Moving PoemsThe best poetry videos on the web

This appeared at HTML Giant almost a year ago, but I just found out about it from berfrois. The accompanying text at HTML Giant provides not only context but invaluable commentary by Jackie Wang, worth reading in full. I’ll just quote from the first paragraphs:

We are very proud to house Untitled, a film of pornstars reading poems, directed by Laurel Nakadate, based on text by Dora Malech. [...]

Poetry readings. Whether you love them or hate them, they can sometimes be an uncomfortable or bland affair. Some contemporary authors are committed to reinventing the format of “the reading”—using vulnerability, performance, and other attention-grabbing techniques to pump a little life into these often humdrum happenings. But video artist Laurel Nakadate takes the “the reading” to a whole new level.

In the video Untitled, Laurel has porn actresses read poems by Dora Malech. The interplay between Dora’s poems and the premise of the video is brilliant. The poems grapple with the tension between corporeality and disembodied intellect—being pure body or pure voice, being of the flesh or of the mind, but they settle on neither. Laurel’s video project and Dora’s text collapses those distinctions, using the body itself to speak. “If you give me a dollar I’ll take my top off / and let you see my heart,” reads actress Robbye Bentley. The body is not that which is mute, but that which sings. Another poem speaks to the ecstasy of being an embodied human with the line, “Believe me / when I tell you I’m kept / awake by the light / from my body, splayed star.”

The porn actresses in the video were asked to come to the “audition” (the audition being the final video itself) wearing their usually business attire: lacy lingerie, bright color bras. One woman — Robbye Bentley — even delivers her poems topless, covering her breasts with the poem “script” about a woman taking her top off for money. In recontextualizing the poetry reading event by having porn actresses read poems in settings like bathrooms and bedrooms, the video also dashes another expectation: that the porn actress is somehow less intellectual than the poet. The pairing of poetry and porn initially seemed unnatural to me. On the phone I asked Laurel, “Did the actresses think it was weird to be asked to read poems? How did they react?” She said no, that they loved it, that they were excited to be a part of the project.

Read the rest. Here’s my own reaction: 1) These are very good poems, and most of the actresses do an outstanding job of reading them. 2) Like all actors, these women are very comfortable in front of an audience. If poets want to be better readers, they should take public performance seriously. Instead, most MFA programs I’m aware of still don’t even require a class in speech communications, let alone in theater. A good slam poet with no higher education whatsoever can kick the ass of almost any academic poet at live events. (See the group blog Voice Alpha for much more on the art reading poems for an audience.) 3.) I’m thinking of giving my next poetry reading wearing nothing but a hat (to cover my baldness).

For more on Dora Malech, do visit her website.