An animation by film student Aja Rose Matthews, with the reading of course by Ferlinghetti himself.

See the Motionpoems website for the text. The animator and director is Adam Tow. As with April’s Motionpoem, the free email newsletter contained additional content not archived on the website — an interview with Tow.

Motionpoems: What made you choose this poem to work with?
Adam Tow: After reading all the poems available for this year’s event, ‘Thoreau and the Lightning’ was the piece that I had the strongest connection to. As I read it, I was reminded of my grandfather’s home in the country and the land around it. He was a hard working midwestern man that for some reason I felt had a lot in common with the character in the poem.

MP: What is this poem’s most important moment for you?
AT: For me, the lines that ask if he should “feel humbled” and “give thanks” are the crux of the story. The moving truck and estate sale sign are references to my experiences watching my grandfather’s estate being sold as his health deteriorated. Visually speaking, the tree exploding is my favorite shot.

MP: What was the biggest challenge in turning this piece into a film, and what was your solution?
AT: I struggled with how I wanted to interpret the final sentence of the poem. I had two ideas for what meaning to imply with the visuals (one involving a hearse, the other a moving truck). As far as how to depict things, I wasn’t sure how to show both the positive memories of the past as well as the farm’s abandoned state at the same time. I decided to use a shimmery effect to illustrate his memories overlaid on the farm’s present day appearance.

MP: What did you find most surprising in this process?
AT: It was interesting to see how much you can change the implied message of the poem just by altering a seemingly minor visual element. Also, hearing the music and voiceover for the first time was one of the most exciting moments I’ve had in the last year.

MP: Is there anything else you want to add?
AT: I have to give loads of thanks and credit to Scott Yoshimura (music composition/performance, voiceover) and Logan Christian (audio recording and mixing). I intentionally gave them zero direction and they knocked it out of the park, as I knew they would. Also, many thanks to David Wagoner for agreeing to let me humbly interpret his poem.

Another animation from Martha McCollough‘s erasure project Grey Vacation.

This kinetic text poetry animation by Nikolaus Lesnik uses a reading by Allen Ginsberg.

An interesting kinetic-text animation by Martha McCollough, a painter and animator from Boston, who notes in the description that it it is “Based on a page from my erasure project Grey Vacation. The wrongest thing ever said.”

(English version)

(Dutch version)

Kris J. Yves Verdonck used “stopmotion, pixilation and edited images of Eadward Muybridge,” and notes that the “English version is slightly different from the Dutch one.”

The graphics exist to support the soundtrack here, but I still thought it was an effective videopoem. Ryerson University film student Adin Dell advises, “Put on some headphones or turn up the volume to really hear the ‘soundscape.’”

An interesting stop-motion piece by Nicole Schmitt and Lukas Fiala.

The latest release from Motionpoems, and the first of theirs, I think, to mix in some live footage of the poet alongside the animation (which is by Juan Delcan, who was responsible for the most popular of the Billy Collins animations, “The Dead.”). The text appears in Mark Strand’s latest book, Almost Invisible, which is a collection of prose pieces; the poem part of this video is the only lyric poem in the book.

By the way, if you join the Motionpoems free monthly email list, you get additional content which is not included on the website for some reason. This month’s installment expanded on the making of the video, and included some thoughts by Delcan and Strand:

For this motionpoem, filmmaker Juan Delcan shot live video of Mark Strand in his New York City apartment. He combined that video with drawings inspired by those of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. “I shot [Mark Strand] in 30 minutes and animated the piece in one afternoon,” Delcan told us. “Sometimes not having time to over-think it is the best.”

Delcan also spent time thinking about the purpose of the relatively new genre of poetry films. “I know there are a lot of purists that think that animating poetry is redundant and stops the reader from picturing its words in their own minds, and that the poem should be left alone. And in a lot of cases they may very well be right. But in the particular case of the poems I’ve worked on I feel they retrofeed each other, bringing it to a different genre.”

In response to the motionpoem, poet Mark Strand told us, “I liked the film’s simplicity, which is very much in keeping with the poem, or so it seems to me.”

Jordan T. Caylor writes in the video description,

I recorded my dad reciting his poem “Uncle Harry’s Tombstone” at the end of his stint as the poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin- this is my visual interpretation of his words.