Meadow Suite: Poetry Collaboration Video

The Meadow Suite spiraled into being over the final three days of a creative residency at the In Situ Polyculture Commons in Saxtons River, Vermont. I was there to finish up a poetry manuscript I'd been wrestling with, but found the golden meadow calling -- insistently.

No poet can resist such a call.

I started writing about the meadow on Saturday night, long, running threads of thoughts that went on for hours. I found myself musing on the ephemeral nature of a meadow, on the way a meadow teams with life and invites us to look inward and outward as well as upward, and on the role of humans in creating and keeping meadows open despite the forest's desire to grow in and reclaim the ground once more.

By Sunday morning I realized that engaging with this meadow should be a collaborative effort. My residency colleagues were already each in dialgue with the meadow in their own artistic ways. I asked Ro Adler, Grace Emmet and Hayley Ferber, and residency host Candace Jensen, to share with me their reflections on the phrase "To Love a Meadow". As their thoughts drifted in, I re-read Thoreau's Essay The Succession of Forest Trees and perused Robert Frost's Rose Pogonias, The Exposed Nest, and The Last Mowing.

Then came the fun part -- interleaving text from my residency colleagues and classic New England writers' inspirations with the base text I'd been writing. Here's what excites me about this: Every time I've engaged in collaborative poetry following this model, the interleaved text from others changes my base text in new and interesting ways. For example, in Meadow Suite, my line "designed to hold you here/on the inside", in conversation with Grace Emmet's line "to be joyful" became "designed to hold you here/to be joyful/on the inside" -- a completely transformed and utterly perfect poetic image.

Over and over, the collaborative language shifted my words and thoughts, creating something more complete, more resonant than my words could ever have been on their own.

Then Naomi Harrison-Clay brought her special musical magic to the text, elevating it with her fresh, spontaneous, innovative music. The work was once again transformed, this time into something ethereal. Air and sound breathed life into the text.

Then came the work of melding images and sound. Having not set out to "make a film" I had not thought ahead to planning shots. Rather the images merged with the whole spontaneous outpouring of the project. I wanted to work with the cacophony of shots and video from my phone which were taken simultaneously with the emergence of the text over the prior three days. The bees, the trees, the sounds of the meadow, the movement of ground drifting downward in the meadow's compelling relationship with the open sky. I found myself layering words on the images as well, embroidering through the pictures and text, making them more cohesively one.

The video runs about 11.5 minutes long -- I hope you'll pour your favorite beverage and sit down to immerse yourself in the Meadow Suite. Ultimately, all poetry and artwork is a collaborative effort, which is not complete until the viewer or reader engages the work and fulfills it with their own interpretation and response. Let's share this meadow together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6coQ15bv6iw&t=16s