Moving Poems

An animation by Francesca Talenti. I wasn’t able to locate a website for the poet.

Another videopoem gone viral, with well over a million views at time of posting. It’s not high art, but I guess like a lot of people I love the message here, and I thought the film was charming, too. Andrea Dorfman is the filmmaker. Tanya Davis is the actor/performer as well as the author, justifying this video’s inclusion in my Spoken Word category.

“Video haiku” is a somewhat inchoate genre that overlaps with videopoetry but isn’t wholly contained by it: some filmmakers, for example, use the term for short, poetic films with three scenes reminiscent of the three lines of conventional English-language haiku (Japanese haiku are written in one line). Those that do include text often adhere rigorously to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern, but otherwise are barely recognizable as poems. This short film, however, seems based quite organically on the haiga tradition: the text is very well integrated with the single image, and the author/filmmaker — a London-based director — knows enough to disregard the three-line and 17 syllable conventions when they don’t suit their purposes. Though this is closer to a slide than a film, I think it’s worth featuring here because of the possiblities is suggests for contemporary haiku video.

“This is a motion graphics, kinetic text assignment” apparently created by Dara Elerath, a student at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. Michael McCormick narrates.

For more on Li-Young Lee, see his page at the Academy of American Poets.

Written and produced by Patrick Robert Payne and Susan Ada Brown. Jared Parks directs. Oddly, this is the first decent video for a Philip Levine poem that I’ve run across — the first of many, I hope.

Classic film poem from 1964, directed by Paul Julian and Les Goodman with animation by Margaret Julian. According to a Wikipedia entry on the poem, it was a co-winner of the Silver Sail award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1964. A couple of the user reviews at IMDb are worth quoting. Old_tv_guy calls it

An eerie and disturbing little gem from Melrose Studios. Animation is excellent, of a photocollage style you hardly ever see: stark photo images and gaunt, jagged lines. It seems to be taking place in a backwater of infinity, or a nightmare world of pale colors and limitless space.

And tim_gatchell wrote in 2008,

I also saw this short as a child. Probably in about the 5th grade. It left an indelible impression on me and I continue to use this poem as an example for people when groups allow other groups to be ganged up on and have their rights taken away.

Even more remarkable is that while attending college at Cal Poly, I would take summer classes at the local community college to get credits and save money. Took 2nd Semester Freshman lit and guess who my teacher was…yes, Mr. Ogden himself. He is a remarkable man and I have total respect for the man.

He is still teaching I believe in Costa Mesa at the Coast Community College.

I was unable to verify this biographical information about Ogden.

Though a poorer-quality version of the film exists on YouTube, this was uploaded to the Internet Archive by the Academic Film Archive of North America.

Always good to see an accomplished poet who’s also adept at filmmaking. The poem is from his second book, Scary, No Scary.

Lydia Moyer has adroitly adapted excerpts from the G. C. Waldrep poem for this poetic meditation on colony collapse disorder, in a film titled “The Alexander Veil.”

For more on Waldrep, see his page on the Bucknell University site.

This is the video my co-editor Beth Adams and I commissioned at qarrtsiluni in support of the soon-to-be-released winner of our 2010 poetry chapbook contest, Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels. James Brush wrote about why he elected to envideo this poem, and what influenced his choice of imagery, at his blog Coyote Mercury.

Watermark was chosen by the noted nonfiction author and naturalist Ken Lamberton, who was impressed by the “wonderfully controlled surreal and mesmerizing quality” of the poems. The print edition is already available for ordering ahead of the official launch on Monday, August 30, when we’ll also unveil online and podcast versions. We’re also running a series of poems from the other ten finalists at qarrtsiluni between now and then, hoping in part to interest other micropublishers in snatching up some of these terrific manuscripts (would that we could publish and release videopoems for every one of them!).

Some videos are so bad they’re good; this is one of them. To say that it’s amateurishly done would be a vast understatement, and yet it still manages to be charming and eminently watchable, in part because she messes up toward the end. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Of course, it helps that Addonizio recites the poem really well, and that she has a cute cat.

The text and audio of the poem are available at Poets.org. Be sure to visit Addonizio’s new website, too.