SANDRA LOUISE DYAS

Grapefruit Parts by Sandra Louise Dyas and LeAnn Erickson: MOVINGPOEMS.COM

A second film by old friends Sandy Dyas and LeAnne Erickson for The Serendipity Project, which we introduced with their earlier video, fuze. In the description on Vimeo, Dyas notes, “This collaboration was inspired by Yoko Ono and the serendipity of chance. It is our second chance operation/collaboration, both were inspired by Yoko Ono and her book “Grapefruit”.”

As in fuze, Erickson’s selection of images and Dyas’s selection of sound clips do seem to be in conversation—an uncanny effect, which I think says as much about the nature of collaboration between seasoned artists who know what they’re doing as it does about the nature of videopoetry. One thinks of the famous quote by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Most of us amateur video-makers quickly discover that random mixes of text, sound and images tend to result in little more than a vaguely poetic fog. One of the reasons that Dyas and Erickson don’t fall into that trap, I think, is because they deploy fairly limited vocabularies of images and words or phrases: poetry lives in rhythm and repetition. And viewers can be relied upon to fill in semantic gaps, because that’s basically what we’re doing all day long with snatches of overheard conversation and chance fragments of others’ lives, consciously or unconsciously looking for connective threads—and regularly stepping back to try to see larger patterns. Any good poet, whether for the page or the screen, understands this instinctively: you have to leave a certain number of gaps for the audience to fill or leap on their own. That’s how the poetry happens. And it’s definitely happening here.

fuze by Sandra Louise Dyas and LeAnn Erickson

"fuze" is being featured on MOVING POEMS,  an on-going anthology of the best poetry videos from around the web. Subscribe by email to get a weekly round-up of their content, follow @moving_poems on Twitter, or pick up the full-content RSS feed and follow along in Feedly or some other feed reader.

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania. He is the creator and director of MOVINGPOEMS.COM --- He writes:

An experimental film that showcases the role of the viewer in creating videopoetry. As Iowa City-based visual artist Sandra Louise Dyas explains in the Vimeo description, ‘”fuze” is a collaborative video created for Homegrown Stories that relies on chance and serendipity. LeAnn Erickson (video) and I (sound) worked separately, only knowing the length of the piece and its title.’