Posts in Category: Videopoems

Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells

14 March, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Animation, Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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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.

Gedicht an die Dauer/To Duration by Peter Handke

11 March, 2023 by Dave Bonta - 1 Comment - Posted in Videopoems
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Dutch filmmaker Pat van Boeckel responds to some lines by the controversial Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Peter Handke, with music by Dario Marionelli. For German speakers, here’s a version without the subtitles.

This is a great example of a poem I wouldn’t spend much time with on the page, given its high level of abstraction—not something I generally look for in poetry. So van Boeckle’s images rescue the poem for me, which is great because in fact the passage of time is a mystery of perennial interest… and also because it seems axiomatic that any argument about duration must take some time to digest.

Nomad Palindrome by Kai Carlson-Wee

4 March, 2023 by Dave Bonta - 1 Comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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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

3 March, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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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

25 February, 2023 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Animation, Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry, Videopoems
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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

25 February, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Miscellaneous, Videopoems
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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

13 February, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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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

11 February, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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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.

Sound of the footsteps of water by Sohrab Sepehri

2 February, 2023 by Marie Craven - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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A most rewarding part of sharing videos at Moving Poems is finding a film-maker or poet who has never been published on our site. Sound of the footsteps of water spoke to me while searching the #poetryfilm tag at Vimeo.

The beautiful and mystical poem from 1964 is by Iranian writer and artist Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980).

Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism, and Western traditions, he blended the Eastern concepts with Western techniques, thereby creating a kind of poetry unprecedented in the history of Persian literature. (Wikipedia)

The English translation in the film’s subtitles can be read on the page in the Vimeo summary. It is a selection from a much longer poem. A different translation in entirety is here.

This delicate film and its subtle music are by French media artist Carine Iriarte, and gently voiced in Farsi by Mossi Hashemi.

Carine Iriarte has also made a companion video to this one, a part two, from another section of Sohrab Sepehri’s poem.

so the war would know i’m here by Yahya Ashour

31 January, 2023 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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A powerful evocation of life under aerial bombardment. Palestinian poet Yahya Ashour recites his work in English—two poems translated with the director, Andrew Burgess, who provided some background in an email:

This film visualizes two of Yahya Ashour’s poems about growing up during wars in Gaza. The setting, visual motifs, and sound design work embody the physical experience of danger — hiding, being next, recollecting damage — and create an immersive experience. I met Yahya while he was in Iowa City for the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency.

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