~ August 2010 ~
Dreaming of Hair by Li-Young Lee
http://vimeo.com/26980867
A kinetic text piece by Dara Elerath, a student at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. Michael McCormick narrates.
For more on Li-Young Lee, see his page at the Academy of American Poets.
My Grave by Philip Levine
Written and produced by Patrick Robert Payne and Susan Ada Brown. Jared Parks directs. Oddly, this is the first decent video for a Philip Levine poem that I’ve run across — the first of many, I hope.
William Stafford documentary airing on PBS
See the website for a list of airdates (PDF) around the U.S. this month and next. See also the review of Every War Has Two Losers by Jayne Lyn Stahl in the Huffington Post.
Every War Has Two Losers is a documentary based on the journals of midwestern poet William Stafford who declared himself a conscientious objector to World War II and, from 1942 through 1946, was interned at the Civilian Public Service Camps as a pacifist. The film has already aired on selected PBS stations, and features some of this country’s finest poets, W.S. Merwin, Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, reading from Stafford’s work.
Stafford, who was born in 1914, was the author of some 67 volumes of poetry, winner of the National Book Award in 1963, and a close friend of another legendary American poet, Robert Bly.
Hangman by Maurice Ogden
Classic film poem from 1964, directed by Paul Julian and Les Goodman with animation by Margaret Julian. According to a Wikipedia entry on the poem, it was a co-winner of the Silver Sail award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1964. A couple of the user reviews at IMDb are worth quoting. Old_tv_guy calls it
An eerie and disturbing little gem from Melrose Studios. Animation is excellent, of a photocollage style you hardly ever see: stark photo images and gaunt, jagged lines. It seems to be taking place in a backwater of infinity, or a nightmare world of pale colors and limitless space.
And tim_gatchell wrote in 2008,
I also saw this short as a child. Probably in about the 5th grade. It left an indelible impression on me and I continue to use this poem as an example for people when groups allow other groups to be ganged up on and have their rights taken away.
Even more remarkable is that while attending college at Cal Poly, I would take summer classes at the local community college to get credits and save money. Took 2nd Semester Freshman lit and guess who my teacher was…yes, Mr. Ogden himself. He is a remarkable man and I have total respect for the man.
He is still teaching I believe in Costa Mesa at the Coast Community College.
I was unable to verify this biographical information about Ogden.
Though a poorer-quality version of the film exists on YouTube, this was uploaded to the Internet Archive by the Academic Film Archive of North America.
Litany by Billy Collins
A three-year-old recites Billy Collins — another reminder that YouTube is still a vast repository of wonderfulness if you can only find it among all the dross. Fortunately, this one has gone viral. The mother says in a comment,
Billy Collins did see this and wrote a letter to my son and I. We feel very honored.
Thank you all for your kind comments. We are working on a few new poems I hope to have up very soon. If there are any suggestions as to poems you think might be good ones for him to memorize, let me know! I will consider them, if he likes them too.
Here’s Collins himself introducing and reading the poem, in a selection from Fora.TV:
drylung by Clayton T. Michaels
This is the video my co-editor Beth Adams and I commissioned at qarrtsiluni in support of the soon-to-be-released winner of our 2010 poetry chapbook contest, Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels. James Brush wrote about why he elected to envideo this poem, and what influenced his choice of imagery, at his blog Coyote Mercury.
Watermark was chosen by the noted nonfiction author and naturalist Ken Lamberton, who was impressed by the “wonderfully controlled surreal and mesmerizing quality” of the poems. The print edition is already available for ordering ahead of the official launch on Monday, August 30, when we’ll also unveil online and podcast versions. We’re also running a series of poems from the other ten finalists at qarrtsiluni between now and then, hoping in part to interest other micropublishers in snatching up some of these terrific manuscripts (would that we could publish and release videopoems for every one of them!).
To the Hand and To a Coming Extinction by W. S. Merwin
The two poems that comprise the closing section of Men Think They Are Better Than Grass, the Deborah Slater Dance Theatre production based on poems by W. S. Merwin. “To the Hand” is read by Ellen Sebastian Chang and “To a Coming Extinction” by Peter Coyote — an excellent, if terrifying, choice of a final poem. This is also the only one of the videos uploaded to Vimeo that gives a good impression of the film playing behind the stage during the production.
Bluebird by Charles Bukowski
This is the first time I’ve ever posted a video that doesn’t include the text of the poem in some way, either as type, as subtitles, or in the soundtrack, but this animation by Monika Umba was simply too gorgeous to ignore. The accompanying information at YouTube includes the text of the poem, but here’s another video that incorporates it in the soundtrack, a trailer for a documentary on the poet by Diego Jose Baud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dynMZa4a_d4
Baud mentions in a comment that the reading is his. I couldn’t find anything to indicate whether this documentary has in fact been released yet. The trailer was posted to YouTube a year ago.
