I devoured this book. It resonated with thoughts of an emergent poetics of online cinema. Angus Flectcher argues that Amercian poetry, starting with Whitman, exploded the notion that poetry should gather images to form an expression of the poet's or reader's concern - an allegory of human import. This is a top-down procedure. How to use nature to express (illustrate) eternal truths, etc.
Whitman and John Ashbery are used as models for a new bottom-up approach to gathering images. A poem as an attempt to shape/probe the chaos of spatial experience - objects, associations, other media, landscape, weather, memories, queries, signs - all go into the semiotic mix.
Of course, poetry has a rich history of formal contraints (sestina, sonnet, haiku - many based on numbers) that give shape to the chaos. Online cinema needs these new constraints, but what is a vlog post other than an attempt to capture the semiotic flux of experince using sound, image, text, thought etc.
Fletcher draws on the seven-fold paradigm of Complexity Theory (via
John H. Holland) as good principles of making poetry or any art that values ecosystems over heroic stories. Here I will take the liberty of (off the cuff) translating these principles for online cinema:
1. aggregation: gathering the materials, the images, sounds and texts. the subject.
2. tagging: signals an order of importance, for literature this is rhetorics. For video this is simply editing and mixing - camera angle, distance, scale, duration - as well as the rhetorics for text and spoken word.
3. nonlinearity: getting the parts to interact. internal references. how can the editing generate questions about what has come before and what will come next?
4. flow: the development of theme, plot. how time is handled. the experience of time. where are we going?
5. diversity: images that are, well, diverse. a vlog about a garden would include the fowers, but also the stray gum wrapper.
6. model or schema: pruning. shaping the piece. the intention can be hidden or quite simple and direct.
7. building blocks: for poetry this would be the words. reworking a line, trying to find the best word, etc. for video, spoken words or text are included in the visual and auditory building blocks of frames/shots/sounds/music.
"If we identify coherence with a loose and notably inconsistent completeness, we reach the artistic representing of environments, a representing pressed so far that the poem actually is an environment. This view would assert that there are two external real worlds, the one we daily walk around in (or drive cars through), and the one the environment-poet has invented. Both would have equal shares of the real - equal shares of Being." (pg 227)
- Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry
