Latest video reviews
To flee from memory… by Emily Dickinson
To Flee From Memory is “A short film about being lost set to a poem by Emily Dickinson,” according to the director, Irish filmmaker Simon Eustace. Click through to Vimeo for a full list of credits. The voiceover is a bit quiet, so let me paste in the text of the poem:
To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man
My First Memory of A Black and White Moon by Karin Wraley Barbee
As a frequent writer of erasure poems, I was excited to see this animation by artist Erin Zerbe of what she tells us is
an erasure poem by Karin Wraley Barbee. The source for the erasure was Sarah Palin’s book “Going Rogue”. The audio was performed by Kathy Graves.
I wasn’t able to turn up much about the poet online, except for three fine poems in DIAGRAM.
eine zweite dritte sonne (a second third sun) by Oravin
https://vimeo.com/86361382
Text, voice, sound and visuals are all by Max Oravin, an Austrian poet, video artist and audiovisual performer currently living in Finland. Be sure to click on the CC icon below the video for the English subtitles.
For more of Oravin’s videos, browse the Visuals tag at his blog. I asked him about the provenance of the footage used here, and he wrote:
The video uses a mixture of original and found footage. While I shot some sea animals for the first half of the video in Berlin’s magnificent Aquarium, I use heavily edited YouTube videos in the second part.
As I create videos for my own poetry, I try to use visuals as a means to reveal hidden layers in the text. By avoiding a literal visualization, I can make explicit some associations I had while writing the poems.
Self-Portrait as Beast by Frances Justine Post
I think the description on Vimeo kind of buries the lede for this one:
Video and animation by artist Cecelia Post. Cecelia (photographer and video artist) and Frances [Justine Post] (poet) are twins who have been collaborating since birth.
I love seeing collaborations like this. The sisters produced it as a trailer for Frances’s new book of poems, Beast (Augury Books, 2014). Here’s how they characterized the book at Vimeo:
In BEAST, Frances Justine Post explores the destruction and eventual reclaiming of the self following loss. Many of the poems make up a series of “Self-Portraits” that explore the psychological core of intimacy with its inherent devotion and betrayal, reward and punishment. In one, she is a wolf; in another, an equestrian and her horse; then a tornado, the dropped crumbs of a beloved, a pack of hounds, and finally a cannibal. The self changes form and species and switches from one voice to multiple voices. Each poem attempts to reinvent the self and alter it as a way of trying to understand what remains after devastation.
Ethics of the Mothers by Rachel Barenblat
A poetry film by Othniel Smith with footage from the Prelinger Archive and a reading from The Poetry Storehouse by Peg Duthie. The poem, by Rachel Barenblat, originally appeared in April Daily.
It’s entirely possible that I take videopoetry just a bit too seriously. The thing about Othniel Smith’s remixes is that they are fun. This one is a good case in point.
Look for an interview with Smith about his approach to poetry film at the Moving Poems Forum toward the end of the week.
