Melissa Ginsburg’s The Adder reads as a collage of thoughts – dark, moving, and searching.
In this final installment of The Year of the Poet, the program flow and individual videos reflect this stylistic approach.
Imagery includes film, photography, and found footage, and all use music or sound as an equal channel of information to the visual, creating this final body of work that investigates and interprets The Adder.
Melissa Ginsburg, The Adder
May the pond be free
from its companion pondwater
blackening. the pond’s edges
slipping as it does
to the sides behind
below a swimming adder
May the air and the sky be excused
from one another as a child
from a table as a table
from its planes the house from
its frame Free
garden from dirt
garden
from sprouts waxing
white and long under layers
of mulch Part spring from cold part
wood from grain part grain part monstrous
shout Part splinter
from wood splinter from flesh
Toss it in the fire
divorce fire
from its color its tremble and
its burn
Divorce: does a door
need a wall to become itself
to separate
from to open to allow
Invited artist: Miriam Bennett
Invited artist: Markus Haala
Artist: LeAnn Erickson
Invited artist: Jeff Caplan
Artist: Sandra Louise Dyas
Invited artist: Kristine Heykants
Invited artist: Todd Kimm
This is the second installment of Homegrown Stories’ Year of the Poet. We again asked Melissa Ginsburg for an inspirational poem and, with Apollo, she did not disappoint.
Our ten video artists have reimagined Apollo’s birth, reign, and demise through music, image, and text.
Apollo, by Melissa Ginsburg
Wolf god. Sheep god. God trapped in a mine. God of fields and
flowers. Of pastures and herds. God of exoskeletons. Hunter
and flayer, feeder of snakes. Healer god of arrows, of oracles
you will never figure out. God of colonies and the crying rock.
Unshorn god. Shining god of mice and islands.
Wolf of healing. God in the womb already frightening. Killer of
cyclops maker of lightning. God of moderation. Monster of
light. Tender protector. Hunter god liar god. Colonizing god,
god of ships leaving, of sun in the sky, of tunnels and holes, of
sowing a seed. Slayer of Python. God of the deal.
Farm god. Lover god. God of my sister Artemis goddess of that
sleek lens through which I look, the moon. God of ships and a
sun. Supplier god, contract god. Twin god and wave god.
Waving goodbye on the dock and the ship leaving god on a
wave.
God of the oracle stops. God of compromise and centuries. God
of whispered riddles swallowed on an island. Snake-eaten god.
God of dried up waters, cratering depths. Canyon, erosion,
billowing out. Tributary god cut off from its source. God of the
dry bed, of the cold war. Together with Artemis slayer of
progeny. Husbanding the silver arrows. Quiver in the outskirts
of the sky.