Posts in Category: Videopoems

Acknowledgements by Louise Wallace

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On a sweltering day at the pools, monotony conspires to take us on an ethereal journey. A bored front desk attendant reads the acknowledgments of a paperback and while observing the swimmers she drifts into a daydream.
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New Zealand poet Louise Wallace as interpreted by Auckland-based director Arvind Eriksson and voice actor Elizabeth McRae. This 2021 film is included in a new article by poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen at a general-interest news site, How to film a poem — a wonderful survey of poetry filmmaking in New Zealand in preparation for the first Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival in November (submissions open).

Acknowledgements was a recommendation to Charles by another New Zealand director, Alfio Leotta, who called it “a beautiful, intelligent and funny film that inspired my decision to start experimenting with poetry film.”

Watershed by Tania Haberland

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Watershed is a fusion of abstract music video and poetic text. Its maker, Carine Iriarte, calls this electropoetry. As with ambient electronic music, the piece is minimal, with mantric repetition of a fragment of a poem by Tania Haberland, whose spoken voice within the music is lush and lulling to the ear. The images meet the sound in fluid digital layers. The hypnotic experience of the video is like a trance meditation.

The Torrid Zone is another video from these artists featured before at Moving Poems, in that instance from a complete poem by Haberland.

Music and film are credited to Poetics of Reverie, a collaborative project of Iriarte.

Deep Into Another Night by Finn Harvor

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There are different sub-genres beneath the umbrella terms videopoetry and poetry film. Finn Harvor’s Deep Into Another Night is at the far end of a spectrum – a poetic film without words. It has a soft observational quality, delicately revealing poignant everyday moments in a quiet evening in South Korea.

Sensurious by Ian Gibbins

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The videopoetry of Australian artist and thinker Ian Gibbins is strikingly unique. This version of his 2015 piece Sensurious was just this week uploaded in higher definition and with English and Spanish subtitles. He has previously written about his work with video, poetry and translation for Moving Poems Magazine.

The text in the video first came into being as a response to the art of Judy Morris, written specifically for an exhibition of her Sensurious series. From Ian’s artist statement about this at Rochford Street Review:

Judy and I have collaborated on many projects over the years. Sensurious – drawings to stimulate the sense was her third solo exhibition. It was held at Pike Wines gallery in Clare Valley, South Australia (2014) and at Magpie Springs winery gallery neat McLaren Vale, South Australia, in 2015. I wrote short pieces of text for each of the drawings and they became the basis for poem. The video features the formal Latin names of the plants, the meanings of which inform the text of the poem.

A number of other videos by Ian Gibbins have been featured at Moving Poems here.

Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat

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An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.

Сезонът на печалните кентаври / The Season of the Sorrowful Centaurs by Marion Koleva

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A poem in the voice of Clio/Kleio, the muse of history, by Bulgarian journalist and poet Marion Koleva in a 2021 film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3, supported by funding from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The poem appears in Koleva’s 2014 collection, Спомен за тропик (Memory of Tropic).

Like Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva, which I shared two weeks ago, this film is part of Mihaylov’s project 10 Short Films of Videopoetry.

Childhood’s End by Howie Good

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I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.

The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.

Foxtrot by Rosemary Norman

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A fun text animation by long-time videopoem collaborators Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman, who appear also to have a new videopoetry collection out, though I haven’t seen it yet.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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From the brief and powerful poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), this animated version of his Ozymandias is directed by Alvaro Lamarche-Toloza in France.

The soundtrack features the richly dramatic voice of Bryan Cranston reciting the poem in a 2013 trailer for Breaking Bad. The compelling voice is accompanied only by a thrilling heavy heartbeat, also from the original soundtrack.

Wash drawings in the animation are by Estelle Chauvard. More about the project can be read in the notes beneath the player at Vimeo.

This is another strong piece to be found in a Top Ten of films from classic poems selected for Moving Poems by Paul Casey and Colm Scully.

Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva

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Four poems from a 2012 collection called Eastern Time (Източно време/Iztochno vreme) by Bulgarian poet Десислава Неделчева/Dessislava Nedelcheva, about whom I can glean nothing in the Anglophone web. But I love this film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3. According to Google Translate, ‘The video was realized with the support of the National Fund “Culture” 2020.’ Glad to hear that the government of Bulgaria has money for poetry film! Mihaylov’s entire playlist of subtitled videopoetry is worth a watch.