Second Living Bay Sweetwater @ home

I was asked at a poetry gathering this past weekend why someone like myself, who writes primarily poetry, would want to make machinima. She said it seemed like a diversion for me, since she didn’t see machinima as a strong vehicle for language, or at least not in the same way poetry is. My answer is a dream I’ve always had.

Ever since I was a child, I have wanted to build a park where people could walk around the images that constantly come into my head. It was the best way I could think of to communicate. I have always had trouble navigating through physical space. One minute I think I know where I am, and then suddenly everything switches position and looks unfamiliar. I have gotten lost almost everywhere I have ever been. The same thing happens with words. I am always slow communicating ideas, not because they aren’t clear in my head, but because as I think about the words, they get jumbled with images in my head, and I have never been able to communicate these images very well.

I began to write poetry in an attempt to give voice to images, but more than that, I wanted the poem to be a place that people could visit. I have a wonderful home in the Second Life sim of Farhaven where I can build these images to my heart’s content. I tried to do it once in real life, but the logistics were just too difficult and expensive. But in SL, I can build a whole poem without a single word. I usually then go back and put words to it, a little like putting lyrics to a song.

When I first became Poet Laureate of Elf Circle ( a post I no longer hold), I felt honored and totally lost. Just what did a Poet Laureate do? Feeling I had to do something, I went over to the EC Library and built a flower path (with a lot of scripting help from Phantori Serrati) in which each stone turned into a flower and gave out the line of a poem as you walked on it. It’s still there, and you can see it here.

So this idea of using images to create language has always been with me. I have created a number of “Poem Parks” in Farhaven using famous poems (Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), as well as my own poetry.

Farley Crabgrass made a wonderful machinima of my very first build, which he called A Second Life Winter’s Night. That’s what gave me the idea of using machinima to expand these Poem Parks into moving terrain. Not only give voice to images, but a body too! That’s my idea of machinima, and that’s why it has captured my imagination.

The very best example of this process that I have ever seen was done several years ago by Robbie Dingo, Watch the World. For me, this machinima set the bar for the type of expression I’m dreaming of. My next step after that will be to script a 3D machinima on a variety of media prims which when placed strategically inside an SL 3D build (thank you KirstenLee) will allow people to walk around inside a poem that moves. I warned you I was a dreamer! Anyway, here’s Robbie’s fantastic vid.