Filmmaker: Forrest Gander

The Hugeness of That Which is Missing by Forrest Gander

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Forrest Gander‘s latest collection Be With has just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry — congratulations to him. As someone who shares his interests in Latin American poetry and ecopoetry, I’ve been cheered by his growing prominence in recent years. Not to mention the fact that he’s one of the very few major American poets who makes his own videopoems. Here’s one he re-edited just a few weeks ago. (I think the original video appeared around 2012.) The text appears in his 2001 collection Torn Awake.

Paleoacoustics by Forrest Gander

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Forrest Gander‘s description at Vimeo reads: “This video is about Paleoacoustics, traces of the past in the present, poetry, imagination.”

A Border History by Forrest Gander

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Poem, music and film are all by Forrest Gander.

When Nights Were Dark by Forrest Gander

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https://vimeo.com/22523543

It’s great to see a writer of Forrest Gander’s stature making his own videopoems. (So many don’t even bother to put up websites.)

Gander’s poetry can be challenging, but the images in this video tempt me to listen more than once, and I think also encourage receptivity through visual suggestion. Incidentally, there are lots of rock canyons like this scattered around the Appalachians — mossy, fern-draped, secret places — if you know where to look.