Posts in Category: Videopoems

My Story is Not My Own by Steven McCabe

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The most ambitious film by a poet for his own poem I’ve yet seen. It even has its own website; go there for the complete credits. Here’s McCabe’s description of the poem and the project:

At the moment of the fatal shots Jacqueline Kennedy was seen fleeing into prehistory, dancing ritualistically, time-traveling to the wild-west and documenting landscape. The film’s running time of 11:22 mirrors the date of the events precipitating the film’s thematic concerns.

‘My Story is Not My Own’ intertwines art forms; featuring four performers (including two dancers), narrators reciting poetry, one singer chanting Javanese-inspired incantations, electronic-ambient music and ‘found’ Super 8 footage from Kashmir in the 1960s.

The film blends scenes of journey, intimations of ritual, emotionality and American political history within an overarching sense of earth’s mystery. Personal and national grief juxtapose with archival footage of distant landscapes evoking a sense of loss.

Archetypal images of grief pervade the film’s imagery via the symbols of starfish, stones and veils. A mythological texture envelops the various manifestations of the ‘widow.’

Wearing her pink outfit, from that tragic day in 1963, she bursts through a saloon’s swinging wooden doors followed by the swelling ocean crashing wildly in faded footage. Linked to nature her story is truly not only her own.

‘One string snaps, this is the sound of what was new, and the oldest vibration of all, following its twin.’

‘My Story is Not My Own’ is a first film from a poet remembering the ‘feeling’ of November, 1963. Watching black & white TV with his mother nearby tending to small children. The film makes an unspoken connection between chemical attacks on the jungles of Vietnam which soon followed and the spirituality of disappeared Neolithic culture.

The Wind, One Brilliant Day by Antonio Machado

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Machado is one of my favorite poets, so I was excited to see this from award-winning filmmaker Chel White, and with the recitation by none other than Alec Baldwin. Here’s White’s description from the Vimeo page:

Based on a one-hundred-year-old poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “Wind” is an allegorical perspective on climate change. In recent years, a number of films have been made on the topic of global climate change, but few have addressed the issue from a poetic perspective.

“Wind” is constructed with the poem as the film’s nucleus, book-ended by montages of astonishing time-lapse sequences by photographer Mark Eifert. In the film, scenes of the earth, weather, and human interaction, both negative and positive, dominate the film’s imagery. The music consists of a lesser known piece by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with solo piano played by Thomas Lauderdale (of Pink Martini.)

Though written in the early 20th century, the Machado poem is particularly poignant today, bearing an uncanny relevance for climate change and planet stewardship. This film was commissioned by the environmental organization Live Earth, and is narrated by Alec Baldwin. The English translation is by Robert Bly.

(Thanks to Viral Verse for the introduction to Chel White’s work.)

we hear them cutting by T. L. Kelly

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According to the author’s resume, this was

a poetry film collaboration with poetry by T. L. Kelly and film by Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin and sound by Paulo Beto, in Born Magazine, October 2003. Screened in 2004 at Resfest Brazil and Anima Mundi, both in Brazil; and Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin (where the film won a special mention).

Born Magazine has been around in one form or another since 1996, and is now probably the best-known web journal for literary animation, as well as a standard-bearer for artistic collaboration in general.

The magazine launched on the Web in 1997 with a focus on editorial design and traditional editorial topics, including essays, film and music reviews, and topical articles. As Web technology continued to evolve, contributing artists began focusing on the connections between literature and visual arts, and experimented with the dynamic relationship between text, cinema, audio, and interactivity. In response, Born redefined its mission in 1998, focusing on collaboration and media-rich interpretations of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, and eventually arrived at its present incarnation.

Shelby the Dog by Robert Sward

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A wise and funny poem by Robert Sward from Blue’s Cruzio Cafe, an online space for poetry animations that’s been in operation since 2004. The animations are by Beau Blue, but authors collaborate by providing readings, photos, ideas for storyboards, and other sugggestions, according to the About page.

Stadt-Fisch (City-Fish) by Jan Kummer

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A 16 mm film by Patrizia Monzani, who describes herself on her blog as “a film director and editor. Author of videopoems in collaboration with contemporary poets, she is currently involved in the videoart world also as a curator (cooperations with LOOP festival, Visualcontainer.org and Videoartworld.com).” Of this film, she says on Vimeo:

Three characters cross each other – without really affecting one another, thoughts and voices overlap, strophes are repeated… Actually they are not alone and lonely, they just don’t see what they are surrounded by.

Jan Kummer, the poet here, is an artist and author from Chemnitz, Germany.

She is Overheard Singing by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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A music-video-style film titled Overheard by composer Briareus (Clayton Corrello). Millay’s poetry doesn’t do much for me by itself, but put to music and envideoed, it’s really quite compelling, I think.

Yellow Leather by Naufus Ramirez Figueroa

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A meditation on the banana by Guatemalan interdisciplinary artist Naufus Ramirez Figueroa. I like his artist statement:

Though my creative process is committed to experimentation and research, and my subject matter often deals with things such as the Guatemalan Civil War, the results are often absurd and humorous. I have found that refugees and survivors of war are often that way; nothing in life is ever so dire as to be unworthy of a joke or two.

“I am” machine-poem by Brion Gysin

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http://www.vimeo.com/90415

I couldn’t resist following Steven Nichol Smith’s “I Am” with this audio experiment from 1960 by Brion Gysin:

Permutation is a technique commonly used by avant-gardes and above all, and systematically, by the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is possible to permute sentences, words within a sentence, syllables and phonemes within a word. Permutation is a typically modern device and considerable use was made of it in the plastic arts by the constructivists. In fact it permits the complete exhaustion of all the possible combinations within a given choice of material, without limit of number. The Englishman Brion Gysin, one of the founders of the beatnik movement and inventor of such new formulas as the collage-novel, has composed his phonic texts on this principle. “I am” is a classic of the genre. Composed exclusively of permutations of the biblical words “I am that I am”, with ever more marked accelerations, he succeeds in rendering, from the initial nucleus, a crowd of “I am”s, the creation of the world in geometrical progression until it fades away in the sidereal silence.

The video by Alex Itin is titled “hotdog,” and is one of the very first videopoems posted to Vimeo four years ago. The god/dog pun is an old one, but the twitching of the animal in its sleep is a great way way to suggest dreaming and delusion while remaining entirely objective. And you certainly wouldn’t want anything less minimalist for a poem like this.

I Am by Steven Nichols Smith

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An experiment in found poetry with a distinctly populist flavor. As the filmmaker describes it:

I Am is not only a film but a social experiment that took strangers in Philadelphia and asked them to finish this sentence. “I am ___.” Through these responses, the film-maker was able to create a montage of answers and then delve deeper into a select few and allow them to explore their answers even further, creating not only written poems but a visual metaphor of these responses. (Premiered at iLLReality’s STEW event on March 21, 2010). Be sure to check out illreality.com

The three poems embedded on the piece were written by Smith, based on the stories told him by Kelly Turner (“I Am Constantly at War with My Body”), Sanja Blazevic (“I Am Proud of My Parent’s Resilience”), and Jared Martin (“I Am an Actor, Once Upon a Time”).

Lunch Poem by Tracey K. Smith

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Andrew Kamp claims this is the first video he ever made — seems hard to believe. Tracey K. Smith appears to have let her website’s domain expire, but there’s a good selection of her poems at the audio poetry site From the Fishouse. (Hat-tip: Cloudy Day Art)