample video poetry in this post, watch this one. It matters. And it's done so very well. It's called "To This Day" and it is by Shane Koyczan:

To This Day from To This Day on Vimeo.

Without any analysis, I think it fair to say that a video like this proves that poetry is more than alive and well online in video form today. It's actually quite amazing. What did you think made it work so well?

Astronauts and the Otherworldliness of Poetry

I just tweeted to an astronaut.

He probably won't tweet back, since he's busy getting ready to return to earth tonight (which I plan to watch). But I had to thank him for pioneering the use of poetry in space. He has done the first-ever zero-G music video -- aptly performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity":

This is fascinating on many levels, but let me say a few words about how this represents a minor triumph for poetry -- something more than a mere publicity stunt. Let's think for a minute about how poetry itself has always been otherworldly.

The Personal Literary Narrative

Example of a personal literary narrative

My previous post, "Fully Empowered by Poetry," models a hybrid genre I wish for my students to imitate: the personal literary narrative.

This type of writing is a combination of three kinds of writing:

1. The personal essay
   It is framed as a personal narrative, and not as a detached academic analysis. It emphasizes individual perspective and attempts to convey the emotion of authentic, lived experience.
2. Literary criticism
   At the same time, integrated within this reflective piece, is literary analysis which fulfills the traditional function of literary criticism: it identifies and interprets both literary methods and themes -- form and content.
3. The blog post
   It has the casualness, brevity, and immediacy of online writing. It also is visually composed, with an accompanying image and text that is set off and spaced for easy consumption. This writing is also embedded in social media (links to the post were disseminated via Google+ and via Facebook, and these elicited immediate responses -- see below). 

Screenshot from my Google+ stream, showing quick response to post

Screenshot from my Facebook stream, showing responses
(see "likes" below)

Fully Empowered by Poetry

This is the story of the literary moment that changed me forever. And it centers on a single poem by Pablo Neruda that I stumbled across thirty years ago.

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being, 
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,

I was 17, taking a college course over the summer at the University of Utah while still in high school. In the bookstore I came across Pablo Neruda's Fully Empowered (from his Plenos Poderes of 1962), a slim volume with the Spanish in a thin column on the left page and Alastair Reid's fine translation on the right. The first poem I opened to was called "Births" ("Nacimientos").

and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.

This poem cast a spell on me, starting off tamely enough as a kind of philosophical musing, taking us outside of time to a place where birth and death are somehow both nostalgically distanced and personally proximate.

Ten Prompts for Blogging About Literature

Use a quotation

• as a post title (if brief)
• to provoke thought at the start of your post
• set off in the post with the block quote feature (or a larger font or different color)
• or post a set of quotes (not too long or too many) (example 1 | 2)

Tell a story

• about finding that great read
• about a book's influence on you
• about being read to aloud
• about reading as a child or to a child
• about a specific copy of a favorite book

Write a review

• in one sentence / in 140 characters (tweet)
• as a list of adjectives
• copied from your Goodreads
• targeted to a specific audience
• as a parody

Use a picture

• show your own stack of books or your bookshelf
• show yourself curled up with a book
• take a snap of a page from your book (with your notes? example)
• find a picture via Creative Commons related to your book's content
• show a screen shot of your Goodreads library shelves

The Utility of Poetry for Dentistry

While my son underwent the filling of two cavities today, the dentist asked me what I've been reading. I told him how I'd just begun teaching an introductory course in literature and how excited I was to cover a range of works with a fresh group of students.

He recited a ballad to us
as he filled two cavities for my son

This led to him telling us about how he learned some poetry from Mad Magazine back in the day, an odd remix of "Casey at Bat" and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." He even left my son with the suction running so he could ferret through his office to try to find me a copy of the poem. He'd kept it all these years.

"Has learning poetry made your life better?" I asked, fishing for some nugget to take back to my students.

"Do you know how many laughs I've gotten from reciting poetry?!"

And that led, inevitably, to his recounting the story of being a missionary in the South and coming across some toothless 95-year old man spitting tobacco into a can who recited to him the ballad of "Elmer and the Bear." Mark furiously wrote it down in a notebook and memorized it.

My son was late getting back to class because of Elmer. Our dentist took enormous pleasure at reciting the entire thing. He seriously stopped working and relished delivering the lines -- laughing behind his mask. His assistant patiently waited, with a look on her face like she'd heard this ballad a few times before.

So here's the kicker. My teenage son had been pretty down in the mouth, so to speak, about getting these cavities filled. One might even say he was surly. But by the time Dr. Fullmer had finished his bear ballad, my son was smiling.

Yep, literature is equipment for living.

Let's Analyze Literature

This blog is intended to assist students, teachers, and anyone who wishes to appreciate literature on those levels only available to those who study it closely.

The title of this blog is pun, a kind of wordplay that plays off of separate meanings for the same word. "Coming to terms" is meant literally, in the sense that this blog will invite its readers to learn terminology for literary analysis. "Coming to terms" is also meant idiomatically in the sense of "dealing with" or "being equal to" something. Another connotation for "coming to terms" is resigning oneself to something. Well, not every connotation is going to work in your favor.

There are risks in using literary form. But there are also risks in ignoring it, falling prey to superficial or even abusive uses of language and art. I'm in favor of becoming more aware of and skilled in literary method. This is one reason why I have created this blog, as well as its subsidiary blogs that my students will be maintaining:

• Coming to Terms with Fiction
• Coming to Terms with Poetry
• Coming to Terms with Drama
• Coming to Terms with Creative Non-Fiction

In this blog I will address more general issues about analyzing literature and the methods of writing informally or more formally about it. In the breakout blogs, features of each category of literature will receive more specialized treatment by my students.