Lenora de Barros is a genre-crosser, a concrete poet and visual artist also working in film and audio. I was impressed that someone with such a strong background in the visual aspect of poetry would become so seduced by sound.

I searched for an example of her work on YouTube and found Encorpa (Embodies), a video made for an exhibition called The Overexited Body — Art and Sports. Lenora de Barros is credited with the sound on this piece along with Cid Campos. Brazilian filmmaker Grima Grimaldi directs.

Must be expanded to full screen. Mariano Rentería Garnica made the film in collaboration with his fellow Mexican artist Raúl Calderón Gordillo, who supplied the text. The Spanish/English title as given above is what he wrote in Vimeo, where he also supplied this explanation:

Este remix visual trata de crear una impresión rítmica de la mirada poética en el cine, mostrándola como imágenes aleatorias. Este Abecedario Poético es la búsqueda de una relación del cuerpo humano en el cine, apoyado con algunos textos del artista visual michoacano Raúl Calderon Gordillo.

This visual remix tries to make a rhythmic impression of the poetic glance in cinema by showing random images of beauty. The Poetic Alphabet, tries to make a relation in between the human body in cinema and the poems of the mexican visual artist Raúl Calderon Gordillo.

A videopoem about a poem called “poem” (from the collection Cross Section 1947): Stephen Ausherman brings a fresh approach to the genre of concrete videopoetry here. According to the note on Vimeo,

Camera obscura transforms a page from an anthology into visual poetry. Alan Dugan is one of several Cape Cod writers interpreted by Stephen Ausherman during his 2010 art residency at the C-Scape dune shack.

This sounds like a fascinating project, dedicated to “interpreting local literature through new media,” as Ausherman puts it on his website. The five videos completed during his residency in the shack on the National Seashore were first “screened” for visitors in and around the shack itself.

For more about Alan Dugan, see the Poetry Foundation page (and check out the PF’s slick new revamped website!).

Paul Digby designed and created this video, which I am slotting into the “concrete poetry” category (even though the text is in rhyming couplets) on the strength of its last few seconds, which to me also perform the essential function of suggesting additional meanings beyond those immediately obvious in the text itself. Marly Youmans reads her poem, which is from her new collection The Throne of Psyche.

Interesting kinetic text animation by Daniela Elza’s husband Dethe, “programmed in NodeBox, final video produced using QuickTime and iMovie.” To me, this kind of fits in the “concrete poetry” category (though I admit that’s subjective, and I should probably just merge it into a kinetic text category).

Self-referential in the grand tradition of concrete poetry. The music is also a perfect fit, I thought.

Poem by Zach Lieberman. Code by Zach Lieberman & Kimmo Kallio. Performed live by Kimmo Kallio. Built with Processing. processing.org

Soundtrack: Caveman lament by Chris Clark.

I don’t entirely understand Josephine Gustavsson’s explanation for the method here, but it sounds highly imaginative:

Every day, trains scrape off iron filings from the rails of the tube network. These filings are regularly removed by staff, since they can otherwise interfere with the signaling system. The procedure is carried out using a machine that contains a magnetic force.

The visualisation of the poem ‘Window Interplay’ is made for the moving image screens of the London Underground, to inspire Monday morning commuters. It is made through a series of explorations, making use of iron powder and magnetic fields.

Francisco José Blanco is a Venezuelan artist resident in Sweden.

An excerpt from the short film Tongue of the Hidden, directed by David Alexander Anderson with calligraphy, translation and narration by Jila Peacock and animation by Florian Guibert, assisted by Jerome Dernoncourt. See the film’s webpage for complete credits, stills, storyboard, and more.

The poet Hafez, also known as the Teller of Secrets, used the language of human love and the metaphors of wine and drunkenness to describe his desire for the Divine and intoxication with the mysteries of the Universe. [...]

Hand-drawn Farsi (Persian/Iranian) calligraphy is imported into the computer and forms the basis of constructed landscapes, and animals that move within landscapes. Software was Studio Max, Maya, XSI and After Effects.

According to a page on Jila Peacock’s website, “The film was premiered at the National Film Theatre in October 2007 as part of the London Film Festival and as part on Animate TV on C4 in December 2007.” See also the section of her site on her handmade artist’s book Ten Poems From Hafez.

nam june paik’s confused rain (1967) was the chaotic distribution of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E on a sheet of paper.

clint enns’ confused rain (2008) is a posthumous collaboration with nam june paik that expands paik’s work into a computer program that produces an animation of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E falling like rain drops.

this was written in visual basic.

For more on the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, see the Wikipedia, which says he was “considered to be the first video artist.” For more on Clint Enns, see his Vimeo page.

Toronto-based painter and poet Brenda Clews has recently begun to explore videopoetry, with some very interesting results. Concrete or visual poetry often strikes me as more art than poem, but I like what this one says about rain — and about poetry. The words are right at hand, but remain out of reach. (If you have the bandwidth for it, this is available in HD, as well — click through to view it on YouTube.)

Another exciting thing about this production is the double-blind collaborative way it came about, alluded to in the title and explained in the credits at the end:

Brenda created a short film
for unheard music

Gabriel created music
for an unseen film

Gabriel is the avant garde musician Gabriel G, a.k.a. Alphacore.

See Brenda’s lengthy description and analysis of the piece at her blog, Rubies in Crystal.