Chicago Review

CR’s Winter-Spring 2002 issue featured a special section on filmmaker Stan Brakhage. In the introduction to that issue, I wrote:

Brakhage’s explorations of the aesthetic possibilities of film are complemented by an extensive body of writing. Although his lifelong ambition as a filmmaker has been to achieve a visionary mode of cognition free from language (what he calls “moving visual thought”), Brakhage has nevertheless recognized the utility of language to his project: “I have found, across years of photography and editing, that the verbal can open to the visual, like a swing gate in the mind, or sprung door, revealing plethoras of inexplicable and often utterly unexpected visitations.”

The issue includes essays by Brakhage, several essays on Brakhage’s work (by Fred Camper, P. Adams Sitney, Jennifer Todd Reeves, and others), and selections from Brakhage’s correspondence with poets Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Ronald Johnson. Here is a conversation between Brakhage and Johnson, from 1997, one year before Johnson’s death.

There are many living poets who inspire my life, whose work I enjoy as a regularity in my living, but there are three, right now, who contribute directly to my filmmaking: […] Michael McClure, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Jarnot.

This work, more than any epic (since Pound's Cantos inspired my film Dog Star Man), has directly engendered a reciprocal epic film, the Vancouver Island Trilogy: I stood at times waist deep in ocean reading the typewritten (unpublished at that time) continuance (past ARK 50) of the poem which Ronald was kind enough to send me. The full poem had been printed (with a verbal description of myself enoceaned) by the time 8 years later when I was photographing the third section of my film. Ronald and I are both from Kansas, as is Michael McClure (all three of us growing up within a hundred square miles of each other): from those “grounds” Ronald manages linguistic landscapes which finally encompass the Western world, its history coming down finally (as in a child's vision) to the exactitudes of that geography and biology before, and being one with, the eyes and ears of the poet's language — an imaginary multiple series of recognitions of “real toads” (as Marianne Moore would have it) inhabiting the grain-growing (under inverted blue bowl of sky) flats of Kansas. My related imperative was to imagine a “real” (i.e. completely “royal”) Victoria childhood (which I could, thus, share-thru-art) with my wife, Marilyn, who grew up on those Victorian grounds I'd never previously known: thus Johnson and I, each with love, went eye/ear-&-hand together on our separate loving adventures.

CR’s “Stan Brakhage: Correspondences” is out of print, but Essential Brakhage (McPherson, 2001) is readily available. Shortly after Brakhage’s death in 2003, Criterion released a two dvd collection of his films, By Brakhage.