A film by Luca Dicorato and Takanori Yoshiro. Dicorato notes:
Giant is a poem written and performed by 12 years old Orianne Breakspear.
We decided to animate this piece by employing a mixture of techniques, mainly cutout animation. We favoured images from old books and magazines as well as from the web in order to establish the vintage look.The music is from Kevin MacLeod
In 2011, Orianne Breakspear won the Brit Writers Award for poetry in the Under 16s category.
A video made for some kind of climate series at The New York Times, locked behind the paywall, I think. My request for clarification on filmmaker(s) has gone unanswered, but it seems the result of a collaboration with the photographer named at the beginning, Josh Haner, a Pulitzer-winning feature photographer for the paper. Ellams himself also works in graphic art and design. I like how the poem’s searing language is mediated by the intimate space of an online reading, giving way to natural places and a more-than-figurative tree of life.
Earlier we shared a film by Jamie McDonald for the title poem from Ellam’s 2020 collection The Actual, among several other video interpretations of Ellams’ work. It’s fascinating to see giant legacy media organizations like the NYT and the Financial Times promote Ellams’ poetry, almost as cover for their ceaseless promotion of the planet-destroying financial and military/industrial machines.
I realized as I was putting this program together that there was a kind of theme to the films, as expressed in the subtitle, and I mention this because I don’t want to give the impression, to people who aren’t as familiar with Latin American poetry, that there isn’t also light and playful poetry south of the Rio Grande! The screening also happens not to include any explictly political poetry—another rich part of the tradition. The borders transgressed in these poems may be political, but are just as likely to be existential, including the borders between self and other, sanity and insanity, and life and death.
But what I most hope to show is that the linguistic divide isn’t nearly as insurmountable as many gringos might suppose, because of the way film can mediate between languages while showing us the world through another’s eyes. We’ll see an array of strategies for handling translation: subtitles in one language and voiceover in another, titles for both languages, voices for both languages, and monolingual versions of films made originally in a different language—the last probably the best strategy for anyone with dyslexia.
The genesis of this program was an online, international collaboration which I instigated in 2015 with a Facebook group called Poetry From the Other Americas, where amateur translators like me with my bad high-school Spanish and professionals like my friend Jean Morris in London, plus people with native-level fluency in Spanish, Portuguese and French, all worked together to translate and raise awareness of Spanish American, Brazilian, and Quebecois poetry. We posted the most successful results in my literary blog Via Negativa (vianegativa.us) where you can read the results by clicking on the Poetry From the Other Americas link in the Series section of the sidebar. If you’re a film-maker looking for ideas, I should mention that most of the poems have yet to be adapted to film. But a few have: by me; by the Belgian artist and musician Marc Neys, aka Swoon—one of the most prolific and prominent videopoetry makers of the past decade; and by Eduardo Yagüe, a Spanish director with a background in theater, who formed an on-going collaborative relationship with Jean Morris that’s led to a number of additional films. And just the other week I invited Marie Craven, an experimental filmmaker and musician in Australia who is now my co-editor at Moving Poems, to re-make a film I’d largely failed at several years before, adapting three micropoems by my favorite poet in this whole screening, Alejandra Pizarnik.
In addition, I reached out to several film-makers whose works I’ve featured on Moving Poems over the years. Charles Olsen, a poet and filmmaker from New Zealand living in Spain and his partner, the Colombian poet and actor Lilián Pallares, have made several poetry films together, and we’ll see two of them today. Miah Artola is an artist and creator of interactive installations teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the short we’ll see by her is part of a still-unfinished experimental documentary about her father’s homeland, Nicaragua, and how it has survived U.S. military intervention. Tomás (formerly Paola) Proaño is an Ecuadorian musician and video artist who learned how to make videopoetry in order to adapt his countryman Efraín Jara Idrovo’s epic lament for the death of his son, from which I’ve selected the fourth of five parts. The finished audiovisual composition earned Proaño a masters in music cum laude from Berklee College of Music. And the program concludes with a light-hearted adaptation of a poem from north of the border—because turn-about is fair play—from Juan Bullón, a Spanish poet and audiovisual professional who teaches videopoetry workshops in Seville.
I’ve included perhaps one or two more of my own videos than is entirely wise, but keep in mind that they were meant to be shared online, at Moving Poems, and don’t look half-bad on the small screen! I feel a bit like a grasshopper among eagles—as Ogden Nash once said at a reading in celebration of the 50th birthday of Poetry magazine—but I will share my most ambitious hops.
El otro / The Other
dir. & trans. Dave Bonta (2017)
poet Rosario Castellanos (Mexico, 1924-1975)
01:50
I couldn’t believe my luck when I found this footage on one of those free stock photo sites. There’s nothing stock about it! As soon as I saw it, I thought of the Castellanos poem—the translation that had kicked off the whole Poetry From the Other Americas project. I contacted the uploader to get the performer’s name, Stephanie Leathers, and make sure that she was fine with it, too. Evidently it was a rehearsal for a piece of performance art
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La canción del espejo / Song of the Mirror
dir. Eduardo Yagüe (2015)
poet Rafael Courtoisie (Uruguay, 1958- )
trans. Jean Morris
05:06
Eduardo writes,
When I started to make videos I thought that it would be great to have subtitles translated into English in order to have more audience, or at least try to. It was a great help to be invited to be part of the Facebook Group Poetry from the Other Americas, where I met Jean Morris, who is very important to my projects. I am so grateful to her, to her sensibility and huge knowledge of Spanish; she became a very important part of the process (sometimes long process) of making a video. I especially remember with profound respect how she translated La canción del espejo and the care and love she put into this work. Another project that was very important was Antesala Altísima, where Jean and Estefanía (whose knowledge of English is also huge) had so interesting conversations via mail about the convenience of one or another word, and was a privilege of learning for me. Jean is an amazing professional and her support (like yours) has been very important in the way I feel myself as an artist, you both gave me confidence and I am always grateful to this.
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Catarsis / Catharsis
dir. & trans. Charles Olsen (2019)
poet Lilián Pallares (Colombia, 1976- )
01:20
Charles writes,
This was made originally as a book trailer, to capture the essence of Lilián’s latest collection Bestial published in Zaragoza, Spain, by Papeles de Trasmoz, Olifante Editions, 2019. Her collection explores her Afro-Colombian roots and the death of her father. While writing the poems she was taking African dance classes in Madrid and we wanted to capture something of the African influence in this poetry film.
We live in a neighborhood of Madrid with a large migrant population, with people from Senegal, Guinea-Conakry, Morocco, Bangladesh, China, etc., and us (Colombia and New Zealand), and we decided to film this at night in streets with the dancer Marisa Cámara (Guinea-Conakry) and the poet and performer Artemisa Semedo (Galicia/Cape Verde). The music is ‘Zuru’ by the Colombian duo Mitú.
In 2020, Lilian and Charles have been awarded a year-long Arts Residency at the Matadero Madrid Centre for Creative Arts on the theme of ‘Childhood, Play and Public Spaces’. For more on their creative partnership, see antenablue.com.
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Verde embeleso / Green Enchantment
dir. & trans. Dave Bonta (2015)
poet Juana Inés de la Cruz (New Spain/Mexico, 1648-1695)
02:16
I roped in my Via Negativa co-author Luisa Igloria to contribute a reading for the soundtrack. The norm for videopoems of translated texts is to put the original language in the soundtrack and the translation in subtitles, but I decided to reverse that here, just as an experiment. I wanted to make the poem feel less foreign to an English-language audience.
I thought of the poem only after I filmed the meadow footage featured in the video. The original plan for this videopoem was to have that, the titling, and nothing else. But mid-way through the editing process, I woke up early one morning with the idea of adding crowds of people as an overlay. One thing led to another, I found some crazy-ass 1960s TV ads in the Prelinger Archives, and a few days later I had something that seemed to work. For the music, I used a public-domain guitar interpretation of Albéniz from Wikimedia, reasoning that something from the 19th century would help bridge the gap between the 17th and 21st centuries.
To my mind, a videopoem that doesn’t reinterpret the text in a manner different from what its author intended isn’t a real videopoem. But as Lorca much later showed, verde (green) is one of those words with an almost unlimited number of connotations. So this is more than a translation; it’s a complete re-imagining. Then again, human nature hasn’t changed in the last 400 years, and deciding to live in the moment rather than living in hope is, if anything, wiser than ever.
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Mortal (English version of Lo fatal)
dir. Marc Neys (2015)
poet Rubén Dario (Nicaragua, 1867-1916)
trans. Dave Bonta
05:06
Marc writes,
On working with other languages: it’s a cliché maybe, but for me poetry is music and music has no ‘language’ even when used as text on screen as in Lo Fatal.
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El caballo ahogado / The Drowned Horse
dir. Miah Artola (2016)
poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (Nicaragua, 1912-2002)
01:51
Miah writes,
This poem depicts Nicaragua’s long struggle against American imperialism and I wanted to depict the resilience and power of the Nicaraguan people in their recitation of this poem. It was recited by random Nicaraguans throughout Granada, San Marcos and Masaya and most of the participants were familiar with the poem.
Nicaragua is often called ‘The Land of the Poets’ as the most remote village to the busiest town and the old and young alike, have an impressive knowledge of the country’s literary figures as well as international poets and writers. There is enormous esteem placed upon poets in Nicaragua and top government posts have been filled with poets, especially during its strongest period when the Sandinista party was still for the people.
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Ofertorio / Offertory
dir. Eduardo Yagüe
poet Amado Nervo (Mexico, 1870-1919)
trans. Dave Bonta
04:11
Eduardo writes,
I see culture as global and I’ve always thought that my background is not only my Spanish culture, which I love with all my respect (from the medieval jarchas to Antonio Machado or Lorca and, of course, Cervantes and all the theater and poetry from El Siglo de Oro or the amazing poets and writers from Iberoamérica), but also English, U.S. and European, and that is thanks to translators, basically. I think that part of my sentimental and cultural education are equally Lorca, Shakespeare, Whitman, Luis Rosales or Sam Shepard… And if speaking about cinema I usually think on Lynch, Buñuel or Bergman, and there are not many differences between them (and many others), artists taking risks and giving deep works to the whole world.
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Riqueza / Wealth
dir. & trans. Dave Bonta (2011)
poet Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889-1957)
01:44
One of my first successful videopoems, made back in 2011. Who’d have thought a Chilean poem and an Irish folk song (“The Foggy Dew” on pennywhistle, by British software developer Chris Kent) would go together so well? But the mix of sweetness and melancholy was just right, I thought.
This is one of those videopoems that began with some of my own footage (of a spinner who wishes to remain anonymous). When I thought about what sort of poem to match it with, Gabriela Mistral came to mind almost right away — those who know her work will understand what I mean.
Dicha can mean happiness, joy, good luck, or good fortune. Many translators, influenced by the title and the “stolen” part, have gone with “fortune,” but I think it’s better to keep our options open. So often, the simplest poems are the hardest to translate.
Re-edited and re-sized to 16:9 ratio in 2020 for the REELpoetry screening.
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Historia de mi muerte / Story of My Death
dir. & trans. Dave Bonta (2015)
poet Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina, 1874-1938)
02:32
I really like stationary single-shot videopoems. The shot has to be sufficiently suggestive and interesting, of course, and relate to the text in several possible ways. The goal is to put the watcher/listener/reader in a contemplative frame of mind maximally conducive to the reception of poetry.
I translated the poem (with some invaluable assistance from Alicia E-Bourdin on Facebook) specifically with the intent of pairing it with this footage of cabbage white butterflies—which, when I shot it, I already recognized as having a certain Lugones-like feel. So it was just a question of finding the right poem.
This almost didn’t make the cut for the program, due to the lack of sharpness in the footage, but among other things I wanted to show off the approach to bilingual subtitling I’d hit upon for the video.
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A media voz / Under My Breath
dir. Eduardo Yagüe (2018)
poet Blanca Varela (Peru, 1926-2009)
trans. Jean Morris
04:02
Eduardo writes,
English and Spanish are not so far apart, we are part of the same culture, and the time we are living in makes approaching and mixing with other cultures very productive. Generally speaking, this is what I think videopoetry is doing, mixing genres, artistic languages and sensibilities. I am also thinking about Spanish language being so important in USA, despite bad politicians.
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una mirada desde la alcantarilla / a glimpse from the gutter
dir. Maria Craven (2020)
poet Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936-1972)
trans. Dave Bonta and Jean Morris
03:23
Marie writes,
A few weeks ago, Dave Bonta invited me to participate in this “Poetry Without Borders” program at REELPoetry, by making a video remix of his 2016 piece, “A Glimpse from the Gutter”, from three poems by Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). Having previously made a number of films with Dave’s poetry, and being involved in some of his wider projects, I was keen to rise to the challenge.
Like the majority of Australians, I speak only the dominant English. Nonetheless, this is the sixth film I’ve made involving different languages. My interest in doing this has arisen in part from a personal impulse to in some way transcend the xenophobia and racism that has long been a lamentable aspect of my own geographically-isolated culture. Aside from this, and despite being in my late 50s, I retain a child-like wonderment that our single human species communicates in so many richly varied ways. In addition, my film-making over 35 years has been largely directed towards international audiences, via the film festival circuit, and now also the web, where poetry film has by far its greatest reach. I also simply love the expressive sounds of different languages as a kind of music.
Dave translated Pizarnik’s poems with advice and in discussion with Jean Morris, a poet and professional translator. Jean voiced the poems in Spanish, while Dave spoke them in English. For my film, I retained only the text and voices, which I re-arranged and mixed with new music and images. I have remained true to Dave’s impulse in his earlier piece to make a truly bilingual film, spoken in both Spanish and English, and therefore without the need for subtitles.
As in a number of my films, the raw images were sourced from Storyblocks, a subscription website with a vast library of short, random clips from videographers in many different countries. The collection of shots I selected were then transformed via changes to speed, light, framing and colour, and the addition of long dissolves that blend and juxtapose the images via superimposition.
Some of the images I selected touch on the literal meanings of the poems. These direct connections of image to text are sometimes seen at moments other than when they are spoken. The film also contains a number of shots that bear no direct relation to the words. My overall impulse was to create a series of moving images that might form a kind of visual poem in themselves, while remaining connected to the resonances I found in the text and in the qualities of the voices. The final visual element is a faintly-flickering overlay containing animated x-rays of human anatomy.
The music is an ambient piece by Lee Rosevere, who for several years has generously released much of his music on creative commons remix licenses, enabling film-makers and other artists to create new works incorporating his sounds. I chose this piece for its slow pace, beatlessness and meditative quality, that left room for the voices to take by far the greatest prominence.
I am delighted to have especially made this film for REELPoetry, where it is having its world premiere.
My next film-making project this year will be the completion of a film started in 2019 called “Metamorphosis”, based on a poem by Jean Morris, and featuring Spanish actor Pedro Luis Menéndez. It is the first film I am collaboratively directing, with Spanish film-maker, Eduardo Yagüe.
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sollozo por pedro jara, IV (Weeping for Pedro Jara, IV)
dir. Tomás Proaño (2016)
poet Efraín Jara Idrovo (Ecuador, 1926-2018)
trans. Cecilia Mafla Bustamante
05:07
Tomás writes,
The poem sollozo por pedro jara (1978) is an elegy written by Efraín Jara Idrovo after his son Pedro’s suicide. It can be seen as his masterpiece because of its expressiveness and the meticulous work done on structure, which was inspired by musical serialism, specifically by Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3, as stated by the poet. This poem consists of 63 verses divided into 5 series, and each series has three parallel developments. In the first edition of this poem, Jara Idrovo shares suggestions on how the poem could be read and combined and this is interesting, especially, for the oral performance of this piece and for
interdisciplinary approaches.
I started this project as part of my M.Mus. thesis project. The main goal was to compose music for this elegy by finding creative approaches to translate its emotional content and avant-garde structure into a musical composition arranged for guitar. This is the musical aspect of the frame I wanted to provide for this poetry. The five resulting audio tracks are part of five audiovisuals, which include a recitation, ambient sounds, footage and video editing that supports the emotional environment and English subtitles based on a translation by Dr. Cecilia Mafla Bustamante.Regarding the translation, at certain times she preferred to change some verses in order to produce rhymes. I admire her work, especially because the metaphors she changes in order to preserve original rhymes are similar to the original and yet provide new images and beauty, which makes this a very thoughtful translation.
Watch all five parts on Vimeo.
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Despedida / Farewell
dir. Marc Neys (2015)
poet Cecília Meireles (Brazil, 1901-1964)
trans. Natalie d’Arbeloff
02:41
Marc blogged at the time:
My mother passed away.
This is a tribute to her and the way she directed her own ending.
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Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca / Black Stone on a White Stone
dir. Dave Bonta (2017)
poet César Vallejo (Peru, 1892-1938)
trans. Jean Morris, Natalie d’Arbeloff, & the Poetry from the Other Americas group
01:43
This is so far the only time I’ve paid for stock footage to use in a videopoem. (I’m not opposed to that; I’m just cheap.) The music really makes this one work, I think.
Translating by committee can be a challenge. In this case, I think one or two lines never got complete buy-in from everyone. But it’s such an iconic poem, I just had to envideo it.
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Vuelvo a la noche / Back in the Night
dir. Eduardo Yagüe (2019)
poet Mía Gallegos (Costa Rica, 1953- )
trans. Jean Morris
05:31
Eduardo’s most recent film (as of January 2020), continuing his collaboration with translator Jean Morris, is the final piece of his TRILOGÍA DE LA SOLEDAD (Trilogy of Solitude), which began with an adaptation of a piece by a Spanish poet, Pedro Luis Menéndez: La vida menguante (Waning Life), and continued with the previously shared A media voz. He says the trilogy is “sobre la soledad y el vacío existencial, creativo y amoroso” (about solitude and existential, creative, and romantic emptiness).
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And the Alarm Rang (English version of Y sonó la alarma)
dir. & trans. Charles Olsen (2013)
poet Lilián Pallares (Colombia, 1976- )
03:00
Charles writes,
Inspired by the cinematic techniques of Georges Méliès such as differences in scale, the actor appearing multiple times in the same frame, and the language of silent cinema, we had a lot of fun taking the poem off the page and into film. Lilián Pallares is both the poet and actress and we filmed it in the streets of Madrid, constructing a bed from a cardboard box to support the pillow so we could easily carry it around. Why try to film real ants on sugar when you can film a giant paper cut-out ant on large salt grains?
I’m interested in the use of translation as a way to understand another culture, both the physical translation – Lilián from Colombia to Spain and me from New Zealand to the UK before moving to Spain – and the move into a new language in my case. We both were writing when we met in 2009, but Lilián encouraged me to start writing and reading my poems in Spanish and introduced me to the local poetry circuits in Madrid. Lilián had studied Audiovisual Communication at Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla and I came from a Fine Arts background and had recently begun filming, and so we complimented each other and learned from one another.
The flamenco pianist Pablo Rubén Maldonado composed the music especially for the video. We had previously worked together on my flamenco short film ‘La danza de los pinceles’ (‘The dance of the brushes’) and we have performed together with Lilián and the flamenco dancer Selene Muñoz with our show ‘Agita flamenco’. Moving to Spain in part to study flamenco guitar has connected me with the world of flamenco and provided amazing opportunities.
The internet has also been very important in my creative work. With poetry I have run the online Spanish poetry competition Palabras Prestadas and the last four years I have run the equivalent, ‘Given Words’, in New Zealand for National Poetry Day, so I receive hundreds of poems from New Zealand and across the Spanish-speaking world. Lilián and I have also collaborated with musicians and dancers in Madrid, the Netherlands, and in the United Kingdom, on poetry film and performance projects.
In this case the starting point was to make a film inspired by the French film director Georges Méliès, and we chose Lilián’s poem ‘And the alarm rang’ from her first collection Voces Mudas (Silent Voices) because it told a simple story that gave room for surreal treatment. She wrote the poem in Madrid as a way to comment on the daily grind as she worked in jobs that weren’t satisfying creatively so it was fun to play with her poem in the streets and metro (subway) of Madrid.
The translation of the poem for the film was quite straightforward as the text is inserted between the images. In other text-on-screen pieces where the text is integrated with the image I will also do two versions. In pieces with voice I have recorded separate soundtracks in Spanish and English, especially for my own poems, or if the Spanish text is in the voice of one of the actors then I prefer to use subtitles rather than dub the voice. I sometimes question whether I shouldn’t just do my poetry films in only one language and use subtitles – there is something attractive about this that accentuates the different cultural contexts, and it maybe makes the audience feel like they are having a more ‘cultural experience’ – but I also want to make the work accessible so the English viewer can appreciate it immediately as a Spanish audience does when it is in Spanish and visa-versa. I guess this works best where the poet speaks and writes in both languages.
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El hombre imaginario / The Imaginary Man
dir. & trans. Dave Bonta (2018)
poet Nicanor Parra (Chile, 1914-2018)
01:44
As I wrote in my blog when I first posted this, the great Chilean poet Nicanor Parra died on January 23, 2018 at the age of 103, so I wanted to make a video for one of his poems as a tribute, especially since there didn’t seem to be any real videopoems or poetry films of his work on the web. I asked some fellow fans of Latin American poetry on Facebook for suggestions of poems, and “El hombre imaginario” came up. It had been translated before—by Edith Grossman, no less—but we all found her decision to depart from the plain meaning of the text in order to imitate the word order of Spanish odd and unfortunate. Eduardo Yagüe agreed to read the poem for the soundtrack when I mentioned I had an idea for a videopoem. I found the music—an accordion track by the composer Steven O’Brien—on Soundcloud, and the footage was something I’d downloaded from the one-person stock video channel Beachfront B-Roll a while ago.
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Your Dog Dies / Tu perro se muere
dir. Juan Bullón (2019)
poet Raymond Carver (USA, 1938-1988)
02:14
Juan writes,
I’m a Spanish film maker and writer. I write with creative, narrative or poetic intention for about twelve years. I come from the audiovisual world (television and advertising mostly). In recent years I have attended several creative writing workshops. Now, far from audiovisual as a profession, I dedicate myself to writing and coordinate a creative writing workshop in Seville. It is a workshop to experience the fact of creating and feeling literature. We try to go beyond writing or correct narrative, poetic, autobiographical or reflective texts, beyond knowing techniques and writing tricks. Creativity is the goal without end. We give great importance to reading aloud as a way to recognize and work the literary voice of each one, and also, we experiment with the audiovisual format as another way of learning to know how to interpret our texts, to voiceover them, and act on them. Video-poems are another part of the creative process and the recognition of each as an author, it is another way of creative knowledge. The essential is to pose, think and act, and in our case, create from writing to let go and leave our point of view, and be able to share it. And this ability to narrate and tell should be transferable to another means of expression, as another complement, as another revelation of our creative capacity.
Transferring our texts (or those of other authors) to an audiovisual format, relying on the image and music to create these video-poems is a challenge where the fundamental is the literary burden of the text. We do not consider it as a struggle between the greater or lesser relevance of the image, music or text. The written is the important, it’s essential, then, the interpretation and performance of these texts with a suggestive audiovisual dress. The direction and production of these video-poems must be guided by the simplicity and speed of creation in the event that they are self-produced or by taking advantage of what the internet offers with the royalty-free images and music that can be used and shared, with that democratization of the media. In turn, the video-poems we make are posted on the internet for anyone’s free enjoyment, helping to fill in that great library of Babel.
Moving the texts to an audiovisual format is a part of the creative process, a moment of enjoyment and self-knowledge. The important thing is to act, to be and to write it.
The power and importance of curation is once again demonstrated by the eclectic and compelling selections included in the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival, which was held at the Wolverine Farm Publishing’s Letterpress and Publick House in Ft. Collins, CO on Friday, October 19, 2018. Organizers R.W. Perkins (poet, writer, and filmmaker from Loveland, CO) and Matt Mullins (writer, musician, experimental filmmaker, and multimedia artist who teaches creative writing at Ball State University and is the mixed media editor of Atticus Review) have put together a program that surveys the breadth and depth of film poetry rather than attempting to construct or validate some narrow canon. From animated calligraphy to found footage, from flicker film techniques to metamorphosing animation, from abstracting digital layering to Hollywood narrative techniques, from dreamlike transitions and juxtapositions to post-apocalyptic mise-en-scene, from beauty in a broken world to cultural and political critique, from digital image fracturing and recombination to stark, off-balance, black-and-white compositions harking back to Man Ray, from silent film techniques to spoken word poetry, from digital remixing to music video techniques, and from preschool poets to poetic giants from the past to unpublished poets who are also filmmakers, the selections survey the state of video poetry and yet reflect the tastes and inclinations of Perkins and Mullins, who hopefully will keep this festival going for years to come.
One interesting feature of Juteback 2018 was live poetry readings by the 2018 poet laureate of Ft. Collins, Natalie Giarratano, and 2013 Ft. Collins poet laureate, Jason Hardung. If you don’t know them, both of them are poets worth exploring.
Also worth mentioning is that both Perkins and Mullins each showed one of their own poetry films to open the festival, in order to demonstrate that they are poetry film practitioners as well as curators. Perkins’ film is Visions of Snow, and Mullins’ film is One/Another.
As Perkins noted in his closing comments, most of the films in the festival are available openly, and he encouraged the festival audience to share what they liked as widely as possible. With that in mind, here are links to the poetry films (where possible), and to trailers for the films or links to the filmmakers’ websites (where the films themselves could not be found).
Perkins and Mullins are seeking to expand the audience for the Juteback Poetry Film Festival. If anyone has any suggestions, you can contact them.
(Full disclosure: Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran’s The Names of Trees was one of the poetry films included in the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival.)
Carolyn Rumley
One Step Away
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Rita Mae Reese
Alphabet Conspiracy
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Jutta Pryor
Poet Matt Dennison
The Bird
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Cindy St. Onge
My Lover’s Pretty Mouth
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Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp
Poet Marc Zegans
The Danger Meditations
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Kate Sweeney
Poet Anna Woodford
Work
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Mohammad Enamul and Haque Kha
Poet Sadi Taif
A Vagabond Wind
(this is a 50-second trailer for the film poem)
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Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran
Poet Lucy English
The Names of Trees
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Marie Craven
Poet Matt Hetherington
Light Ghazal
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Dan Douglas
Poet Paul Summers
Bun Stop
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Vivek Jain
Poet Kirti Pherwani
I Don’t Know
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Mark Niehus
Shiver
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Eduardo Yagüe
Poet Samuel Beckett
Qué Palabra
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Eliot Michl
Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful
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Gilbert Sevigny
Poet Jean Coulombe
Au Jardin Bleu (In the Blue Garden)
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Lisa Seidenberg
Poet Gertrude Stein
America
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Merissa Victor
Poet Angelica Poversky
The Entropy of Forgiveness
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Kathryn Darnell
Poet Bertolt Brecht
Motto: A Poem by Bertolt Brecht
Visit her Vimeo page, where you can watch 14 videos using similar animated calligraphy techniques, though Motto is not among them.
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Kidst Ayalew Abebe
Poet Femi Bájúlayé
Bámidélé
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A. D. Cooper
Home to the Hangers
(this is a 48 second trailer for the 5-minute film, which is behind a password to protect its film festival qualifications)
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Luna Ontenegro, Ginés Olivares, and Adrian Fisher (mmmmmfilms collective)
Fatal When They Touch
Visit the collective’s webpage for the film (which does not include the film itself).
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Jane Glennie
Poet Brittani Sonnenberg
Coyote Wedding
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Nancy Kangas
Preschool Poets: An Animated Series
Visit the Vimeo page for the Preschool Poets project, which has the eight films compiled for Juteback, as well as some behind-the-scenes video.
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Steven Fox
Alone
There’s a Facebook page for the local actor and filmmaker, but there does not seem to be any online link to the film.
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Team BTSD
Perpetuum
(Special screening)
Bellingham, Washington-based poet Susan J. Erickson reads a poem from her 2016 collection Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine in this film by poet and editor Ellie A. Rogers. The soundtrack is by Louis McLaughlin.
Rogers has just blogged about making the film:
Susan J. Erickson has red cowboy boots and impeccable diction. She’s a poet hero of mine who I met back in the land of Douglas fir, though we’re both ladies of the 10,000 lakes.
Sue won the Brick Road Poetry Press prize last year, and her book, Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine, is out now. Her collection of lady persona poems is tonally diverse, smart, and powerful.
Sue asked me to make a book trailer for her. We chose to work with her poem “Rapunzel Brings Her Women’s Studies Class to the Tower” partially because I now live near a giant bell tower and tracts of forest, but mostly because this poem is a linchpin poem. Rapunzel is trying to “relinquish the rib of victimhood.” She pushes back against the story we tell about her. She tells her class “your voices are searchlights that can sweep the horizon to reveal fault lines and illuminate passage.” What a good lesson.
I’m a filmmaker not a poet. So for me the word “poetry” means something different I think than how poets might see it. For me the poetry part of cinépoetry is not the written part, it’s a kind of magic that can suddenly bring alive an enchanting correspondence between words, sounds and images. Given this definition, here are my current favorites put into categories.
Once
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 2000
Lyn Elliot must surely be America’s most underappreciated filmmaker. Her work is so smart, so simple and often times uproariously funny. What more do you want? Ok, how about short and to the point too. I love this film. I wish I was this smart.
On Loop
Directed by Christine Hooper, 2013
Poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold
I went to the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in October of 2014 and I saw many great cinépoems. This was my favorite one there. I still don’t fully understand how she did it, but I think she perfectly captures that moment where we are trying to sleep but our mind seems instead to dissect us into multiple fighting personalities who churn things over endlessly.
Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry
Directed by Joanna Kohler, 2010
Poem by Bob Hicok
Are all the best cinépoems directed by women? Sheesh, third in a row. I think what I really love best about this one is how it finds a way to create an enchanting dialogue between the interior voice of the poem and a kind of external visual journey of the ruminating man. Also, projecting on chest hair is a genius visual idea. I wish I’d thought of that.
Closed Wounds
Directed by Lanka Haouche Perren, 2014
Poem by Michael Harding
I saw this at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in 2014. It’s haunting. A brilliant and troubling juxtaposition of images and sounds with words. Some might call the film exploitative, but all I saw was its humanity. Also, I never would have thought of putting this poem with these images. It’s a surprising confluence of words and images that would at first seem entirely inappropriate, but here, somehow, this piece elevates both the words and the visuals to levels I’m not sure they achieve on their own.
When Walt Whitman was a Little Girl
Directed by Jim Haverkamp, 2012
Poem by M.C. Biegner
I think this film takes us down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland style visual universe that’s enchanting in way that’s both completely its own thing, but also perfectly suited to the tone of the words. I also like that I don’t think it tries to be impressive – like so many calling card short films. It just makes the original work sing again with spirit and soul, transposed into a new key.
Never Too Late
Director uncredited, 2013
Poem by Michael London
I love the poem and how it sounds when read. I think the words work cleverly to open up the difficulties, paradoxes and the potential for change in what I take to be life in inner city Chicago. Also, for me at least, it feels like I am invited to feel the breathing spirit of a personal, family space and understand its value to the poet, and to all of us. I know the piece has affected me when all the natural sound drops out at at the end and I can still feel and hear it in the poem and what it describes.
Heliotropes
Directed by Michael Langan, 2010
Poem by Brian Christian
I think the sequence from :52 to 1:09 in this film are my favorite 17 seconds in cinépoetry. It’s perfect. I’m sure there is some kind of eternal punishment for being perfect, even if it’s just for 17 seconds — maybe door to door electioneering for Donald Trump(?)
Cars Will Make You Free
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 1997
I don’t guffaw, or make giant snorting sounds while watching this piece (like I do while watching certain scenes from Trailer Park Boys) but I do laugh throughout it, and you can’t really wipe the stupid grin from my face. It’s simple, fun and smart.
Massacre at Murambi
Written and directed by Sam Kauffmann, 2007
I think this is a cinépoem masquerading as a documentary. One could could characterize the words here as simply poetic, rather than a poem onto itself. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I guess I don’t care either way. But for the purists, I urge you to hang with it until its conclusion before you cinch any final judgment here. While at first the words may seem like a conventional documentary voice-over, the poetry is revealed soon enough, and the whole movie turns on a few well chosen words and their devastating reveal.
La jetée
Written and directed by Chris Marker, 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLfXCkFQtXw
Well, who am I to add anything more to the volumes written about this movie. It’s an acknowledged masterwork that deserves your undistracted attention for its duration. Actually, imagine you didn’t have a phone or a computer or any devices and you were in a dark cinema in Paris in 1962. It’s still great though even if you do glance at your devices once or twice. I don’t believe it has been surpassed really — an astounding blend of visuals, sounds and words. It’s a one of a kind work that, if not a cinépoem must be instead a grandfather to the genre.
I really enjoy all forms of videopoetry, and collaborations have certainly led to some of the most groundbreaking and vital work out there, but I also have tremendous admiration for those people who work primarily as singular “videopoets.” To have the skill and talent to write a compelling poem and the ability to place that poem into an equally compelling visual and sonic context is an impressive artistic accomplishment.
But as I sat down to compile a list of ten single-author/author-made pieces that have influenced me, I quickly realized that there’s a tremendous amount of excellent work of this type out there. So I decided to narrow my list even further to focus on those poets who have demonstrated that they have the skills I mention above, and the ability to read their own poetry convincingly, and the ability to deliver the whole package in four minutes or less.
So in no particular order, here they are: Ten notable single-author videopoems under four minutes where the author also reads the poem.
Mouth
Timothy David Orme, 2012
Kleine Reise (Little Trip)
Claire Walka, 2010
The Dinosaur Book is Green Fire
Brenda Clews, 2011
the giant
Kate Greenstreet, 2009
Vowels
Temujin Doran, 2012
Where They Feed Their Children to Kings
John Gallaher, 2012
when you land in New Orleans
Ben Pelhan, 2012
Profile
R.W. Perkins, 2011
It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012
Who’d have thought
Melissa Diem, 2013