POPULIST PASTORAL IN SMOKE
This film was made with my friend the Tanzanian filmmaker and photographer Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe in Umbria a world ago, meaning in September 2019—at Civitella Ranieri. It comes out of our conversation about how poetry that lives in images as well as words and the soundscape can be presented as process as well as product, and beyond the intimate space of live reading. Well, here we are. And it's about clouding of the lungs, so.
This is a two-sided panorama poem made on a leporello in homage to Etel Adnan. It comes out of the fact that on the day I arrived in Italy a fascist populist (Matteo Salvini) tried to pull off a coup. That got me to thinking about populism and smoke on my morning walks in an old homeland of mine, where sunflower fields had largely been replaced by tobacco fields, under a new regime of uncontrollable heat, and the old centri sociali appeared shuttered under pressure of the battling of hateful new mass-mediatic rhetoric. The roadsides were strewn with cigarette packs and lotto cards branded with warnings about the health risks implicit in this pastoral economy: SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF BLINDNESS; THIS GAME OF CHANCE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. This garbage and other junk (receipts, brochures, etc) was integrated into the poem as scribbled daybook of the march of headlines. It goes without saying that the poem is about the cynicism of economies that kill people en masse and then issue warnings that place responsibility in individual hands. It was read and recorded on the gravel road uphill in a single take hence its sometimes dizziedness and breathlessness—