Stilts (2016)
Single channel HD video, stereo.
Digitized archive photo, tooled digital objects, text, animation, sampled and synthesized sound.
Stilts references Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats – poetry “…survives/ In the valley of its making/…it survives/ A way of happening…” It’s the “happening,” the making of poetry, that interests me here. The boy is me in the mid-1950s. My father made the stilts, then made a picture, as he would say, on our Brownie box camera. The words in the swirling panels are from a number of poems – ordinary words free for the taking. The voices are of Jim Wayne Miller and Wilma Dykeman, poets who shared their time, work, and words with me.