Archives > fresh: March 2008
The fine folks at Southern Spaces have spent many weekends following me around to put together film versions of four of my poems which you can see here. Really, you can't imagine the number of hours they spent just with me, not to mention the much harder work of editing the raw footage into these beauties. I've been talking to my students, for years, about the music video as a heuristic for imagining a poem, but even when I was making my short films, I never thought this sort of presentation could be this good.
For me, the best part of the whole experience was getting to climb inside the model of Gadsden inside the Center for Cultural Arts to read part of "Gone With The Wind." I hadn't expected to be able to do that, but two of the gentlemen who maintain it were in the model that day and let me in. Strangely, it got me to thinking about the poems, almost all the poems, as kind of models of places in which I get to walk around, re-wire, even distort at times.... Anyone from Gadsden will know the model and will see, watching the footage of the model in the film, how it doesn't quite accurately represent the geography of the town, though it comes very close in the space available to it.