Poem: ‘A November’ By John Ashbery

For my video, I wanted to provide an interpretation of some of the hidden values in the poem. It is not necessarily grounded in the truth of what Ashbery is saying, rather a foothold for my own understanding of the words.

So strangely, the video ended up being a fake a calendar commercial. “What?” You say. “Why a calendar commercial?” Well, let me tell you.

Approaching this task I found the way the words resonated with me seemed to form a pattern of meaning. The lost library made me think about the books that lie on my shelf I will probably never have time to read. “Next years list of things” sounds to me like a whole lot of multitasking, “places left unplanted” sounds I missed a few important things, but I’m so busy there just “isn’t room” to fit the quiet moments I can enjoy a cup of coffee and read. Moreover, this mysterious friend who doesn’t “understand anything” is probably an incorporeal nagging pressure to steer me away from going at my own pace. So what would I need to balance all this time? A calendar.

There used to be a trend in certain videos where a vague poem would be read over meditative cinematography, and right at the end it turns out to be a commercial for something completely unrelated, like beer or cars. This poem stood out to me because it made me consider that poetry and art can be appropriated for capitalist means, and I figured its words would most suit a calendar commercial.

This was fun to put together and made me chuckle a little making it. It’s not a roaring comedic take on the poem, but it is a nice experiment in how far words can be taken from their initial intention (or lack of intention) in Soft Choreography.