The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled by Bridget Lowe
The September offering from Motionpoems is an animation by the co-director herself, Angella Kassube. Visit their website for the text. This is another selction from Best American Poetry 2011. Bridget Lowe is a young poet from Kansas City with a first book due out next year from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Motionpoems’ free email newsletter quoted Kassube on the making of the film:
“From the beginning I knew I had to use the correct face and the correct eyes. But the line ‘World, there are two baskets / on my back’ – I didn’t know what to do with that. I built the section several times. I knew I didn’t want to use images of two baskets and fill them with something. I had already thought about how many definitions there are for the word ‘WORLD,’ and I had decided that World should be inside her head. There are the city and other images that represent outside influences on her world, but it is how she reacts to those things that creates her World. I realized she could look in two different directions and that could be a way to interpret the two baskets.”
The use of those eyes also stood out to Bridget: “The beautiful illustrations Angella used to tell the story (the eyes–so perfect!) balance explanation and mystery impeccably. Her timing as a director is likewise inarguably impeccable. Angella’s vision has compelled me to rethink how I read, and therefore present, my own work. What a gift.”
Here at Motionpoems, we’re always excited when we learn one of our films has inspired a poet to consider her work in a new light. Bridget continued, “The thing that most surprised and excited me about Angella’s interpretation was her ability to illuminate a playfulness in the poem that I hadn’t previously noticed fully. I knew the poem was one of pleading and desperation, but Angella’s version cut through some of that heaviness and landed in a place more like wondrous awe, which is what the poem announces itself to be from the beginning. I thought that was brilliant.”
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
