R.W. Perkins‘ latest videopoem was recently featured at Atticus Review:

A woman contemplates how her life’s ambitions have seemed to mature as she sits alone on her back porch.

Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes could easily be described as poetic leftovers. The poem crafted from scraps, nearly discarded verse edited from a longer wordier poem, while the film itself is a remix project taken from black and white public domain T.V. commercials, assumed to be produced in the 60s and early 70s.

On May 4th 2013 Morning Sex will make its big screen debut at The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival to take place at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, Colorado. The event, hosted and directed by Perkins, will be Colorado’s first poetry film festival and will feature poets and filmmakers from all over the world.

You can read about all the selections for the film festival on their website.

Martha McCollough says of her latest videopoem: “It’s about shopping. And death.”

An author-made videopoem by Marilyn McCabe which incorporates voices of war veterans and videography by Peter Verardi. There’s a long and fascinating essay on McCabe’s website about the making of this videopoem, her first. Here’s a more succinct description from an email she sent me:

I gave my poem to some local vets then interviewed them about whether it made them think of anything particular in their experience, and asked particularly about the landscapes of the wars they’d experienced. I then wove some of their words into the stanzas of my poem, and set them to images from the Saratoga National Battlefield park, and the French art song, which is about men who are leaving for the far horizon feeling held back by the souls in the cradles they leave behind.

And here’s a brief excerpt from her essay:

I think the most important thing I learned as an artist from this project is to let go and just wait and see, to try things out without fear. So I tried things and took one step at a time and things began to come together.

I began to learn that images too have rhythm, have silence; that speech – with its rhythms and stutters – is rich and complicated and that voices are a kind of text; landscape is a kind of text and has movement and emotion. That I could create a kind of lineation and space by manipulating the movement of sound and picture. In the end, the whole thing felt more like a creating dance than anything else.

One of the ways I dealt with time was in the movement from image to image. I felt a kind of rise in energy in the third stanza where they’re talking about ordnance and the mechanisms of war, so I used faster flashes, and used the rise of the music here.

Read the rest.