Kevin Simmonds’ brief film is part interview, part reading. Simmonds is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, which includes this poem by Amir Rabiyah.
A film called Parental Guidance by Belgian artist and composer Swoon, his third for a poem by Howie Good.
A dramatic reading by George Wallace, writer-in-residence at the Walt Whitman birthplace on Long Island, forms the soundtrack for this neon animation by Jack Feldstein. According to Feldstein’s Wikipedia page,
His trademark style is the “neonizing” of a combination of live action video recording and public domain material, particularly cartoons. “Neonizing” is a complex computer technique that renders the lines of an image to be like a neon sign. [...]
Feldstein was a scriptwriter for many years before, as he puts it, he woke up one morning and began making neon films. In the 1990s he was instrumental in developing series for Australian television. He then went on to be Head Writer for Brilliant Digital Entertainment where he was involved in creating 3D computer animated multipath webisode series which included Xena-Warrior Princess, Superman and Ace Ventura.
He describes neon animation, (neonism)…as a deconstructionist, post-modern animation filmmaking style that utilises appropriation and pop art techniques in a ”Warhol meets Vegas” look. It is a stream-of-consciousness narrative with a cartoon aesthetic. Neonism takes modernist stream-of-consciousness filmmaking into a post-modern and humorous form.
Metempsychotic (reincarnated) modernism is another description of Feldstein’s neon animation aesthetic.
Neon animation has also been described as re-animation.
Swoon‘s second film for a poem by Howie Good (look for the third here next week). I think the fugal structure works really well with this poem, especially in light of the last sentence:
You can hear if you really listen
the common names for things
weeping noisily beneath the music.
The poem appears in Lovesick from Press Americana (2009). Here’s a review.
Some lines of Mary Oliver’s get what I like to think of as the film equivalent of the illuminated manuscript treatment from artist Stephen Ausherman — another in his “e-scape” series made during a residency at the C-Scape dune shack on the Cape Cod National Seashore.
This new Moving Poems production features a poem and reading by Nic Sebastian from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday. She blogged her reaction to the video here. “The wanderer’s blessing” originally appeared in the online journal Escape Into Life.
For more about Nic, including links to a number of her poems online, see the bio page at her blog.
Director Nilja Mu’min’s “cine-poem” for a piece from Tara Betts‘ debut collection, Arc & Hue. Betts recently wrote about the collaboration on her blog.
