Posts in Category: Author-made videopoems
Seven things I know by Janet Lees
Janet Lees is a poet and film-maker with a distinctive voice.
Her images are often black and white, with soft shades of grey, or tinged with the subtlest of colours. Her poetry is minimal in style, carrying quiet emotion. In counterpoint, the soundtracks are often lush in feeling. So it is in her latest film, Seven things I know.
The atmospheric music is by alt-pop duo Narrow Skies, Anita and Ben Tatlow. The song’s lyrics weave with those of the poem, which is given as text on screen. Anita Tatlow sings in an abstract way that is more musical than verbal, and so the song does not detract, but instead adds fine strands of meaning to Janet Lees’ poem.
The poem is whimsical while uncovering depth. A few of the seven things of the title:
the cadbury’s flake jingle
…
the magpie’s rough music
…
that eric morecambe
was not my uncle
Both poem and song lyrics are printed on the page with the video. This is a film in a single shot and slow motion rhythm, with breathing space for each of its elements.
More of Janet Lees’ films are to be found on her Moving Poems author page.
Un/Write by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Vancouver-based poet and poetry filmmaker Fiona Tinwei Lam collaborated with animation students Lara Renaud and Quinn Kelly back in February on this videopoem “about revision, redaction, and renewal.” Lam told me in an email that
It originated in a published shaped or visual poem on the page about the editing and revising process. I quickly created and brainstormed a text block from which the poem would be carved out on screen.
But I realized there were other poems within the poem while utilizing further compression and fragmentation. Then I noticed there were a few interesting phrases in the discarded text from the text block I’d created for the initial poem, that could form the basis of a new poem about reclamation. So these “cut out” phrases could return on screen in a new way.
She added that she thought it could form the basis of a fun lesson plan for schools and community writing workshops, and I agree. One of the great things about erasure poetry is the way it reminds us that no creation is truly ex nihilo; there’s always an element of discovery. And often with such serendipity comes joy, flowering of its own accord, as the animation suggests. A wonderful start to Poetry Month. (And imagine my surprise just now, bringing up the Canadian National Poetry Month page, to find that this year’s theme is in fact joy!)
Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells
Humour and silliness are not commonly found in poetry films. I rejoice when I stumble upon a piece that tickles my funny bone. Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells is one such rarity. The synopsis:
A pencil-powered matchbox theatre outlines the risk of using sub-par pencils.
This is a one-man show, with Mackenwells as writer, narrator and film-maker. The video animation is amusingly home-spun and original. A bio:
Brian Mackenwells is an Irish writer living in Oxford. Despite being quite tired, he has written for the BBC about pencils, told stories on stage about not getting sick in zero gravity, performed standup about strange superheroes, and co-wrote an audio drama every month for five years.
I found Writing Advice among the finalist films in the 2022 Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland.
Nomad Palindrome by Kai Carlson-Wee
This is I think the first palindromic poetry film I’ve seen, but it’s a very good one. The author-filmmaker, Kai Carlson-Wee, previously appeared with his brother Anders, also a widely published poet, in a documentary short called Riding the Highline, which they co-directed, as well as several poetry videos of Kai’s own (including Cry of the Loon, which I shared here).
A note at Vimeo says the poem previously appeared at Agni, and I got all excited thinking that maybe another major literary journal had followed Triquarterly‘s lead and was publishing poetry films online, but it appears to be still just a print publication. Oh well.
Landschop by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
From the Canadian duo of Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, Landschop is one in a series of videopoems titled Around Osprey. The artists’ words about the overall project:
Around Osprey is a series of short videopoems based on our 2018 residency at the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast Preserve in South Florida. These poems have been derived from our exploration of the lands and waters of the Myakka River, the Manatee River, Sarasota Bay, and Charlotte Harbour. While looking for the crossovers between nature and culture, we were also looking for threads of human histories within protected natural spaces. (source)
Whispered voices combine with cleverly designed on-screen text to convey the single words and short phrases that form the poetic piece of writing. The background of the soundtrack is comprised of subtle sounds of nature, randomly punctuated by sounds of gunshot. The latter are a mysterious aural presence through the video and only connect to the text in the final moments.
I appreciate the gentle, open-ended qualities of this video, consistent with much of the other work from these artists. It’s as though each of their videopoems is just one moment in a long and steady stream of contemplations.
Their daily blog entries for the Around Osprey residency can be found here.
The Future is Ours by Andrew Roberts
A stop-motion videopoem by Brooklyn-based animator Andrew/Drew Roberts, uploaded to Vimeo nine years ago when he was making a whole series of poetic shorts under the banner Stop Motion Haiku, apparently once featured on a dedicated website that no longer exists, though several may be viewed on his own website (scroll down) and on Vimeo.
Moving Poems turned 14 on Thursday, so I wanted to find someone I’d overlooked just to remind ourselves how much good work is still out there. I’m sorry I missed Roberts’s work when it first appeared but happy to have found it in the end.
Wash/Backwash by Jacqui Malins
Featuring a text that alternates between poetry and essay, Wash/Backwash is an intriguing piece by Australian artist Jacqui Malins. The bio on her website describes her as a “cross-disciplinary artist, whose practice incorporates ceramics, poetry and spoken word, performance, video, drawing and photography”. She was also curator of a videopoetry program for the 2021 Poetic City event in Canberra.
Two voices speak the text in a call and answer manner, one giving the poetry and the other conveying theories about perception and feeling. Malins speaks one part and the other is spoken by Abhishek Gupta. The density of the narration led me to watch the video a few times over for better comprehension.
Dissolving shadow images create the sense of just one single image throughout the video. I find the visual concept to be eloquent and touching, suggesting both the singularity and the continual motion of human experience. The screen is in a portrait ratio that works well in focusing our view on the shadow figure. The visual simplicity provides welcome space for the words to take centre stage.
From the video’s summary at Vimeo:
Waves wash across a shadow. The figure softens, sharpens, nearly disappears, snaps back into focus. Is this how emotion feels?
Up-to-date news on Malins’ work in various media can be found here.
blue jay by Anthony Matos
A poem accompanied by a visual story, blue jay is written and directed by Anthony Matos in Maine, USA. He describes the film as “a story about three strangers trying to overcome different forms of grief and loneliness.”
From his bio at FilmFreeway:
My love for film grew from my love of poetry and the Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver collections I read in high school. I lived through these poets and craved to be able to appreciate life and the moment around me as they did.
Poetry films are most often very short and small-scale in production. By contrast, Blue Jay is over 12 minutes and involved a substantial cast and crew. In these ways it more closely resembles a well-produced narrative short.
The combination of poem and story is interesting, and I find this touching film well worth the watching.
Thru Hell by S’phongo
Thru Hell is a video I found among the finalist films from the 2022 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition. It is by S’phongo, an artist born in Zimbabwe and now living in Sierra Leone.
A village boy with a dream, S’phongo is a published author and spoken word artist from south-east Zimbabwe. With two slam champion titles three years into his career as an artist, S’phongo has appeared on stages in Zambia, Sierra Leone, Italy, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. One of his poems has been published on poetrypotion.com (South Africa). He currently works as the Operations Director for VAfrica, a youth media organisation in Sierra Leone and as the senior Technical Officer at LitFest Harare. (source)
S’phongo writes about his poem:
In my life, things weren’t easy, and I believed they weren’t until I adopted a new set of eyes. At that moment, I realized that if my life hadn’t turned out the way it did, I wouldn’t have been able to experience that moment.
Looking around me, I saw birth, growth, and death. Every year we chain the oxen to a plow, take baskets of grains, chasing behind the oxen, dropping them into freshly plowed earth. A week later, life shoots off the ground in hundreds of tiny microgreens. These include growth hindering weeds that will be killed only a few weeks into their lives. Death.
Life continues for the grains while some fade into nutrients for the living. Three months down the line, we witness another birth. The only difference now is it’s in abundance. One grain has become a hundred, then it withers.
This pattern of birth, life, and death can be seen even in man-made objects. It is what it is. We give birth to habits; they live through us and we can kill them at will. I killed some and gave life to some, this being one of the living at the moment. (source)
His synopsis for the video:
Thru Hell explores how all human interaction has the potential of being hell when it is not nurtured from a place of love. It is a reminder that we are all similar, and that hurtful intentions, no matter what their source is, can hurt the same. Most importantly, they can be survived. (source)
More videos from S’phongo can be found here.
HairBrush by Kate Sweeney
A gentle and personal piece reflecting on motherhood, HairBrush is a hand-drawn animation from UK artist, film-maker and writer Kate Sweeney, whose work has featured a number of times before here at Moving Poems. From the synopsis at Vimeo:
After adopting our son during lockdown… I wanted to explore my journey towards becoming a mother.
HairBrush is a meditative reflection upon an everyday activity – a haircut. It documents the laboured process of making a paintbrush out of a golden curl from my son’s head. The brush then being used to paint each frame of the film.
Watercolour, instead of blood or DNA, becomes the metaphor and material for describing how we imagine and manifest our selves through each other.
The film was one of a series of microproject commissions at Star and Shadow Cinema, a co-operative in the north east of the UK.
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