Poet: Mary Oliver

Poem (“The spirit/ likes to dress up like this”) by Mary Oliver

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Directed by Chloe Stites; shot and edited by Travis Stewart. According to the credits, this was made for “a special presentation by Denise Stewart at Bay Arts” — I’m guessing July’s show “The Dress Says It All“: “Women artists give tribute to ‘the dress’ in works of art that come alive through words of their own.”

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

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This is O wild goose da muller by Carmen PG Granxeiro:

Videoarte. Tres formas de escoitar. Tres formas de entender.
Videoart. Three ways to listen. Three ways to understand.
Videoarte. Tres formas de escuchar. Tres formas de entender.

Oliver’s most famous poem has been made into numerous videos for the web, most of them dreck. But I shared one other that I liked, a film by Justin DeWaard, back in 2010.

What I Have Learned So Far by Mary Oliver

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http://vimeo.com/31104514

O.K., this is something different for Moving Poems — a videopoem made to embody the mission of a university. Marquette University is a Jesuit school whose motto is “Be the Difference.” (Gotta love Jesuits!) The filmmaker is James P. O’Malley of Carnaval Pictures. Here’s what he says in the description at Vimeo:

Using Mary Oliver’s inspirational poem as a script, I created this Poem-Videoclip for the inauguration ceremony of Marquette University’s new president.

I shot all the images solo with my Canon 5D Mark2, using Nikkor and Canon lenses and available light. The sync sound day included John Egan, of Egan Audio Services, and Patrick O’Malley as assistant. Patrick composed, recorded and mastered the piano solo, and John Egan created the sound design and audio master.

The readers are Marquette University students, and all on-camera performers are “non-pro” or “real-people”.

I edited and mastered on FCP, except for the simple graphic call to action I exported from After Effects.

The result is lightly branded enough, I think, to engage Oliver fans unconnected with Marquette. I know I enjoyed it.

Cold Poem by Mary Oliver

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Some lines of Mary Oliver’s get what I like to think of as the film equivalent of the illuminated manuscript treatment from artist Stephen Ausherman — another in his “e-scape” series made during a residency at the C-Scape dune shack on the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

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I like the gritty take on Oliver’s most famous poem. I’m sure this won’t be the last filmic word on it, but there are so many ways this could’ve been done wrong — I’m glad Justin DeWaard steered clear of them.

Shot with a Canon 7D and edited on Final Cut. HD was lost in the compression. Filmed on location in Holland MI and at Gyxo Studio.