A Moving Poems production by yours truly. The text and reading are by the English poet and blogger Dick Jones. Thanks are also due to the blog carnival The Festival of the Trees, edition #60, which reprinted Dick’s poem, and featured as well a number of videos, helping to inspire this effort.
A Moving Poems production, with the cooperation of Nic Sebastian at Whale Sound, who agreed to let me use her reading for the soundtrack, and the author, who perhaps unwisely gave his permission without any constraints whatsoever. Read Peter’s original text at his blog, Slow Reads. I think it’s a spectacular poem, and I hope my video does it justice — or at least excites interest in the poet and the reader.
I found the rest of the soundtrack at ccMixter, and a public-domain film to poach footage from at the Prelinger Archives (just two of the many online resources I’ve found for videopoem makers — check out the whole list).
Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, a Facebook contact, shared the text of his poem at The Idler just after I discovered that Al Jazeera has a cache of Creative Commons-licensed videos available for remix. So with Lababidi’s blessing I pulled this videopoem together, using some of that Egyptian street poetry for a soundtrack. I did the reading myself because he was having internet-connection problems and wasn’t able to send me his own reading.
Videos in the film/animation category at YouTube don’t seem to attract too many views, so I identified it as “News & Politics” instead. We’ll see if that makes a difference. In any case, it needs to be watched by people with an interest in the uprising.
I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.
A Moving Poems production (with fingers crossed that Milosz’s heirs aren’t too litigious). The audio is Milosz himself, not the same translation as the one that made it into the Collected Poems (which you can read here).
This was “found video” rather than something deliberately planned and acted to go along with the poem, though of course I edited it to make a better fit.
One of my own videos, using footage I shot last spring of a garter snake mating ball to illustrate a favorite poem from the great 20th-century Spanish poet Pedro Salinas. I recently found an audio track of Salinas himself reading the poem, and dubbed that over some public-domain electronica from the Internet Archive.
Salinas left out one phrase from the printed version of the poem, which I’ve represented in the subtitles with an ellipsis: “que… [es la nada]” — “which… [is the nothing].”
