The Pioneer Wife Speaks in Tongues by Donna Vorreyer
Swoon‘s latest film features Donna Vorreyer reading a poem from her new collection The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife. The footage is from a public-domain documentary. As Swoon says in a blog post:
Sometimes I collect images, keep them with me until the right poem comes along.
The same with certain tracks I create.
‘And So They Live’ (John Ferno, Julian Roffman, 1940) is a piece of archive showing poorly educated “mountain peoples” living in poverty and stricken with disease, it’s a public-domain documentary about life in the Appalachian mountains with some great looking shots but a typical and very patronizing narration.
I used some parts before more than a year ago in ‘Odds and Ends’. The images stayed on my ‘shelf’ since then…In came Donna Vorreyer. We worked together before and I think she’s a very fine poet.
Donna has got a new collection out: ‘The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife’ (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013)
Almost every poem in that collection could have been used for this videopoem. Not because they’re all the same. Because they’re all so good![…]
There was one sequence in the film I really loved. Can’t explain why, but the feet in the snow worked on a whole other level. When I placed that sequence on the basis, the rest came naturally.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
