Reading Canadian Poetry with its Experimental Films

My affinity for experimental film stems from my love for poetry. Best-selling novels and big budget features get profiled constantly in the media, while avant-garde film and poetry is often overlooked. Maybe it’s because they lack the glitz, glamour, and gossip that their counterparts do.However, there is much to be said for the beauty of poetry by linking it to the cinematic essay form. An experimental director condenses an idea within visuals, sound, and often, time constraints. Like a reader processing verse, a viewer interprets avant-garde film images using their own internal schemas and learned archetypes. Avant-garde filmmakers often say that there is far more freedom in doing their work because they are almost entirely in control of it. Poets are also liberated in the mediums they choose. There are so many rhythms and fashions available to them and if the poet doesn’t find what suits their vision they are free to create a new way to conceive their poetry.During film festivals I often take poetry books with me because they are something small I can digest while waiting in line or for the film the start. More often than not, a weird synchronicity occurs. Read on as I compare three Canadian experimental films with three Canadian poetry books to show how poetry and avant-garde film can form an interesting connection when read and seen side by side.(Dowker, “DNA assemblage”)Dowker is attuned to the land that envelops life around language-made connections. Sensorium is nature’s internal communicator. It warns of dangers, discovers nourishment, and helps find safe shelter. Flakes of mica are contrasted with the intentional patterns of embroidered cotton that is itself formed from living beings.Long after the gears of modern life die out, the elements of survival will still exist, but without a need of their assemblage to form an existence. What is life without meaning? Life is just presence without a purpose in this poem, like letters are just abstractions when they are not forming words in Paterson’s film. Words and images are powerful architectural tools when they are used to communicate feeling such as grief or loss. They can also help create thought-provoking evaluations of people or places by subverting or remixing the visuals and texts that are associated with them. Furthermore, stripping bare visuals and our means of communications to its foundation in letters exposes a possibility for recreation and renewal. These days, language and symbols form and evolve rapidly over time. Experimentation in film and poetry is an anchor by which artists can create new coping schemas and mechanisms through their artworks.Poetry and experimental film take the fabrics of their formation and spill them onto the page, the screen, and the ever-consuming internal view-master of the human mind. These mediums always interplay in synchronous ways in my brain and it is extraordinarily fun to find myself digesting a poet’s words while I watch a filmmaker’s dream come to life.* * *Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and The Barnstormer among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto. Jacqueline previously wrote about poetry as the conceptual experiment of language for the All Lit Up blog.

Public Lighting (2004) by Mike Hoolboom, like Queyras MxT, is a film divided into chapters. Instead of grief, though, this film is about personality. Hoolboom makes collages out of clips of people that include family, reality, and advertising. He superimposes fictions upon the images, sounds, and voices to create moving narratives between the seven sections.The sixth and most well known of the sections is called, “Hey Madonna,” where the director splices footage of Madonna’s “Truth Or Dare,” “Vogue,” and “Oh Father,” and places it within the story of a gay man who is dying of AIDS. The man is said to have once slept with Madonna and pens a letter to her wondering how it must feel to be in her shoes.The narcissism, glamour, and fame she holds in the present will be nothing to her after death. This examination of a celebrity life is both a fan letter to the artifice of fame and the existential means that film and photography can create the illusion of immortality. Film stars can somehow cheat death.Montparnasse in the 1920s is a time and place replete with characters and personality, not unlike the modern day Madonna. Amanda Earl’s poetry collection, Kiki (Chaudiere Books) utilizes the cut up technique to provide a surrealist view of that era. Kiki, aka Alice Ernestine Prin, was one of its icons and is the central character in Earl’s poems.(Earl)

Kiki was a model, singer, actress, writer, and painter. She helped build the romanticized view we now have of 1920s Paris. She grew up in poverty, but made a name for herself, and others, through her talents and creativity. In the poem, Earl shows Kiki bearing witness to the artistic residents of La Ruche. It is a place where the once poor now sell in the millions. It claims Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani as its previous inhabitants.Kiki struggled while her male counterparts flourished. Many of them used her body as a muse for their art, including Sandy Calder in this poem with his wire sculptures. Through newsreels artists became instant celebrities. Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, never became as famous as those she inspired.(Earl)The reader will find a lot of phrases like these repeated (“This is Alice. This is fucked up.” is found often at the first section of the collection), due to the cut up method, but they invariably reveal alternate meanings within the words of Earl’s sources. In the verse above, Kiki imagines herself like a rose stripped bare of its thorns, regaled, but still only defined by her beautiful petals.She is arranged in print as means to express love in art. Her fame is tenuous and only becomes permanent after her death. In real life, she dies from complications of alcoholism and drug dependence. The depressive realities in living like a true bohemian take her, but leave an indelible and triumphant image:(Earl)* * *

Icons, though, don’t have to be people. Sometimes the structures of language itself can become the image source for filmmakers. Andrew James Paterson’s Roman Spring Leakage (2001) is composed of coloured gels, colour bars, pulsing colours, and white text. The title is a reference to the Roman alphabet system and in the progression of the film has each of the twenty-four letters showcased with “j” and “u” missing.These two letters are then imposed upon the other letters to form abstractions in its collage. The letters don’t create words and they don’t communicate directly to the reader except through their appearance in the film. Without traditionally forming words like they are supposed to, the letters in the film become a meaningless husk of language detritus, showing how letters and the words they form cannot fully contain the meanings they express. Formal language will inexorably “leak” their intention into the ether and letters will become desultory.Technology allows a poet to render letters and language in a similar fashion. In David Dowker’s Machine Language (BookThug), verses read like an old school ticker tape machine sending out messages, images, and at times, even numbers like a networking rhizome.(Dowker, “DNA assemblage”)Dowker is attuned to the land that envelops life around language-made connections. Sensorium is nature’s internal communicator. It warns of dangers, discovers nourishment, and helps find safe shelter. Flakes of mica are contrasted with the intentional patterns of embroidered cotton that is itself formed from living beings.Long after the gears of modern life die out, the elements of survival will still exist, but without a need of their assemblage to form an existence. What is life without meaning? Life is just presence without a purpose in this poem, like letters are just abstractions when they are not forming words in Paterson’s film. Words and images are powerful architectural tools when they are used to communicate feeling such as grief or loss. They can also help create thought-provoking evaluations of people or places by subverting or remixing the visuals and texts that are associated with them. Furthermore, stripping bare visuals and our means of communications to its foundation in letters exposes a possibility for recreation and renewal. These days, language and symbols form and evolve rapidly over time. Experimentation in film and poetry is an anchor by which artists can create new coping schemas and mechanisms through their artworks.Poetry and experimental film take the fabrics of their formation and spill them onto the page, the screen, and the ever-consuming internal view-master of the human mind. These mediums always interplay in synchronous ways in my brain and it is extraordinarily fun to find myself digesting a poet’s words while I watch a filmmaker’s dream come to life.* * *Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and The Barnstormer among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto. Jacqueline previously wrote about poetry as the conceptual experiment of language for the All Lit Up blog.

Crack, Brutal, Grief (2000) by experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder is inspired by a friend’s violent suicide by chainsaw. It was made as a way for Elder to deal with the devastating grief he felt in that loss. The images in the movie are mixtures of brutality and pornography. They are then degraded through film processing and result in abstract textures and hues. All of the visuals are taken from the internet and through their reassemblage become moldable structures that extoll the fragility of the body in human hands.Web-based images, no matter how they are filtered, are mutual exchanges based on popular societal images. Those images can be calming or assaultive, but they are often there to provoke a reaction in the viewer. Death evokes strong feelings because it reveals a lack of control over our lives, especially to protect the ones we love. Elder takes the emotional chaos of his mourning and forms a cohesive and interpretable pastiche in what most people see every day on their computer monitors. Film can help a filmmaker, and in turn a viewer, try to make sense out of something so calamitous as death. Similarly in poetry, words can be used in the very same way.In MxT (Coach House Books) Sina Queyras attempts to create a machine to help parse grief. It is divided into nine chapters that read like mathematical descriptors and a graphed view of mourning. One chapter starts with a drawing of a geared mechanism and the following:

One of the poems in this section is “Over To You” whereby the poet writes:“There will be no one to write an elegy for me and so I am writing my own now, I want you to keep up with me. I want you to feel the way the wind holds a bird, or a balloon, the slightly different movement of feather versus plastics, smooth surfaces gliding, dodging, come lie under the red balloon with me, come trace the horizontal motion…”“Can the situation of breasts be about life? I want to pitch you this idea. I want you not to tell me this is too abstract. Women’s bodies are fairly solid. They stack well. They are a current item…”(Queyras)And ends with:“It takes so long to say anything. I haven’t time to be optimistic.Spit. Breathe. Carry on.I did not want to air my feelings.Fuck you who eat feelings.”(Queyras)While are no explanations for the machine described in the chapter diagram, the poem itself is the apparatus in action. The poet creates a comprehensible framework for the reader to go through by writing a eulogy made up of her own emotions and pictures that are full of meaning to her. The images of a red plastic balloon compared to the lightness of a feather are contrasted and shared as a way to navigate the reader through the grief that comes ahead.The poet details the things she has seen and experienced and then frames it in the struggle for women to be heard. Breasts give life but can also take life away in the cancer that often affects them. She makes clear her vision for what she wants those in mourning to know, but also recognizes the possibility of the erasure of her feelings despite her explicit affirmations. The order she frames her confident images in become hardened stances for validation of those emotions.She ends by cursing the inevitable and thereby preventing the “excess of excessive feeling from damaging,” her sense of independent hope. Like Elder with his visuals, Queyras takes over the reins of her grieving processes to create malleable texts for her readers to use as tools to deal with death.* * *

Public Lighting (2004) by Mike Hoolboom, like Queyras MxT, is a film divided into chapters. Instead of grief, though, this film is about personality. Hoolboom makes collages out of clips of people that include family, reality, and advertising. He superimposes fictions upon the images, sounds, and voices to create moving narratives between the seven sections.The sixth and most well known of the sections is called, “Hey Madonna,” where the director splices footage of Madonna’s “Truth Or Dare,” “Vogue,” and “Oh Father,” and places it within the story of a gay man who is dying of AIDS. The man is said to have once slept with Madonna and pens a letter to her wondering how it must feel to be in her shoes.The narcissism, glamour, and fame she holds in the present will be nothing to her after death. This examination of a celebrity life is both a fan letter to the artifice of fame and the existential means that film and photography can create the illusion of immortality. Film stars can somehow cheat death.Montparnasse in the 1920s is a time and place replete with characters and personality, not unlike the modern day Madonna. Amanda Earl’s poetry collection, Kiki (Chaudiere Books) utilizes the cut up technique to provide a surrealist view of that era. Kiki, aka Alice Ernestine Prin, was one of its icons and is the central character in Earl’s poems.(Earl)

Kiki was a model, singer, actress, writer, and painter. She helped build the romanticized view we now have of 1920s Paris. She grew up in poverty, but made a name for herself, and others, through her talents and creativity. In the poem, Earl shows Kiki bearing witness to the artistic residents of La Ruche. It is a place where the once poor now sell in the millions. It claims Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani as its previous inhabitants.Kiki struggled while her male counterparts flourished. Many of them used her body as a muse for their art, including Sandy Calder in this poem with his wire sculptures. Through newsreels artists became instant celebrities. Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, never became as famous as those she inspired.(Earl)The reader will find a lot of phrases like these repeated (“This is Alice. This is fucked up.” is found often at the first section of the collection), due to the cut up method, but they invariably reveal alternate meanings within the words of Earl’s sources. In the verse above, Kiki imagines herself like a rose stripped bare of its thorns, regaled, but still only defined by her beautiful petals.She is arranged in print as means to express love in art. Her fame is tenuous and only becomes permanent after her death. In real life, she dies from complications of alcoholism and drug dependence. The depressive realities in living like a true bohemian take her, but leave an indelible and triumphant image:(Earl)* * *

Icons, though, don’t have to be people. Sometimes the structures of language itself can become the image source for filmmakers. Andrew James Paterson’s Roman Spring Leakage (2001) is composed of coloured gels, colour bars, pulsing colours, and white text. The title is a reference to the Roman alphabet system and in the progression of the film has each of the twenty-four letters showcased with “j” and “u” missing.These two letters are then imposed upon the other letters to form abstractions in its collage. The letters don’t create words and they don’t communicate directly to the reader except through their appearance in the film. Without traditionally forming words like they are supposed to, the letters in the film become a meaningless husk of language detritus, showing how letters and the words they form cannot fully contain the meanings they express. Formal language will inexorably “leak” their intention into the ether and letters will become desultory.Technology allows a poet to render letters and language in a similar fashion. In David Dowker’s Machine Language (BookThug), verses read like an old school ticker tape machine sending out messages, images, and at times, even numbers like a networking rhizome.(Dowker, “DNA assemblage”)Dowker is attuned to the land that envelops life around language-made connections. Sensorium is nature’s internal communicator. It warns of dangers, discovers nourishment, and helps find safe shelter. Flakes of mica are contrasted with the intentional patterns of embroidered cotton that is itself formed from living beings.Long after the gears of modern life die out, the elements of survival will still exist, but without a need of their assemblage to form an existence. What is life without meaning? Life is just presence without a purpose in this poem, like letters are just abstractions when they are not forming words in Paterson’s film. Words and images are powerful architectural tools when they are used to communicate feeling such as grief or loss. They can also help create thought-provoking evaluations of people or places by subverting or remixing the visuals and texts that are associated with them. Furthermore, stripping bare visuals and our means of communications to its foundation in letters exposes a possibility for recreation and renewal. These days, language and symbols form and evolve rapidly over time. Experimentation in film and poetry is an anchor by which artists can create new coping schemas and mechanisms through their artworks.Poetry and experimental film take the fabrics of their formation and spill them onto the page, the screen, and the ever-consuming internal view-master of the human mind. These mediums always interplay in synchronous ways in my brain and it is extraordinarily fun to find myself digesting a poet’s words while I watch a filmmaker’s dream come to life.* * *Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and The Barnstormer among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto. Jacqueline previously wrote about poetry as the conceptual experiment of language for the All Lit Up blog.

Public Lighting (2004) by Mike Hoolboom, like Queyras MxT, is a film divided into chapters. Instead of grief, though, this film is about personality. Hoolboom makes collages out of clips of people that include family, reality, and advertising. He superimposes fictions upon the images, sounds, and voices to create moving narratives between the seven sections.The sixth and most well known of the sections is called, “Hey Madonna,” where the director splices footage of Madonna’s “Truth Or Dare,” “Vogue,” and “Oh Father,” and places it within the story of a gay man who is dying of AIDS. The man is said to have once slept with Madonna and pens a letter to her wondering how it must feel to be in her shoes.The narcissism, glamour, and fame she holds in the present will be nothing to her after death. This examination of a celebrity life is both a fan letter to the artifice of fame and the existential means that film and photography can create the illusion of immortality. Film stars can somehow cheat death.Montparnasse in the 1920s is a time and place replete with characters and personality, not unlike the modern day Madonna. Amanda Earl’s poetry collection, Kiki (Chaudiere Books) utilizes the cut up technique to provide a surrealist view of that era. Kiki, aka Alice Ernestine Prin, was one of its icons and is the central character in Earl’s poems.(Earl)

Kiki was a model, singer, actress, writer, and painter. She helped build the romanticized view we now have of 1920s Paris. She grew up in poverty, but made a name for herself, and others, through her talents and creativity. In the poem, Earl shows Kiki bearing witness to the artistic residents of La Ruche. It is a place where the once poor now sell in the millions. It claims Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani as its previous inhabitants.Kiki struggled while her male counterparts flourished. Many of them used her body as a muse for their art, including Sandy Calder in this poem with his wire sculptures. Through newsreels artists became instant celebrities. Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, never became as famous as those she inspired.(Earl)The reader will find a lot of phrases like these repeated (“This is Alice. This is fucked up.” is found often at the first section of the collection), due to the cut up method, but they invariably reveal alternate meanings within the words of Earl’s sources. In the verse above, Kiki imagines herself like a rose stripped bare of its thorns, regaled, but still only defined by her beautiful petals.She is arranged in print as means to express love in art. Her fame is tenuous and only becomes permanent after her death. In real life, she dies from complications of alcoholism and drug dependence. The depressive realities in living like a true bohemian take her, but leave an indelible and triumphant image:(Earl)* * *

Icons, though, don’t have to be people. Sometimes the structures of language itself can become the image source for filmmakers. Andrew James Paterson’s Roman Spring Leakage (2001) is composed of coloured gels, colour bars, pulsing colours, and white text. The title is a reference to the Roman alphabet system and in the progression of the film has each of the twenty-four letters showcased with “j” and “u” missing.These two letters are then imposed upon the other letters to form abstractions in its collage. The letters don’t create words and they don’t communicate directly to the reader except through their appearance in the film. Without traditionally forming words like they are supposed to, the letters in the film become a meaningless husk of language detritus, showing how letters and the words they form cannot fully contain the meanings they express. Formal language will inexorably “leak” their intention into the ether and letters will become desultory.Technology allows a poet to render letters and language in a similar fashion. In David Dowker’s Machine Language (BookThug), verses read like an old school ticker tape machine sending out messages, images, and at times, even numbers like a networking rhizome.(Dowker, “DNA assemblage”)Dowker is attuned to the land that envelops life around language-made connections. Sensorium is nature’s internal communicator. It warns of dangers, discovers nourishment, and helps find safe shelter. Flakes of mica are contrasted with the intentional patterns of embroidered cotton that is itself formed from living beings.Long after the gears of modern life die out, the elements of survival will still exist, but without a need of their assemblage to form an existence. What is life without meaning? Life is just presence without a purpose in this poem, like letters are just abstractions when they are not forming words in Paterson’s film. Words and images are powerful architectural tools when they are used to communicate feeling such as grief or loss. They can also help create thought-provoking evaluations of people or places by subverting or remixing the visuals and texts that are associated with them. Furthermore, stripping bare visuals and our means of communications to its foundation in letters exposes a possibility for recreation and renewal. These days, language and symbols form and evolve rapidly over time. Experimentation in film and poetry is an anchor by which artists can create new coping schemas and mechanisms through their artworks.Poetry and experimental film take the fabrics of their formation and spill them onto the page, the screen, and the ever-consuming internal view-master of the human mind. These mediums always interplay in synchronous ways in my brain and it is extraordinarily fun to find myself digesting a poet’s words while I watch a filmmaker’s dream come to life.* * *Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and The Barnstormer among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto. Jacqueline previously wrote about poetry as the conceptual experiment of language for the All Lit Up blog.

Crack, Brutal, Grief (2000) by experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder is inspired by a friend’s violent suicide by chainsaw. It was made as a way for Elder to deal with the devastating grief he felt in that loss. The images in the movie are mixtures of brutality and pornography. They are then degraded through film processing and result in abstract textures and hues. All of the visuals are taken from the internet and through their reassemblage become moldable structures that extoll the fragility of the body in human hands.Web-based images, no matter how they are filtered, are mutual exchanges based on popular societal images. Those images can be calming or assaultive, but they are often there to provoke a reaction in the viewer. Death evokes strong feelings because it reveals a lack of control over our lives, especially to protect the ones we love. Elder takes the emotional chaos of his mourning and forms a cohesive and interpretable pastiche in what most people see every day on their computer monitors. Film can help a filmmaker, and in turn a viewer, try to make sense out of something so calamitous as death. Similarly in poetry, words can be used in the very same way.In MxT (Coach House Books) Sina Queyras attempts to create a machine to help parse grief. It is divided into nine chapters that read like mathematical descriptors and a graphed view of mourning. One chapter starts with a drawing of a geared mechanism and the following:

One of the poems in this section is “Over To You” whereby the poet writes:“There will be no one to write an elegy for me and so I am writing my own now, I want you to keep up with me. I want you to feel the way the wind holds a bird, or a balloon, the slightly different movement of feather versus plastics, smooth surfaces gliding, dodging, come lie under the red balloon with me, come trace the horizontal motion…”“Can the situation of breasts be about life? I want to pitch you this idea. I want you not to tell me this is too abstract. Women’s bodies are fairly solid. They stack well. They are a current item…”(Queyras)And ends with:“It takes so long to say anything. I haven’t time to be optimistic.Spit. Breathe. Carry on.I did not want to air my feelings.Fuck you who eat feelings.”(Queyras)While are no explanations for the machine described in the chapter diagram, the poem itself is the apparatus in action. The poet creates a comprehensible framework for the reader to go through by writing a eulogy made up of her own emotions and pictures that are full of meaning to her. The images of a red plastic balloon compared to the lightness of a feather are contrasted and shared as a way to navigate the reader through the grief that comes ahead.The poet details the things she has seen and experienced and then frames it in the struggle for women to be heard. Breasts give life but can also take life away in the cancer that often affects them. She makes clear her vision for what she wants those in mourning to know, but also recognizes the possibility of the erasure of her feelings despite her explicit affirmations. The order she frames her confident images in become hardened stances for validation of those emotions.She ends by cursing the inevitable and thereby preventing the “excess of excessive feeling from damaging,” her sense of independent hope. Like Elder with his visuals, Queyras takes over the reins of her grieving processes to create malleable texts for her readers to use as tools to deal with death.* * *

Public Lighting (2004) by Mike Hoolboom, like Queyras MxT, is a film divided into chapters. Instead of grief, though, this film is about personality. Hoolboom makes collages out of clips of people that include family, reality, and advertising. He superimposes fictions upon the images, sounds, and voices to create moving narratives between the seven sections.The sixth and most well known of the sections is called, “Hey Madonna,” where the director splices footage of Madonna’s “Truth Or Dare,” “Vogue,” and “Oh Father,” and places it within the story of a gay man who is dying of AIDS. The man is said to have once slept with Madonna and pens a letter to her wondering how it must feel to be in her shoes.The narcissism, glamour, and fame she holds in the present will be nothing to her after death. This examination of a celebrity life is both a fan letter to the artifice of fame and the existential means that film and photography can create the illusion of immortality. Film stars can somehow cheat death.Montparnasse in the 1920s is a time and place replete with characters and personality, not unlike the modern day Madonna. Amanda Earl’s poetry collection, Kiki (Chaudiere Books) utilizes the cut up technique to provide a surrealist view of that era. Kiki, aka Alice Ernestine Prin, was one of its icons and is the central character in Earl’s poems.(Earl)

Kiki was a model, singer, actress, writer, and painter. She helped build the romanticized view we now have of 1920s Paris. She grew up in poverty, but made a name for herself, and others, through her talents and creativity. In the poem, Earl shows Kiki bearing witness to the artistic residents of La Ruche. It is a place where the once poor now sell in the millions. It claims Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani as its previous inhabitants.Kiki struggled while her male counterparts flourished. Many of them used her body as a muse for their art, including Sandy Calder in this poem with his wire sculptures. Through newsreels artists became instant celebrities. Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, never became as famous as those she inspired.(Earl)The reader will find a lot of phrases like these repeated (“This is Alice. This is fucked up.” is found often at the first section of the collection), due to the cut up method, but they invariably reveal alternate meanings within the words of Earl’s sources. In the verse above, Kiki imagines herself like a rose stripped bare of its thorns, regaled, but still only defined by her beautiful petals.She is arranged in print as means to express love in art. Her fame is tenuous and only becomes permanent after her death. In real life, she dies from complications of alcoholism and drug dependence. The depressive realities in living like a true bohemian take her, but leave an indelible and triumphant image:(Earl)* * *

Icons, though, don’t have to be people. Sometimes the structures of language itself can become the image source for filmmakers. Andrew James Paterson’s Roman Spring Leakage (2001) is composed of coloured gels, colour bars, pulsing colours, and white text. The title is a reference to the Roman alphabet system and in the progression of the film has each of the twenty-four letters showcased with “j” and “u” missing.These two letters are then imposed upon the other letters to form abstractions in its collage. The letters don’t create words and they don’t communicate directly to the reader except through their appearance in the film. Without traditionally forming words like they are supposed to, the letters in the film become a meaningless husk of language detritus, showing how letters and the words they form cannot fully contain the meanings they express. Formal language will inexorably “leak” their intention into the ether and letters will become desultory.Technology allows a poet to render letters and language in a similar fashion. In David Dowker’s Machine Language (BookThug), verses read like an old school ticker tape machine sending out messages, images, and at times, even numbers like a networking rhizome.(Dowker, “DNA assemblage”)Dowker is attuned to the land that envelops life around language-made connections. Sensorium is nature’s internal communicator. It warns of dangers, discovers nourishment, and helps find safe shelter. Flakes of mica are contrasted with the intentional patterns of embroidered cotton that is itself formed from living beings.Long after the gears of modern life die out, the elements of survival will still exist, but without a need of their assemblage to form an existence. What is life without meaning? Life is just presence without a purpose in this poem, like letters are just abstractions when they are not forming words in Paterson’s film. Words and images are powerful architectural tools when they are used to communicate feeling such as grief or loss. They can also help create thought-provoking evaluations of people or places by subverting or remixing the visuals and texts that are associated with them. Furthermore, stripping bare visuals and our means of communications to its foundation in letters exposes a possibility for recreation and renewal. These days, language and symbols form and evolve rapidly over time. Experimentation in film and poetry is an anchor by which artists can create new coping schemas and mechanisms through their artworks.Poetry and experimental film take the fabrics of their formation and spill them onto the page, the screen, and the ever-consuming internal view-master of the human mind. These mediums always interplay in synchronous ways in my brain and it is extraordinarily fun to find myself digesting a poet’s words while I watch a filmmaker’s dream come to life.* * *Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and The Barnstormer among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto. Jacqueline previously wrote about poetry as the conceptual experiment of language for the All Lit Up blog.