Poet: Lissa Kiernan

Daddy Dearest by Lissa Kiernan

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Marc Neys AKA Swoon‘s latest video for a poem by Lissa Kiernan incorporates footage by Grant Porter, Tim Williams and Mikeel Araña. Marc’s original composition features in the soundtrack alongside Lissa’s recitation.

5AM by Lissa Kiernan

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A new film by Marc Neys AKA Swoon using a text and reading by American poet Lissa Kiernan, his second collaboration with her (see Witness from 2013). Marc used footage by Finn Karstens and Graham Uhelski.

Census by Lissa Kiernan

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The last Poetry Storehouse remix I’ll be featuring this week was made by Othniel Smith three months ago for a poem by Lissa Kiernan. Together with a video by Swoon that we previously shared here, it’s included on the multimedia page of a website for Kiernan’s fantastic new book, Two Faint Lines in the Violet, which I happen to be in the middle of reading. The publisher is Negative Capability Press, and when I went to check them out online, I was impressed to see that they had gone to the trouble to set up an independent website for the book. (The norm for American publishers is to have, at best, a separate page in the online catalogue, and possibly also a page for the author in some other section of their site which may or may not link to the catalogue page.) The two video embeds appear as images in a slider at the top of the page with a brief description at the bottom of each image, and when clicked, the videos are responsive, meaning they automatically resize to fit any screen. Overall, a very pleasing presentation. I hope other poetry publishers take note.

Though Othniel Smith’s interpretations of poems are sometimes too literal for me, this one has just the right degree of allusiveness (and elusiveness) for my taste. Kiernan evidently thought so too, commenting on Vimeo, “Thank you, Othniel – you brought this poem to life! Love especially the dancing feet shot, the pre-natal scene, and the final few shots.” They go on to talk about the original film that the remix borrows most of its footage from, Marriage Today (Alexander Hammid, 1950) — “certainly an interesting film coming from an experimental filmmaker on his second marriage,” Smith notes.

Incidentally, congratulations to Othniel for getting four of his Storehouse poetry films selected for screening at The Outcasting: Fourth Wall Festival in Cardiff! I like what he had to say about the importance of online resources such as The Poetry Storehouse:

Primarily a scriptwriter (e.g. “The Story Of Tracy Beaker” for CBBC), I have been making poetry films for a few years, in an attempt to enhance my skills in respect of visual story-telling. The existence of online resources such as The Internet Archive, Flickr Commons and Librivox means that there is plentiful material in the public domain for the unschooled video editor to play with. Having made films of poems by such historic figures as Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson and R.S. Thomas, I was delighted to discover The Poetry Storehouse. This has given me the opportunity to apply my imagination to the work of contemporary poets, and to obtain their feedback which has, thus far, been largely positive.

Witness by Lissa Kiernan

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A film by Swoon for the poem “Witness” by Lissa Kiernan, recorded for qarrtsiluni‘s Animals in the City issue. This is Swoon’s 11th film for a qarrtsiluni poem. A couple of snippets from his blog post about it:

The track I wanted to lay this podcast in had to be a bit dreamy but also suspenseful and foreboding (with a small hint of mysteriousness) […]

The images had to be lush, but with a hint of decay. I had a vase with tulips, way past their ideal point of freshness. The petals falling gave me the idea for this video…

The first time I watched this, the images Swoon chose to accompany the text struck me as possibly a bit too random. But now they strike me as a subtle but inspired match. And the poem is, after all, directly concerned with how we might view an odd conjunction.