The Rope by David Ian Bickley

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This was the third place winner in the 2021 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest. David Ian Bickley is “an award-winning media artist whose body of work spans the primitive technological of the 1970s to the digital cutting edge of today.” We previously shared his film for a poem by Irish poet Paul Casey, Marsh. This time the text is his own, “based on a story told by Gerald O’Brien,” according to the credits.

It’s always interesting seeing how an accomplished filmmaker approaches the problem of creating a lyrical film for a narrative poem. In this case Bickley may well have crafted the poem with specific shots or images in mind. Regardless, it all adds up to a very affecting film.

Everything Is Radiant between the Hates by Rich Ferguson

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I remember seeing this on social media when it came out in 2020, but forgot to share it here—better late than never, I guess! L.A.-based Beat poet Rich Ferguson is also an accomplished videopoet, resulting in an interesting hybrid between a spoken-word-style video and a regular videopoem. It took 3rd Place in the 2020 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest from Slippery Elm magazine. The camera work is by Ferguson, Christianne Ray, and Butch Norton, who’s also the drummer.

Cultural Submissions by Caroline Reid

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Written in a free-associative Australian vernacular and littered with local references, Cultural Submissions is by Caroline Reid in Adelaide. It evokes episodes in places on either side of the continent and the endless drive between the west-east poles of Perth and Melbourne.

For the video, Caroline speaks the prose-poetic text in a downbeat drawl, layered in a call-and-response fashion by sound engineer Jeffrey Zhang. This heightens the sense of thoughts rolling over each other and subjects changing as if melting in mid-sentence. Film-maker Patrick Zoerner brings together a series of slowly dissolving images that provide a poetic visual space for the voice to take centre stage.

Cultural Submissions can be read on the page at Verita La. It is from Siarad, a collection of Caroline’s poetry and prose published by ES-PRESS in 2020. The video was part of an interesting program curated by Jacqui Malins for the 2021 Poetic City event in Canberra.

Moving Poems has previously featured three other videos from Caroline’s writing.

De Sluis / The Sluice by Marc Neys

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As I said when I shared Eduardo Yagüe’s Oscura the other week, it’s always interesting to see a long-time poetry filmmaker stepping into the poet role himself. Especially one like Marc Neys (aka Swoon), whose style is in many ways closest to avant-garde videopoetry, where author-made films are the norm.

Poem, voice, music and film
Marc Neys

Text editor and translation
Willem Groenewegen

Footage right panel
David Samiran’s ‘Mems First Steps’, 2011

Here by Philip Larkin

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Last week’s Larkin centenary surfaced this fine poetry film from 2010, directed by Dave Lee with voiceover by Sir Tom Courtney. David Stubbins was the cinematographer, Andrew Olsson the editor and Louise Bennett the composer. The YouTube description:

‘Here’ is a contemporary cinematic interpretation of Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name, which depicts a journey east “from rich industrial shadows” through an initially bleak but increasingly fecund rural landscape and on to a large and bustling town, whose inhabitants (and their lives) are brought into sharp focus in uncompromising but affectionately honest terms before the journey continues eastwards beyond the town, to where “Ends the land suddenly” in an ethereal and unattainable “unfenced existence”.

The film has been nominated for awards at:
RTS Awards 2010
Holmfirth Film Festival 2010
Hull Short Film Festival 2010
Cambridge Strawberry Shorts 2011

Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale by Willa Carroll

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Eco-ritual and apocalyptic pilgrimage, “Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale” follows an array of wayfarers through endangered landscapes. Scored by a dystopian poem cycle and an ambient sound collage, kinetic explorers don yellow hazmat suits as protective membranes and second skins.
(official description)

One of the most impressive author-made videopoems I’ve ever seen, Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale debuted in TriQuarterly in January 2021, and went on to win Best Poetry Film at the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival.

Willa Carroll is an up-and-coming, NYC-based poet whose 2018 collection, Nerve Chorus, was a small press bestseller. “Her poetry video and multimedia work has been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. […] Carroll has collaborated with numerous artists, performers, and filmmakers,” including cinematographer Andreas von Scheele and choreographer Susannah Keebler.

Here’s how Sarah Minor described Project Hazmatic at Triquarterly, in her typically lucid prose:

Combining poetry, performance art, and moving image, “Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale” reveals the yellow hazmat suit to be a sheath, a container, a figure, and an effigy that can move in surprising ways across landscapes. While two suits blow empty across a beach, inflating with wind to make ghost shapes, a voice recites: “Skin, a bridge, a porous equation, overworked for centuries, unhinge the jaws, swallow all, a black air.” This project features a long sound poem in eleven sections with titles like “Score for Body as Thirst Suit,” “Score for Body as Durational Performance,” and “Score for Body as Wild Processional.” Its images and language think together about the purported lines among human, animal, and landscape that are often delineated by porous skins, and about the environmental degradation across the strata of many beings: “We play a game with no score, down on all fours, call all ill animals to the yard, sweeten the debris you feed them, jump the electric fence, a species link.” Part object lesson, part evolutionary retelling (“Flowers precede the bees, whales flunk back into the oceans”), “Project Hazmatic” also demonstrates the shared goals of texts that stretch the possibilities of language and video performances that pose and re-pose questions through repeated shapes, colors, and horizon lines.

To see more of Carroll’s videos, browse the Multimedia page on her website. We’ll be following her work with keen interest.

The Greatest Poem by Philippa Hughes

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“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
– Walt Whitman

The Greatest Poem is a project involving many collaborators. At the heart of it is a spirited and uplifting poem by Philippa Hughes. The film-making is a composite of many short animated pieces by different artists, brought together into a consistent whole by Elyse Kelly. A statement about the film:

“The Greatest Poem” is inspired by the words of Walt Whitman who believed that the power of poetry and democracy are derived from their capacity to make a unified whole from diverse and sometimes contradictory parts. In this spirit of diversity and unity, the film was made into a beautiful whole by a team of 20+ artists, from around the U.S. and world, posed around the question “What does it mean to be American?” – source

FULL CREDITS:
Writer: Philippa Hughes
Director: Elyse Kelly
Voice: Raechel Wong
Music & sound design: Cathead Noise & The Lunar Year
Sequence Directors (in order of appearance): Rohan McDonald, Nazli Cem, Zoë Soriano, Eric Larson, Catalina Matamoros, Cynthia Chu, Yoon Su Lee, Nijah Brown, Sofia Diaz, Mithra Krishnan, Jackson Ammenheuser, Megan Jedrysiak, Matea Losenegger, Angela Hsieh, Ana Mouyis, Sara Spink, Selina Donahue, Dena Springer, Dorca Musseb.
Additional design: Darren Enterline

The project was commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington D.C.

The More Loving One by W. H. Auden

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Auden’s poem animated by Taiwanese filmmaker Liang-Hsin Huang for The Universe in Verse, “A project by Maria Popova in partnership with On Being“. Here’s Popova’s post introducing the new video. A snippet:

In what may be the single most poignant one-word alteration in the history of our species, [Auden] changed the final line of the penultimate stanza to reflect his war-annealed recognition that entropy dominates all. The original version read: “We must love one another or die” — an impassioned plea for compassion as a moral imperative, the withholding of which assures the destruction of life. But the plea had gone unanswered and eighty million lives had gone unsaved. Auden came to feel that his reach for poetic truth had been rendered “a damned lie,” later lamenting that however our ideals and idealisms may play out, “we must die anyway.”

A decade of disquiet after the end of the war, he changed the line to read: “We must love one another and die.”

The reading is by Janna Levin, and Garth Stevenson composed the music.

Աշնանացան / Autumn Sowing by Anahit Hayrapetyan

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Let me turn into a song and spread in your wilderness

Let me turn into a ray of sun and be diffused in your light

Let me turn into a seed and sprout in your fields…

Moving Poems’ first film from Armenia is part videopoem, part documentary of an installation. Poet Anahit Hayrapetyan‘s lines are first shown on screen then incorporated line by line as white flags planted in a scarified landscape of furrowed fields and eroded pastureland, making a powerful statement about how land is claimed and occupied. Only in the final words is the poem’s political agenda revealed: “beloved Artsakh.”

Both installation and film are credited to Maïda Chavak and Naïri Khatchadourian, with Narek Harutyunyan as cinematographer, typography by Sargis Antonian and editing by Nina Khachatryan. The music was composed by Miqayel Voskanyan with Rafik Avagyan on blul (a type of flute). Together, they call themselves the AHA Collective. Autumn Sowing is the third part of a triptych called Hanging Garden, and is probably best seen in that context, as part of an exhibition including “objects of memory, traces of an act of emergency, historical sources of a heritage site with a status left hanging.”

[T]here is an urge to reinvent how mankind inhabits territory and heritage and what new forms can be taken by one’s sense of belonging to one’s land and language. The third space showcases such a short film and an educational program for all to practice the art of typography through wooden stamps, to write by hand to inscribe a permanent imprint.

What Day, from West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal

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Salt Lake City-based filmmaker Jennilyn Merten collaborated with Utah’s former poet laureate, Paisely Rekdal, on an online video installation for Rekdal’s cycle of poems West: A Translation,

a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.

West connects the completion of the transcontinental railroad with another significant American historical event: the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed thirteen years after the first transcontinental’s completion.

This is What Day, which was also featured at Terrain.org. It’s the one that works best as a stand-alone film, in my opinion. Rekdal also has a 20-minute video on YouTube of her reading from the collection.

West: A Translation is slated for publication in book form by Copper Canyon Press in May 2023.