Eric Foley on Ryeberg

By Eric Foley

Movers & shakers:  The creator and editor-in-chief is Erik Rutherford. The site draws on a range of arts-related figures who select YouTube videos and write personal essays about them. Contributors include filmmakers (Mike Hoolboom, Peter Lynch), fiction writers (Sheila Heti, Claudia Dey, Mary Gaitskill), playwrights (Sean Dixon, Anton Piatigorsky), painters (Sholem Krishtalka, Margeaux Williamson), and yes, poets (Lynn Crosbie, John Paul Fiorentino, Nyla Matuk).

Brief history:  Ryeberg started in 2009 and is named for Rutherford’s maternal great-grandfather. As Russell Smith pointed out in last year’s Globe and Mail, YouTube can be “like a vast art gallery curated by author Jorge Louis Borges with no maps and no signs. It’s crying out for curators.” Ryeberg provides these curators, giving them virtual space to present videos that have been selected based on a diverse range of interests.

Highlights of venue:  I discovered Ryeberg when my friend Lauren Bride wrote there about a young man named Pruane. As a believer in unfeigned eccentricity as a form of beauty, his YouTube videos gave me jolts of joy. I also admired the no-nonsense, respectful tone Lauren took in her piece. “Enjoy this,” she seemed to say, “but there’s no need to make fun.” I shared the clip with my 13-year-old sister and then we watched some others, including the mind-blowing one where Pruane hangs out with 50 Cent after totally trashing his album. I love to have a good laugh with my sister, but this also opened up a wider dialogue between us about how viewing habits have changed in the decade and a half since I was her age.

Of special interest to poets:  Charles Olson would sometimes visit Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital; finally, due to Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism, Olson decided he would not go back. That night Pound visited Olson in a dream and said: “Of rhythm is image, of image is knowing, and of knowing, there is a construct.” I heard this story from R. Bruce Elder, who heard it from Stan Brakhage. I’ve never been totally sure what it means, but I think that the visual and its many rhythms are of interest to poets. We can discover amazing things by chance, but Ryeberg is an opportunity to allow some of our viewing to be guided by smart, creative people who have a vested interest in thinking about what they watch and in writing about how they feel about it. As Smith notes, “Static text embedded with moving pictures, whose viewing can be controlled by a solitary reader, is a relatively new form.” Poetry should always be open to, and interested in, new forms.