Old Family Movies.com 

       OLD FAMILY MOVIES: POETRY VIDEO

                  Robert Kirschten, Ph.D.

On November 25, 2003, I lost my mother Rhea Kirschten at age ninety-one.

She was the light of my life.

Six months earlier, she had suffered her third stroke, and her left side was paralyzed.  From that time, she was bed-ridden, could barely talk, and could not swallow food. 

Every day for half a year, I expected the worst.  That the Good Lord finally took her may have been a blessing, but on the day of her passing, there was, suddenly, a shock of emptiness that I had never experienced before and have not yet fully accepted. 

When she was alive, life had a foundation, an emotional source and strength that no other person provides.  I haven’t cried.  The loss is too deep. 

When I grieve, I spontaneously think of a line from California poet Kenneth Rexroth about the death of his young wife, “My sorrow is so wide I cannot cross it.”

Although my mother’s spirit is always with me, my memory of her is beginning to fade.  This is a fact of life.   Like other families, I have photographs and video tapes.  

These are comforting; however, as time begins to claim my recollections, I also have an even more focused emotional memory, something I have chosen to call “poetry video.” 

Poetry video consists of a short lyric poem, read aloud, which functions as the screenplay for a movie version of the image pattern about the subject in the poem.  

The poem (or story) is written first, then visual images—photos, film, scanned memorabilia such as birthday cards, digital animations--are placed on a video track in a video editing program.

Many multi-media, memory-keeping formats exist today, ranging from digital scrapbooks with animated pages to photo editing programs which can crop and color captured pictures.

Poetry video, on the other hand, is more dynamic than scrapbooking or photo albums but not as aggressive, drawn-out, or (often) disjointed as an old family movie. 

It is more focused, more immediate, more intense.   It is the perfect combination of word and image for a short, animated visual memory.

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I have built several video-memories of my Mom; my favorite is entitled “My Mother’s Kindergarten Classroom” which centers on a picture of her in her classroom at the Esmond School in Chicago where she taught kindergarten for almost forty years.

 As she sits next to the sandbox in her classroom, the poem invites the reader and viewer to return to their own kindergarten days through the vehicle of my mother playing piano for her students. 

The piece concludes with the words of a game song from her teaching which my mother recalls on video tape then sings.

When I read literature—poetry, prose, or drama--I always have a movie of the text running in my mind.  The same for memory.  

If you ask me what was my mother like, I can recount my thoughts in words, but the combination of word and images more accurately approximates my internal recollection which is impossible to share as fully without this new media format.

The wonderful invitation to the videographer in new media is, in fact, to take a static, typographic, black and white sign and give a fuller visual representation of the real subject of a poetic image. 

This is quite a transformation.  In our new media age, one might even argue that the poem as a human communication is not complete until its visual embodiment has been added.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a time in which the media sound-bite has become a basic unit of communication. 

While there will always be a place for the extended written memoir, digital technology is changing the way we see the world and encounter those we love. 

And it is drastically changing human consciousness and memory.

This new version of the ancient Sister Arts of poetry and painting invites us to use modern technology to preserve and enhance traditional human values.

The proof is in its appeal to all generations. 

I have used poetry video extensively in Creative Writing classes at Prairie View A&M University, and the response by the students has been uniformly enthusiastic. 

They have built many videos from their own poems to commemorate lost loved ones, to celebrate successes, and to mend broken hearts.

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Because of its popularity, I wrote a short Quick-Start Guide for Poetry Video for my classes, especially for Education Majors who are interested in teaching this format in Language Arts. 

While the Study-Guide is useful to get things going, I also thought it a good idea to develop a more extensive, portable course for this new discipline.

Consequently, I have taken the outline and major topics from the Study Guide and turned them into a detailed enumeration of techniques, lesson plans, workbooks, and other instructional elements that cover the process of poetry video from writing to video and audio production.

I have integrated the original 12-page Guide into well over a hundred pages of practical material that I have used in teaching for years. 

Even if you have never taken a creative writing course or worked in video editing, this course offers a series of step-by-step suggestions that facilitate the transformation of personal recollection into lyric statement and then into its digital visualization. 

This course is not a substitute for technical manuals, video tutorials, or  “Getting Started” PDF files for video-editing.  While necessary, some of these are vast.  My manual on iMovie 6 & iDVD is 500 pages.  My manual for Final Cut Studio Pro is in four volumes with over 2100 pages.  

These are at times unwieldy and of little use when you actually have to begin to build the informing narrative in your video project.  Even so, be sure to refer to these resources and “help” menus when technical assistance is needed.

As I mention later, I assume video-editing experience on the part of the teacher, parent, or student.  Millions of iLife Suites have been sold by Apple, even more by other companies such as Windows and Adobe.  So the technical skills are out there. 

In class, I have found with even two short sessions with a quick overview of the primary interface and experimentation with a few menu paths, contemporary students can easily grasp the fundamentals of editing programs.

A final word about the title poem for this project: “Old Family Movies.”  When I was in college one Christmas, my Mom brought out the old eight-millimeter film rolls with her Bell and Howell movie projector and showed our old family movies.

As I looked at decades long past, I saw on the screen all my great aunts and uncles at Thanksgiving dinner when I was ten. I suddenly realized that they—all the adults who you think will last forever—were gone.

I’m sure we’ve all had similar experiences.  I hope this home study course will help to preserve those childhood events, especially the precious moments of joy. 

Through poetry video, your old family movies--along with those great aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents--will have new ways of returning each Christmas every time your DVD disc plays old family memories with a new media heart.

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Thank you, and blessings . . .

Robert Kirschten, Ph.D.

Director of Creative Writing,

Department of Languages and Communications, 

Prairie View A&M University

           Mother, Rhea Rimes, 1928