Guilty Pleasures
A BAMF Retreat Collaborative Poem
I am a long-term member of a filmmaking collective called FilmShop that has various chapters across New York,Los Angeles, and New Orleans. The New York chapter I am in meets in Manhattan and thus is called BAMF, “Bad-Ass Manhattan FilmShop,” and yearly we host a retreat where members rent a sprawling AirBnB somewhere outside of the city to spend a weekend cooking, writing, playing games, and in this case, some creative workshops.
I ran a workshop for the retreat this last February where we collectively wrote and filmed a poem on the subject of “Guilty Pleasures,” which was selected as the theme for FilmShop’s yearly end-of-season showcase this year. Here is the collaborative poem we made.
The Video:
The Text:
Speeding away from business finances,
I called the dentist to return my unfinished teeth.
A sunset strikes off the tinfoil sweater
of my companion’s Chipotle.I had a cluttered dream where strangers
carrying noisy hard drives inched closer.
We artfully danced, we danced artfully1
around the music of my family's knickknacks.Necessary confrontation crawls me towards
captivating photographs of intriguing snacks.
To look at doodles of buildings
reveals mountains of human behavior.
The Process:
One of poetry’s many advantages is to pull apart and re-arrange language to question a concept’s underlying meaning or our relationship to it. That’s basically what’s happening here: what does “guilty pleasure” even mean?
To start, I wrote a series of questions for each participant to write down answers to, with the recommendation they focus on concrete images and actions in their answers, and answering in complete sentences. I no longer have the questions I used, but they basically took on the subject without ever mentioning the word ‘guilty’ or the word ‘pleasure.’ Stuff like this:
What is something you like to do you think others judge?
Name a comfort you’re not sure is good for you.
When do you feel bad for enjoying something? Why do you think you feel bad?
And so forth.
We then read our answers aloud as a group2 and I wrote down all the concrete nouns, verbs, and any adjectives or adverbs that sounded more specific or interesting. Sometimes I’d get a few words together as a phrase.
Then we went through the selected words and collectively arranged them, “Let’s say ‘doodles of buildings’ rather than ‘doodles of finances’” style, until we had the the poem you see above. Once everything was aligned, we went off to read it aloud and record it.
The Filming and Editing:
We each read the poem aloud twice, in two different (quiet3) locations around the AirBnB, directing each other. I then went around the property and shot a ton of b-roll in my ambient narrative style.
I sat on the footage from February to October of this year because the video didn’t have to be delivered until then and in the interim I edited Ominous Horizons, pre-produced Shroomery, and shot and edited three short films for this Substack (not to mentions wrote short stories etc.). By the time I looked at the footage again it was fresh and I could re-consider how the lines of the poem linked and worked together.
In the end it flowed smoothly and I’m happy with it. I didn’t feel the need to switch any lines around (and to be fair we had already discussed them at length). I set a rule that all four of us would have equal voice time and I’d try to weave the voices together so that they sounded like they were in conversation with each other. At that point it was just about finding the best deliveries and equalizing the levels, and the b-roll pretty much just came together.
The Meaning:
So, to what end?
I’m very happy with how this poem turned out, in fact it’s better than I originally thought we’d end up with. It represents what I like most about poetry, which overlaps a lot of why I love dreams: poems compress and reorient language so that words’ associative qualities break down and give the reader a unique, subjective experience. Inside this poem lies the question of what we feel so guilty for and what pleasures we actually are seeking.
To me much of the result seems to be about escape: what you do escape vs. what always brings you back, and the guilt for what you leave unattended to.
Guilty Pleasures: A BAMF Retreat Collaborative Poem screened at the FilmShop Presents: Guilty Pleasures showcase at TV Eye in Ridgewood, NYC on Sunday, November 5th.
To view my previous short films:
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This almost chiasmus was the result of the edit, not the original writing.
IF people felt comfortable. This wasn’t the sort of workshop where people needed to get vulnerable and revealing, though it may have made for better poetry. On the other hand I’ve done a lot of work around curating vulnerable spaces for discussion and exploration and sometimes it’s asking too much for something much simpler. In this case I don’t think we needed therapy to make the poem work.
The four of us were not the only people at the retreat. There were more like a dozen and the others were either writing, doing other workshops, or gaming.