~ October 2013 ~
Fallow Field by Scott Edward Anderson
This is Filmpoem 34 by Alastair Cook, who writes:
Fallow Field is a poem by Scott Edward Anderson, from his brand new eponymous collection. It’s been a pleasure to make a Filmpoem for a friend and this harks back to my earlier work, motifs I explored and delighted in a number of years ago which suit Scott’s incredible words.
Scott’s collection Fallow Field is available from Aldrich Press, Amazon and scottedwardanderson.com.
Of the various blurbs on the website, I particularly liked this one:
“Wow, Pop, I had no idea you wrote so many poems!” – Walker Anderson, the author’s 10-year-old son
Anderson blogs at The Green Skeptic and Scott Edward Anderson’s Poetry Blog.
Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats
https://vimeo.com/77916729
Nic S.’s latest poetry video is especially noteworthy for its soundtrack, which blends the voices of four different LibriVox readers to great effect.
The Poetry Storehouse aims to connect poets with artists and filmmakers
Just a few weeks old, The Poetry Storehouse, poetrystorehouse.com, is already beginning to live up to its slogan, “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Everything in the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and there are also links to off-site collections of work with remix-friendly CC licenses of one variety or another. The site’s editors, led by Nic S., are actively soliciting for submissions of poetry in English, and new material will be added on a weekly basis. The editors tag and categorize the poetry on the site fairly exhaustively in order to maximize its findability.
The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of freely-available high-quality contemporary page-poetry for those multimedia collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by copyright and other restrictions. Our main mission is to collect and showcase poem texts and, in some instances, audio recordings of those texts. It is our hope that those texts will serve as inspiration or raw material for other artistic creations in different media.
I’m one of the site’s advisors, along with Marc Neys. My primary agenda is probably pretty obvious: generate more videopoems/filmpoems to share on Moving Poems! But more than that, I strongly believe that poets should be more open to artistic collaboration, and stop viewing a printed book as the ultimate destination for their work. And I think any filmmaker looking for a great short subject should consider bringing a poem to the big or small screen.
I’ve added The Poetry Storehouse to our page of web resources for videopoetry makers in the “Free and Creative Commons-licensed texts and audiopoetry” section. (And while I was updating the page, I also added a new section with links to free online filmmaking tutorials, to make it even easier for poets who want to have a go at envideoing their own or others’ works. Thanks to beginning poetry filmmaker Graham Barnes for the suggestion.)
Oir by Luisa A. Igloria
This new videopoem by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is one of his best, I think. Somehow the poem and reading by Luisa A. Igloria are just a perfect fit with the images and music.
As with his previous collaboration with Luisa, Mortal Ghazal, Marc has blogged some process notes incorporating remarks from Luisa. I’ll just quote from the first part of his post:
Some weeks ago we’ve had a thunderstorm at night. I recorded it, added some sounds and improvised piano…
For some reason I thought about the recording of ‘Oir’ Luisa sent me earlier. I combined them all and forwarded the result to Luisa.I very much love the broody thunderstorm background and the improvised piano. I like the sound of rain very much. A hard rain on tin roofs is a particularly strong memory trace I have from my growing up in a tropical country. Anyway, for me rain has the capacity for both amplifying and muffling/softening the atmosphere. It’s full of emotional portent,
she replied.
Luisa also gave me the idea of using ‘café-ambient’ noises and provided me with some insights about the poem;
…but in part the poem is partly triggered by a conversation I had in a cafe. We talked about work, creative nonfiction essays, family…
As usual the cafe was crowded and noisy. it struck me then but perhaps more afterward, when I was writing the poem, that in the spaces that teem with so much everyday life, activity, business as usual, we strive to hollow out spaces for the intimate to be enacted and reenacted.
Contemplating Hell by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht’s poem assembled and disassembled line by line in a hypnotic videopoem by the UK-based Polish video artist Maciej Piatek and F_F_P, with music by Karol Wyszynski. In the description at Vimeo, he notes:
In the world of coming from and going to nowhere, we are living in bi-polar reality in which the gap between what’s right and what’s wrong between hell & heaven is getting bigger, thus our life becomes more uncertain. These blended ideas & images are creating chaos and making us lonely. The only solution is to stop and contemplate, contemplate heaven or go to hell.
The movie had its official premiere at Bates Mill, Huddersfield as a part of the multi-arts event ,,Hope,,
(found via London Poetry Systems)
The Black Delph Bride by Liz Berry
Another of Alastair Cook‘s filmpoems for the Poetry Society in partnership with the Canal and River Trust as part of the Canal Laureate 2013 project. See last week’s post of Lifted for more details. Jo Bell says of this one,
Liz Berry’s film is a darker narrative, shot on location as all of these films were, at the Black Delph in the Black Country. Harking back to the canal ballads of the Victorian time, this has a Dickensian tragedy about it.
For more about Liz Berry, visit her website. Her dramatic reading is set off brilliantly by Luca Nasciuti‘s soundtrack.
Kiss the Cobra by Michael Annis
A Swoon (Marc Neys) film for a text by U.S. poet Michael Annis, translated into Spanish with the help of Gabriela Perez and recited by Sitara Monica Perez, with music by Sonologyst. I am deeply impressed by Swoon’s choice of imagery to accompany the sexual, conjugal language of the poem. The whole story of how this videopoem came to be made is interesting, but I’ll just quote the latter part of Swoon’s blog post about it:
Michael then gave me ‘Kiss the Cobra’, in his own words:
“It’s a passionate piece written from the perspective of a woman’s desires. It’s not overtly sentimental; rather, bold and lusty with unbridled passions.”
The poem was recorded in Spanish. I loved the sound and the melody of the Spanish version and I immediately got an idea for the images.
Sonologyst, again, delivered a fantastic soundtrack to curl around the reading of Sitara Monica Perez.The images I used and edited came from an Russian ASMR-Artist called Air Light.
I took a few samples of her scratching and tapping with bright red nails and started working with that.
The video ended up like an abstract cascade of colour and movement, giving the voice and the words enough room to crawl in and out of the piece. Something to stare at…
The video premiered at ‘1.000 poets for change’ in Denver (28/09/2013)
