Mosaic of Time: PRVSLY RCRDED

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (b.1973, she/they)
"1996" from PRVSLY RCRDED

All video poems included in the project PRVSLY RCRDED revolve around the notion that all life is “previously recorded” via inherited memory or biological encoding. The cycle of life (birth/death)—as well as the epigenetic scars inherited from ancestors’ fight-or-flight past—contribute to how we re-imagine/re-tell our narratives. Past poems (written) have now been deconstructed, re-arranged, and re-told as video poems. In the poem "1996", we hear the artist retell her journey to Lithuania as a 25-year-old graduate student—not a typical trip—as all "coincidences" in her journey seem to suggest she was being vetted as a diplomat or intelligence contact at the time. A trip to the borderland area of Kaliningrad, a conversation with the president, and some family secrets divulged resonate throughout the piece, causing the artist to ponder this suspicious series of events.

PRVSLY RCRDED will be an ongoing project, eventually becoming an online space / portal where I can re-purpose / re-present poems. As a 50-year-old poet re-inventing my work—also as a new immigrant from the US during a tumultuous time in all geopolitical spheres—I hope to offer a space for dialogue for those who have also experienced ancestral trauma.

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Mosaic of Time: Topography

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

For the month of October, videopoet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas revisits the idea of time as mosaic via heterotopic spaces—transient and transformative places we visit in our minds as well as physically / geographically / biologically / politically. The videopoem “Topography” is a collaboration with sound artist / poet / translator Khashayar Mohammadi and speaks to seeking an inner cartographer as we navigate our lived experiences, that is, mapping and finding the "lay of the land” of our life’s purpose and identity. Another view: what occurs when two poets who also speak in other mediums decide to collaborate? We draw an audio-visual map. We create our own topography—mountains and valleys from sounds. Rivers from words. A bi Lithuanian-Canadian-American and a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer, and translator who both have a love for ancient Indo-European dialects bring their own A/V languages to the table. As the poem states: we arrange sequences of dialogues.

Poem:
TOPOGRAPHY

“He was one more incognito in the city of illustrious incognitos.”
—Bon Voyage, Mr. President, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

 The same substances—your bones.
Calcium or wood fibres.
Think protection, rockets,  
or of safe people in the crowd,
grasping for dimension, in
simultaneous paralysis.  

The market booms with traitors.

 We flee our voices, our runny DNA flung
upon the street, watercolour without myth
or mystery.

Outside the wreck still curls into itself.

Lizards slide between bank doors. 

 Scaffolds of eyes, arranging sequences
of dialogues. We are not the first with selenite
slippers to kiss the compass.

 We take the sugar pills,
receive a swift kick in the gut 
from the algorithm. What tombs—
we herrings—in cages 
blessed with lungs.

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Mosaic of Time: Translating Myself

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

For the month of November, poet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas revisits the idea of time as mosaic via innate memories of languages we have always known and have yet to speak. One of the author’s last cinepoems, Keeping Up with the Huidobros, used a confrontational method of translating a translation, more specifically leveraging the homophonic (sound) to get new meaning from poems. In this latest cinepoem, “Translating Myself”, the poet applies what poet Clark Coolidge once said of writing poetry: “It had to make itself something through me.” In this spirit, the poet layers her own words to create new poems from one.

Poem:

Translating myself

This is what we hurt or hurl
or vex or transpose: the 
opining horizon, leaving us.
There is a green leaf in the fire.
My flesh, you’ve made the two
of us a blind study. We’ve left 
our vortex, grainy and laminated
in space, and we never reach
the summit of suns, big yolk
growths, an autumn phenomenon,
bringing us kilometers of numerical frosts.

I’ve been waiting to hear from you—
the other you—the silence is never 
too long like the sleeve of my skin.
How we multiple etcetera our thoughts, 
how we remain etched in this cosmic 
fluid. Here the screen malfunctions. 
I am a radio. I am the soundwave.

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Mosaic of Time: Scarcely Gilded

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

‘Scarcely Gilded’ is a poem from the 2020 collection, Between Plague & Kleptocracy: Invented Poetic Creations & Conversations of Seva & Bill, in which the poet, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, cross-references poems between deceased poets, Vsevolod Nekrasov & Bill Knott.

Throughout this collection, Vitkauskas serves as medium and "translator" of the posthumous conversations, making them essentially invented collaborations. Poems are written in the voice / tone / style of both Nekrasov & Knott, featuring borrowed lines and found poems within those lines—they are the transcripts of their thoughts across astral planes, what they’d perhaps discuss in this perilous time in history: of pandemic, widespread injustice, forced isolation, and of the US mesmerized by a traitorous, snake oil salesman.

SELECTED • 9th International Video Poetry Festival • Athens, Greece (2021)

Poem:

Scarcely Gilded

“Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”

Before we knew
until our lungs
filled with pyrite spring
our lungs
hanging
out
or in
an elephant’s envelope

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Mosaic of Time: My Vestibule School

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

The poem is from my 2020 collection titled Between Plague & Kleptocracy: Invented Poetic Creations & Conversations of Seva & Bill.

The collection cross-references poems of two dead poets: Vsevolod Nekrasov and Bill Knott, and the narrator/poet (Lina Ramona Vitkauskas) serves as medium, fusing bits of posthumous conversations and imagined collaborations between them. Vitkauskas hybridizes and recreates their texts, projecting possible dialogues during this perilous time in history: of pandemic, forced isolation, economic decline, and the US finding itself with a pack of kleptocrats and their sycophants overtaking the three branches of government.

The poem itself (below) was written in early 2020, beginning of pandemic. Special thanks to PEN America, which offered a relief grant to the author while unemployed, providing a chance to write the collection.

Poem:

My Vestibule School

National someone
future
something
sometimes
your toes
are a crystal ball
and sometimes
mini executioners

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas. This month marks her first collaboration with video artist, Michael Lewy.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capturing time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

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Mosaic of Time: Poets

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

“Film fixes reality in a sense of time—it’s a way of conserving time. No other art form can fix and stop time like this. Film is a mosaic made up of time.”

When director Andrei Tarkovsky put forth this notion, he was before a live audience of cinephiles at the Conference Cinema Thieves: International Intrigue, held at the Centro Palatino in Rome (1982). There, the event itself, was a breathing mosaic of beings captured in a moment with the director. The conference was being filmed, and so, this moment is documented and frozen in time as well. We can go back to this moment and hear the artist carefully describe how he arranges within his artform—as a composer would arrange notes on a scale.

What we think of a mosaic is a whole unit—a piece of art made up of pieces. When we look at each of the pieces—we can see the materials, the tangible elements of which they are made: ceramic, glass, wood, plastic, etc. The mosaic itself comprehensively represents an idea. The object is made of objects but the whole is a concept. The scenes of the movie themselves are a part of the greater, larger, mosaic. The artists and actors who make the film are pieces and parts of the film, the mosaic. The moments a director captures/records is the harnessing of time that Tarkovsky describes.

Short films, specifically poetry films (cinepoetry), can be viewed this way. Tiny pixels are the pieces or elements to make an electronic vignette, or, mosaic. Poems themselves are intangible and only represent (or do not represent) a concept or idea. A part of the whole. Poetry on film is not made of physical film, not made of anything but digital pixels, but is made of the arrangement of digital sequences. When you edit a film, there are scenes and transitions—and these are a part of the mosaic.

This month, we feature a cinepoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (also the curator of this series). This is a cinepoem that captures a moment in time during the pandemic. It was recently featured in the Halifax-based poetry series, EVE OF POETRY. It illustrates how poets (who operate in already isolated, private spaces) have dipped further into isolation and insecurities during pandemic times. The original poem comes from her 2013 collection, Professional Poetry, available on Lulu.

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores a cinepoem by a different artist.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capturing time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Mosaic of Time is curated by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti RIP

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti, perhaps best known as the champion of the Beats, founder of City Lights, a star lost in the lap of San Francisco, was of course something of a poet in his own right, and is now dead. We wanted to mark this moment with a poem from the man himself. To hear more beat poetry, including by Mr. Ferlinghetti himself, go here.)

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be

For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence