My friend Simon Ensor is doing yeoman’s work creating and he sent me a YouTube interview with David Hockney.  Communicating with Simon through the medium of that video is a bit of tough slog.  It is as if the interview gets in the way. Or maybe the personality of Hockney gets in the way. No one’s fault.

Sometimes I respond to the video using an annotation tool like Vialogues or NowComment to respond textually to an interview.  That can be very juicy, but it is also cumbersome. You have to grab the link, then make sure you can create a public space for response. And what if no one reciprocates the interest or attention.  It’s not a waste of time, but the purpose of sharing and responding is dulled, even defeated. As much as I would like for reciprocation to be a felt duty, I acknowledge that it is a gift of attention, thus love. How much of that can we legitimately expect in any given day?

So I felt challenged to, as Emily Dickinson wrote, to say it slant. YouTube cuts both ways. It is a censorship machine, but it is also a tech marvel platform.  One of the pieces of the platform is automatic transcription.  Sometimes that transcription is verbatim. Incredible. More often, as in the David Hockney interview Simon shared, it is barely lucid. That is just fine for my purposes.

I have taken the transcript as a jumping off point for a found poem.  For those of you who like the play-by-play how to here are the breadcrumbs.

1. Go to the video.
2. Click on the the three horizontal dots next to the “Save” link under the video.
3. Click on “Open Transcript”,
4. Copy and paste the whole transcript into some sort of digital notebook. I used a Google Doc.
5. Read randomly.
6. Find words and phrases you either love or hate or feel about strongly.
7. Copy and paste those love/hate phrases and words into a useful container.
8. I used Diigo Outliner because I can open it next to my Google doc. Copy and past is super easy.
9. Use the transcript as if it is some rando voice in your head directing you to share this as a found poem.

Here is the raw material I found in the Hockney vid transcript:

 

 

Here is another slant on the found material. perhaps think of it as another draft or maybe as just another way to close read the original video. I really don’t know for sure, but I do know that another take with other media helps me. In this case Lumen5 is my tool of choice to translate the found poem into …another foundling.

 

 

It is easy to forget the points I am making here and why I am making them. First, everything we do is an artistic decision. Hockney’s interview underscores this point. Second, the whole of the world, observed and otherwise, is grist for the creative mill. It is not just permitted. The world by its very nature invites us, compels us to create. Third, using available tools even if unusual is all we have in a word-dulled world.