A poem originally published in the Colorado Review, and reprinted in Verse Daily. John Gallaher blogs at Nothing to Say & Saying It (love that title!).
Motionpoems’ latest animation. (See the comments to that post for a quote on the process by animator Amy Schmitt, as well as the poet’s reaction to the finished piece.) This is another of the films produced in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011.
A new film by Brandon Dziokonski blends animation with recycled footage from old Smokey the Bear public service anouncements.
It’s not often you see such roles as Key Grip, Script Supervisor and Gaffer in the credits of a poetry film! Even better, it still goes in the author-made videopoem category, as Iranian-American poet Shabnam Piryaei is credited as both writer and main director. According to the bio on her website, her print publication credits are as impressive as her film credits. It’s always heartening to see a poet working in film at such a high level of professional expertise.
“Profile is a stream of consciousness combination of poetry and prose. The visuals of the film were intended to represent the chaos of thought.” This would be a mesmerizing piece even without R.W. Perkins’ very interesting and detailed process notes on Vimeo and at his website (q.v.). Last Friday at VidPoFilm, Brenda Clews captured the essence of the excitement that many of us in the online videopoetry community feel about this film:
R.W. Perkins has it all in this video. When I saw it I felt it was a marker of our era. That surely many films of this type will follow, but his was the first. Identity in the twenty-first century is shaped by social media sites. Your life is not contained in your private diaries and photo albums anymore; it’s all on-line now. The notion of who we are has never been more global or more revealing.
One’s Facebook profile updates and photo albums provide many snapshots of a life. R.W. Perkins has captured that sense of a collided life, a life of snapshots and home videos and snatches of writing. It is a fast-paced life. We describe ourselves to each other. There are millions of us. Facebook is approaching 1/7th of the world’s population. It is a social media site that is creating a twenty-first sense of self.
Put it all together and you get, PROFILE. On his website, R.W. Perkins offers his essay on his videopoem, Profiles, as his Profile.
Read the rest (and if you have any interest in the videopoem/filmpoem genre, don’t miss a post at VidPoFilm).
Norway-based American poet Ren Powell writes,
I saw a website called fiverr. People will do/make things for 5 bucks. Nathan is making play doh stop motion animations with his kids: 15 seconds for 5.
The result is something of an exquisite corpse… with kids.
It Wasn’t the Flu (From Mercy Island. Phoenicia Publishing, 2011).
I find the result really delightful and satisfying — more so than many more sophisticated poetry animations I’ve seen.
(See Directory for a complete list of poets and filmmakers.)
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