Artistically it is an attempt to stretch myself in the realm of videopoetry, by trying something that has proved to be difficult to do in this art form, “being literal”.
Visually I wanted something that looked a little more feminine, and gentle to the touch. Where as I spent much less time editing this piece, I spent more time on cinematography and atmosphere, I hope it comes through in this videopoem.
Found text has played a central role in the development of videopoetry, so this montage of advertising tropes by the late comedian George Carlin becomes a full-fledged poem merely by adaptation to the kinetic-text medium. An inspired choice and execution by Jenny Lien.
“People and places from a recent trip to San Diego, CA,” says documentary photojournalist and filmmaker Kristyn Ulanday in the description at Vimeo. I think she rather understates the awesomeness of this videopoem. (For the text of the poem, see Poets.org.)
Three poems in one video by the indefatigible Swoon. The poems are: “Spread Out,” “Trash” and “A Sonnet for Edgar Allan Poe.” For the texts, see Swoon’s blog post about the video.
These poems are from Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The wonderfully whimsical drawings by Cheryl Gross are animated in a fairly basic style which the description at YouTube dubs “motion graphics.”
An interesting experimental piece by filmmaker and poet Timothy David Orme, who describes it at Vimeo as follows:
Epithalamium is a hybrid work of “poetry” and altered, erased, and intentionally damaged 16mm film–an odd marriage poem to an ex-wife, the first part being a poem for the speaker’s marriage day, the second part being a poem to the divorced wife’s future marriage, a sort of ‘future memory.’
Epithalamium is a silent project.
For more examples of Orme’s filmmaking, see his online portfolio.
I’ve decided to change course here and begin occasionally posting films that consist entirely of still images so I can feature projects like this. The technical term for a film montage of still images (often found in documentary films) is kinestasis, so that’s the name of this newest category at Moving Poems.
I previously shared Dawes’ kinestases with photographer Joshua Cogan, Live Hope Love, which was about living with HIV in Jamaica. Voices from Haiti is a newer series, also produced by the Pulitzer Center, which explores life after the earthquake in Haiti, focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS.
At the AWP conference in Chicago the week before last, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Dawes speak about the collaborative process involved in making these videos, and was impressed by the extent to which he and the other artists involved in these projects seem to have stumbled upon some of the same principles that make regular videopoems or filmpoems work: the importance of the soundtrack and the need for juxtaposition rather than simple illustration to created multiple narratives in the listener’s head — “reportages in dialogue,” as he put it. These visual poems are creations in their own right, different from purely textual poems, and would not have happened without collaboration between poet, photographer and composer, he said.
