A terrific videopoem addressing the invasive species epidemic. This is one of three Dove Marine Lab poetry films:

Three films made by artist Kate Sweeney and poet Colette Bryce in 2012 inspired by the poetry Colette produced as part of her Leverhulme residency at The Dove Marine Lab in Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear, UK.

On her website, Kate Sweeney describes her general approach to the project:

I am using photography, drawings, video and sound taken in and around the Dove Marine Laboratory to explore some of the motifs, rhythms, ideas and patterns that arise in Colette’s poems. In the poems, Colette to some extent celebrates the act of looking, for the poet and the scientist: the films take this visual thread forward into a new realm. I am trying to create a tension between the words and accentuate the rhythm and sounds of the spoken word through imagery without becoming distracting or merely illustrative.

“Ballasting the Ark,” she writes,

involves drawing, copying, inventing, imagining and re-imagining of some of the activity taking place in the poem. I wanted this film to begin as a sketch, or workings-out  on paper; like a god  sketching out an ‘Ark’; divine imagination, moving toward an opposing set of ideas – the science of observing ‘reality’, and of a scientist looking, counting, analysing, removing, deleting.

For more on Colette Bryce, see her Wikipedia page. And check out the Dove Marine Laboratory website.

[UPDATE] The three films were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for new works in poetry in 2013.

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Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

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