Poet: C. K. Williams

In the Air by Kate Sweeney

A unique poetry film: a hand-drawn animation of poets’ hands from interview snippets that can also be seen as a remix videopoem. Kate Sweeney explains in the Vimeo description:

Created from short elliptical sequences taken from archived interviews with four Bloodaxe poets. I wanted to isolate the gestures used when explaining the poetic, the abstract thoughts they couldn’t express in words alone. Gesture is communication that is also a kind of drawing in the air.

C.K Williams, in his interview with Ahren Warner, muses that “In a sense the final version of any work of art pretends to be an improvisation; even a painting. First the painter puts down the ground on the canvas or the wood then he puts down another layer of something then he begins to put the blocks in and then the last layer, little brush strokes, that look like improvisation”. The archive offers a window through to all those described layers. It tracks the process of producing a poem, a book and in a way, a poet. Inspired by my research in the archive, the animation includes the smudges, rips, mistakes and corrections, of the paper it was drawn on, revealing and incorporating the process into the final version.

Cassandra, Iraq by C. K. Williams

Poet: | Filmmaker: ,

C. K. Williams talks about the language of politics and the Iraq war, and reads his poem “Cassandra, Iraq” in a video from Big Think.

http://youtu.be/UQn2Y1Z9XHA

Here’s another interview with Williams in which he addresses more general concerns, also concluding with a reading of “Cassandra, Iraq.” This one was directed and produced by Mel Stuart for the Academy of American Poets.