Moving Poems

A beautiful animation by Tom Jacobsen from the Minneapolis-based Pixel Farm. I’ve been remiss in not posting more of Todd Boss’s work, considering he’s one of the two people behind the ambitious new videopoetry site MotionPoems.com. Here’s his website.

The Peter Principle is “an epic work poem released in blog form each week” at thepeterprinciple.org, but it just occurred to me to check YouTube as well, where I found uploads from the author, Clayton Crosby, of five of his Flash animations converted to video form. These are all very basic typographic animations, and they’re not integrated with the audio on the blog, but it’s a very interesting project and I wanted to recognize it here. On the About page, he describes its origin as follows:

In 1968, Laurence J. Peter published The Peter Principle, which held the theory that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” He reasoned that any employee who excelled at a particular job would be promoted up the corporate chain, and though the employee might adapt to the requirements of the new job, each promotion brought him closer to a job he couldn’t know how to do. Therefore, any employee is eventually promoted beyond his level of skill and competence.

I’ve been reading Homer, and have been putting a lot of thought into heroes and poetic forms. As a result, I’m exploring the tension between epic and lyric poetry – which is to say the narrative, the expressive and what falls between.

All of these poems are completed before or shortly after going to work.

I am also in awe of the website’s design. It has to be one of the coolest single-author poetry sites on the internet. Check it out.

Jeanette Seah and Daniel Nudds directed this “Final project from the VFS Digital Design Program” at the Vancouver Film School. I’m not sure how well the video fits the poem, but the animation is too gorgeous not to share.

Bob Borgatti (editor of Slipstream) says,

This is a segment from the film “in/word/out” by Robert Borgatti and Paul Lamont. It is a visualization of the poem “Seven-Year-Old Finds Her Murdered Mother’s Naked Body” by Lyn Lifshin. Lifshin performs the voice-over narration for the piece.

Check out Lifshin’s website for her bio and abundant links.

If the author is the same Susan Balboni who is an established voice-over actor for American television (and also a writer), it’s kind of surprising that the reading is by someone else. A fine videopoem nevertheless. Alan Marino says,

A piece I put together for the Lstudio.com Imaginings series produced and directed by Intelligent Life Productions’ Ron Qurashi. Ron presented me with a poem written by Susan Balboni which he wanted me to marry somehow to this Phantom camera 1000 fps footage of a horse clearing a jump. Got the idea of isolating the horse and placing it in a timelapse cloudscape with poetry reading and music by my friend, Kevin Sullivan. Compositing was painstakingly executed by SFX artist Austin Wallender.

Animation by John Eickholt for MotionPoems.com (see also their YouTube channel).

A found-poetry masterpiece comprised entirely of phrases from the NBC Nightly News between July 2008 and February 2009. Brendan Bell credits himself with “imagery, music, and language reconfiguation,” with additional film footage by Lester Bell. He also singles out NBC anchor Brian Williams as a specific source of some of the language. The description on the Vimeo page is worth quoting in full:

We let the television news into the perceived safety of our lives on a daily basis. Even without direct contact, the language of the medium connects with us via background noise, internet blips, and watercooler small-talk. It has a distinct, and often overlooked, authority over the way we think and feel.

The nightly half-hour national news format attempts to condense the state of the world into easily digestible soundbites. My intention is to release these soundbites, inherent powers intact, realign them and force them to interact in unintended ways.

For seven months, I watched NBC Nightly News, recording phrases that piqued my interest. I focused on this single media outlet to give the project a specific voice and began reconfiguring the phrases into what can best be described as collage poems. Poetry, like the news media, uses evocative language to provide insight into the inner workings of the world. However, poetry allows subtleties and subtext to take center stage. The resulting collage poems highlight the ambiguous spaces between language and life, exposing the vagaries of the ostensibly concrete world around us.

The term (Dramatic Pause) implies a brief deviation from an intended script, or a small crack in real time, where things that are normally hidden become visible. It is based on instructions written for news broadcasters on their teleprompters.

Best bilingual poem ever? Well, maybe not, but the last line is perfect.

For background on Guevara, see the Poetry Foundation site.

Rest in peace, Lucille Clifton.

Natalie Merchant talks about her new album Leave Your Sleep, which uses children’s poems and nursery rhymes for lyrics, in an interview with Ellah Allfrey of Granta.

Here’s a live performance of one of the pieces included on the album, from the September 2009 Grand Opening of Poet’s House in New York. This is by British poet Charles Causley: “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience,” the opening track of the two-disc set.

Watch more live performances of songs off Leave Your Sleep at BBC Radio Scotland.