Ken Cormier - { Voices of the Dead }
Sally Van Doren - { Cartographer }
Jenna Freedman - { An Interview }
Jennifer H. Fortin, Nate Pritts - { Notational Analysis / Talk Minutes }
Joy Ladin - { They Say }{ Need to Know }{ Children }
Stephen Massimilla - { Staying With the Mississippi }
Tom Tenney - { I Didn't Know That }
Courtney Andujar - { Series on Superstition }
Lauren Inness Norton - { Privacy }
Melissa Barrett, Pete Luckner - { Pilot }
Amber Boardman - { Classical Translation }
Liz Maher - { Illustrations }
the Roulettes - { 2:1 }
Pilot by Melissa Barrett, Pete Luckner |
Pilot from peter philip on Vimeo.
Traci Brimhall, of the blog We Are Homer., interviews Melissa Barrett and Pete Luckner, the creators of "Pilot."
TB: How did your collaboration begin?
MB: For me, the collaboration began inside of a square silo three years ago.
Pete and I used to work in a studio for disabled artists, located in the middle
of nowhere, Ohio. One afternoon we drove a few miles to our co-worker's farm
for lunch. We met her horses and toured her silo, which was square and leaning
and blonde with wormy chestnut.
Standing in that space with Pete, I began sketching the framework of a poem. It
was then that I realized that Pete stirred all sorts of creative ideas in me;
I've been addicted to his presence ever since.
PL: Our artistic conversation began for me when we were working together and
Mel showed me the film Breathless, by Jean Luc Godard. That was probably the
first time we spoke frankly about our sensibilities. The visual imagery in her
poems also made me think it would be great fun to talk about ideas with her.
We came to our first project when we stumbled upon Lakeside Amusement Park in
Denver, Colorado. We were both captivated by the place—it was such a
run-down old park. The man who worked the Round-Up ride ended up becoming the
subject of "Pilot"—our first poem/video collaboration.
TB: What were the rules or parameters for the collaboration?
MB: The collaboration was utterly parameterless.
There were no rules—the whole thing happened almost by mistake. We just
happened to drive along the fringe of Denver on a Friday afternoon when we were
looking for something to do. We saw the park from the highway and decided that
that would be our weekend.
It was mere luck that the park proprietors bought my bumbling request to film
(they have a strict "no camera" policy—for all of its rusty beauty,
Lakeside wouldn't survive even amateur documentation of its decaying machinery.
There's a reason admission is only two dollars.)
Going through the footage a few weeks later, Pete uncovered distinctive shots
of one of the ride's operators. He hadn't meant for the footage to become anything—and
I hadn't either. But the image of the Round-Up stayed with me; slowly, a poem
began to take shape.
PL: We sort of made rules as we went along. It started as a documentary project
about the humanity of a crusty amusement park. The footage was gathered
intuitively, and it was interrupted by park security. They were a little weird
about the camera since the park has a reputation for being a dump. But that
dumpiness was its charm. When I brought the footage into the computer we
realized the Round-Up operator represented everything we loved about the park.
We began to construct his portrait.
TB: Have you collaborated before outside your art form? How did this
differ from those collaborations?
MB: A little. I was in a band that wished it were Kraftwerk.
We had seventeen keyboards and unlimited access to a recording studio. Around
the same time, I made a few dozen short films with my sisters—some of the
most imaginative people I know.
Currently, I'm trying to write collaborative poems with Dan Poppick
and Anthony Madrid. These collaborations are very different than "Pilot," and
perhaps more difficult. How can something as delicate as a poem survive the
poking and prodding of two people?
PL: I had a band when I lived in Pittsburgh. It was a noisy experimental band.
In my head I view collaborations as always finding the parts that we mutually
find interesting and trying to inflate what is interesting about them. This
collaboration was different in that we worked in chunks. Each chunk had its interesting
parts and we would focus on that each time trying to expand on the aesthetic
and find new avenues. I really liked how that approach fit the project, I think
poetry and video have a lot of promise there.
TB: What did you learn from your fellow collaborator?
MB: I learned that the process of editing a film is in itself quite
poetic—and that it can be just as agonizing as writing a poem. I also
learned that, though poetry and filmmaking are the gods of two different
universes, Pete and I are on the hunt for the same thing: a resonant image.
PL:I learned that our approaches are very similar. Mel taught me how
writing is like painting and how it is different. She told me once that,
"Reading is writing." I found that very interesting. I think that makes the art
of writing very unique.
TB: Did the collaboration affect your own work?
MB: Yes. The problem that I thought I'd have with collaboration was
dishonesty—an inability to evaluate and speak openly about the work. Not
so with Pete. Honesty might be his best quality—he was always pushing me
toward something more exact.
"That's trash," he'd say, critiquing an alliterative string of
adjectives—all synonyms, probably, for the word "brown." My first
reaction was defensiveness. I wasn't in this to get workshopped.
But Pete uncovered a larger problem of mine: my addiction to over-constructed
descriptions, and a heavy reliance on similes.
In grad school, I saw a craft talk on the (dis)function
of simile and metaphor. One of the panelists implored, "Is any one thing really
that similar to anything else? Isn't the designation of words dishonest
enough?" Which is similar to the Mad Hatter's inquiry: "When is a raven like a
desk?" And later, he divulges, "I have absolutely no idea."
PL: Working with Mel gave me a scaffold to build a lot of ideas about editing
and visual scenarios. I have tunnel vision on occasion when it comes to editing
video. In being forced to stretch that tunnel in different directions to fit
the flow of the video I was able to see more possibility in my own work. In the
project I am working on now I am constantly trying to harness that.
TB: Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?
MB: We recorded "Pilot" with my voice at first, and something just wasn't
right. We actually abandoned the project for several months because we couldn't
figure out what that something was. Pete finally made the suggestion to redo
the audio with someone else's voice. Though I'm a huge advocate for poets
reading their own work, this particular story—about a man's simultaneous
aging and infantilization—is benefitted by the
sandpapery voice of poet Maj Ragain.
NOTE: This interview was originally posted on We Are Homer.