Another section of the production Men Think They Are Better Than Grass by the Deborah Slater Dance Theatre, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. This section features a trio of dancers: Shaunna Vella, Kelly Kemp and Wendy Rein.
Video trailers for books are becoming increasingly common, and sometimes, as here, they take the form of videopoetry. This is one of two trailers by Brent Robison for Djelloul Marbrook’s prize-winning collection from Kent State University Press, Far From Algiers.
Marbrook has had a distinguished career in journalism and now authors a blog on literary and cultural affairs.
With the northeastern U.S. just coming out of a heat wave, winter seems a far-off and delicious prospect. This is a poem from the collection The New Planet by Porland, Oregon-based writer Emily Kendal Frey. The video is by Zachary Schomburg, with whom Frey has also done some collaborative writing, according to this interview with her at The Collagist. For this project they also brought in Emily’s sister Elinor Frey, an accomplished cellist, whose music helped create a very wintry ambience indeed.
Beth Fulton writes,
The inspiration of this video comes from Todd Alcott’s poem, Television. I own no rights to his reading of the poem and intend only to share my own personal interpretation. Hope you like!
This is to my knowledge the first English-language videopoem to have gone viral. I first saw it last week on Facebook, where it seems to have been posted quite heavily. It’s been played 445,537 times in just three months, making it currently the most popular videopoem on Vimeo, and second only to Juan Delcan’s animation of Billy Collins’ “The Dead” on YouTube, which has amassed 761,494 views — but over the course of three years. So “Television”‘s refrain, “Look at me!” seems to be working.
Todd Alcott is a screenwriter living in Santa Monica, and judging by the comment he left below the video on Vimeo, seems to be a friend or acquaintance of the filmmaker doesn’t know the filmmaker (though he likes the video — see comments).
Another in our brief series of videopoems that riff on television. January Gill O’Neil makes nice use of TV cooking-show conventions for a poem from her debut collection Underlife. She blogged briefly about the making of the video here.
(Hat tip: Christine Swint in the Moving Poems forum.)
Another section from the production Men Think They Are Better Than Grass by the San Francisco-based Deborah Slater Dance Theatre, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. The two featured dancers here are Travis Rowland and Breton Tyner Bryan. The inclusion of sound effects from the TV quiz show Jeopardy is brilliant, I thought.
Last Thursday, Merwin was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate.