Medium Specificity

What’s in a word

                or two or three

                or two?

In the matching and setting and pairing of words

There’s a magic, a sound; it’s, like, almost a taste.

It’s a rhythm, a flavor from copy and paste

Like a Utah boy hearing Australian birds.

Words.

It’s more than just a story,

unless it’s just a story.

But it rings when it’s true

                it dings when it’s true

It rings and it dings and it sings when it’s true.

And there’s thought involved

                    thoughts involved

              and thoughts evolved

       when the heart’s involved.

or

Once upon a later evening, at Grandma’s house, your dad believing

You and brother would enjoy a sampling of poetic form.

Though you don’t catch all the meaning, something in it feels like dreaming,

Or like moonlight softly beaming –

Beaming on a darkened shore.

When it ends you’re left to ponder feelings never felt before –

Which you’ve held forevermore. 

It’s comfortable, harsh, consistent, contradictory, meticulous, natural, and overall

concise.

It’s poetry, proof that words can express.


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                What’s there to say about poetry?  Honestly, it’s a hard topic to deal with.  For some reason, these past couple generations haven’t upheld the medium as others have, and so it has gained a pretentious connotation or is seen through a light full of flowers, and wussies, and silly romantics.  But it’s an art form.  That’s what it is. 

                My approach to this poem of poems was to utilize different poetic techniques.  The first stanza, of course, quotes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I also kind of pulled from Eliot by repeating myself and creating a sort of structured form only to abandon it.  And I abandoned it for my favorite rhyming pattern:  A B B A (words, taste, paste, birds).  This stanza was originally how I intended to start the poem, using a structured rhythm and rhyme, which, for a long time, was one of the distinguishing features of the medium.  I chose to bookend the piece with more of a free verse style, instead, keeping the more structured (including ascetically structured) in the center.

                Some poems are more narrative than others.  Of course Edgar Poe’s “The Raven” is one of the most famous narrative poems.  To pay tribute to the narrative style and to the poem itself, I told a story through the structure of “The Raven.”  The story I told was of the first time I heard the poem.  My dad read it to my brother and me, before bedtime, while we were living at my grandma’s house sleeping on futons.  It haunted me for reasons I didn’t understand.  I was maybe 8 or 9 years old at the time and didn’t know much about pallid busts of Pallas or about plutonian shores, but I did know about ravens and shadows and souls, and I understood the feeling of the words.

                That’s the magic of poetry to me:  one word pared with another pared with others and placed together just so perfectly so can create feelings and moods beyond what the words themselves mean.  And speaking of moods, that’s one of the chief characterizations of poetry to me.  If another work of art is, to me, poetic, like a movie for example, it will often be less through its symbolism and metaphors and more through its use of tone and mood.  I tried to keep a consistent focus on word paring and a consistent mood of wonder.

I began this poem asking about words, and I ended it by referencing a phrase that I wish more people would forget.  Often times, people say “words can’t express.”  Words can’t express what you mean to me, what the view was like, the horror of the situation, etc.  I disagree.  Words can express, it just takes time and careful paring.  Many poets, as Cody loves to discover, write a single thought over and over throughout dozens of poems until they get it right.  The last poem of the series will often pull lines from the previous struggles, pull them and place them just so.  Then the thought is captured and the poet moves on.  

Historical Story

Our Screenplay: Burying the Dead

James:  This project presented new challenges. First was the commencement. This project was uniquely difficult starting. Chris had some experience with screenwriting, but it couldn't have been more foreign to me. And answering one question only leads to more questions. How long does it take to put the dog away? Where does she put it? Why is the dog like this? And the list goes on and on. It can in fact be quite discouraging to navigate through the sea of endless possibilities. However, what work to our advantage was the difference in writing styles of Chris and I. Chris is more reflective and thoughtful. And I on the other hand like to dive in with half a solution and get my hands dirty. The both of us working together created the perfect productive balance. And I believe I can speak for us both when I say that we are very proud of the final product.

            Our first historical reference is the basis for the story itself. My grandmother, Carol Hall, has long told me about the story of her great grandmother, Hannah Kirby, a woman who converted to the LDS faith, lost her husband and left England to come join the saints in Salt Lake City. Her husband did in fact did come to visit her in the United States after being presumed dead, however under what circumstances I don’t know. So Chris and I decided that the scene would be most dramatically played out on the front porch of her Utahan house with her new family. Selecting a date was another difficult decision. We figured that World War 2 would be the best option. Chris had the idea of the father (Shane) being wounded and rescued by French soldiers. We found that at Dunkirk there was a battle in 1940 where the Germans repelled the French and British forces back, which acted as another historical reference point for us. It was the perfect set up for the story!

Chris:  This was a stronger process than with the Round Robin or the audio/process piece.  There was more at stake.  This story was based on one of James’ family members, his great grandma.  Not only did I have to work hard to do myself proud or James proud, I had to honor the memory of real people in a real time period.  We had to.  For this reason, the rough draft was really tough for me.  I’m glad we read it in class, because the final product was born out of that reading.  All of the sudden, the hidden flaws were very apparent, which wasn’t discouraging but invigorating.  We re-planned, re-formatted.

James and I, throughout the project, after an initial meeting, mostly passed drafts back and forth, adding and making suggestions to each other’s work.  This was a similar approach to how David Byrne and St. Vincent together created their album “Love This Giant.”  Someone else paired them together, they discussed it in person, and then, being the busy people they are, would work on fragments alone, sending them to each other by email.  To their mutual surprise, their fragments would return resembling an actual song.  Little by little for James and me, we ended up with something beautiful.  It’s grounded in history as well as in heart.  

Process Project - by Chris and Leo

Our Sound Project : Balloon Animal

We focused on the process of creating a balloon animal by separating it into its individual steps and components:  stretching out the balloon, using the pump, tying the end, and bending and twisting the balloon into its animal shape.  We also included possible problems: the balloon flying off the pump and popping by overstretching. The form, obviously audio, provided a good arena for this process as each of the events described above provided unique sounds that added to the texture of the overall work. Finally, in the end, the recipient of the animal isn’t all that jazzed with the final product, despite all of the effort put into it. This problem of unappreciative recipients is not uncommon.  How many times have we been critical of a film, play, song that maybe ended up being something other than what we expected? 

In contrast, I heard of a film producer who, after each and every film he saw, would stand and applaud, knowing just how hard it is to get any film made.  Looking at the all the balloon animal steps helped to show us that a product cannot be fully understood without appreciating its process. Even the process of creating this piece; and the little bit of time that it took to brainstorm, plan, execute, and edit; gave us a greater appreciation for art in general, especially that of sound design, and the effort that is put into even a simple 1-2 minute audio work. But in even this short process of creation we as co-creators got to know each other better. When the process becomes the focus, appreciation for the product is enhanced, but, more importantly, a connection to the people involved in the process is strengthened.

We saw this in the short films that we watched with week. In “Scriptures” of course we gained insight and appreciation into the process of family scripture study. But even more importantly we gained a real human connection with Dean’s family as we witnessed scripture study unfold. Because we saw them perform a process we know them better. The same could be said of Commoner’s “The Smokehouse.” We don’t gain a connection with Rohan Anderson by simply seeing the finished smokehouse, we become connected with him, his life, as we participate in the process with him. In the end, humanity is found not in product but in the process.

It is easy to be fooled, when looking at process pieces, that nothing is happening. In Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday it might appear, at first, that plot or story is absent. Plot maybe, but story, no. Because the viewer has spent the entire process of vacation with M. Hulot, by the end the viewer finds herself wishing, with the rest of the characters, that they did not have to leave and that they will see him again. And so, the story is not entirely what unfolds on screen, but in the connection made between the viewer, the characters, and the filmmaker. Processes can do that. Processes, in reality, make up life, draw us closer together, and give us insight and appreciation for those whom we might not know otherwise.