Posts By Dave Bonta
Faites vos jeux by Marleen de Crée
Update 7/19/12: Swoon informs me that there’s a volume of Marleen de Crée poetry translated into English by Annmarie Sauer due out later this year. And note that Swoon’s two earlier subtitled films for de Crée poems have been re-done with Sauer’s translations.
Marleen de Crée is one of Belgium’s most prominent living poets, with 15 poetry collections and a number of major prizes to her name. Swoon, of course, is without a doubt the most active maker of videopoems in Belgium; this is his third video for a de Crée poem, all three available in two versions: with subtitles and without. The recitation here is by Katrijn Clemer, and the English translation is by Annmarie Sauer.
Most of the footage comes from a 1942 home movie in the Prelinger archive of ephemeral films. I love seeing videopoets make use of this kind of material.
Office of Desire and Helicopter Opera by Jeff Crouch
http://vimeo.com/39867909
This is SOS, an experimental video by Cecelia Chapman, who has previously been featured here with videos for a couple of her own texts. Jeff Crouch, who also supplied the soundtrack, frequently collaborates with Chapman. And this time they had a third collaborator: Steve Johnson, who supplied the cellphone video.
The Cloudy Vase by Jane Hirshfield
The Motionpoem for July is short and sweet, the work of Scott Olson and Jeff Saunders. Visit the post at Motionpoems.com for some interesting viewer reactions (and to leave your own). And as usual, the monthly email sent out to subscribers included statements from both the poet and one of the filmmakers. Hirshfield said, in part:
“The Cloudy Vase” is very short–the whole video takes perhaps 20 seconds. Yet somehow, falling into the glass of the vase in the film is also infinite and outside of time. That mirrors perfectly what I myself find so paradoxical and thrilling about very short poems–the collision of brief and large. And the brutality of having to throw out a beloved’s gift of flowers is in there too.
And Olson:
I visualized the poem existing in its own space and time, stripped of any unnecessary visual connotations, distractions, or references, where any and every viewer/listener could step directly into the experience and be totally present for a few brief moments, hear the words, and be taken in.
Sonnet by Bill Knott
Found via a Bill Knott feature issue at Salamander Cove. I’m not crazy about the piano here (“Meditation Impromptu 1” by Kevin MacLeod), but otherwise it’s a well-done video, and I love the poem. The teenaged videographer goes by the handle MusicalMarionette on YouTube. For more on Bill Knott, see HTML Giant, and check out his Collected Poems on Lulu.
Compromise by Steve Connell
http://vimeo.com/15206643
Gabriel Sunday directed. The description on Vimeo reads,
Steve Connell is a world-famous Spoken Word poet and performer. Faye Reagan is a world famous Porn Star.
Accept the truth of our times… embrace the Compromise.
That’s right: according to the Wikipedia, the actress usually known as Faye Reagan has performed in 174 adult films and one videopoem. For more on Connell, the Wikipedia also appears to be the best source.
Saffron by Kate Ruse
A striking animation by Zhiyu Zhao for a piece by UK poet Kate Ruse.
Orphanage by Matt Hetherington
I’m pleased by my own small role in making this happen as managing editor of qarrtsiluni, where the poem first appeared in text form a month ago as the final piece in our Imitation issue, and as compiler of the podcast from which Swoon took the recording of Australian poet Matt Hetherington reading his poem. As we say in the note there, it was “inspired by the poetry of Ian McBryde, particularly his book of one-line poems, Slivers (Melbourne: Flat Chat Press, 2005).”
Swoon blogged some process notes:
I liked the poem and, even more so, his great reading of it for the podcast.
(People who follow my work know how important I think a good reading or voice is for a good videopoem)
[…]
I wanted to keep the pauses he made in his reading, so I didn’t change a thing.
Just added the right track […] and went on a search for the right footage or images. I needed empty houses and remembered a great video I once saw by someone who calls himself Tschmite. He gave me his consent to use footage of it.
I added some of my own recordings and also found amazing images in a series of films made by Graham Gilmore about Tsjernobyl.I edited all I wanted and needed for the right atmosphere. Gave the words by Matt, the space and the room they needed to unfold themselves.
(Incidentally, I wish more videopoem/filmpoem makers would post such detailed descriptions of their process. It’s really helpful for those of us who are trying to learn the craft.)
Renaissance cyclique / Cyclical rebirth by Marianne
http://vimeo.com/44724149/
(See also the original version without the English subtitles.) A collaboration between writer Marianne, filmmaker Dorianne Wotton and Exomène.
[O]ur three dream, disturbing and crazy worlds intersect, tangle and merge to create the spoken worms: audiovisual pieces in which each medium is strengthened to immerse the audience in their imaginary ternary.
Each artist brings his sensitivity, his approach.
There is a high complementarity between the protagonists of these creations. Round trips between writing, music and images are extremely exciting for everyone. They make the transposition of words, pictures and music spectacle in a real research and a perpetual creation.The “spoken worms” have been produced several times in Paris and we are looking for new venues in France or abroad.
To watch more of their collaborations, see the page at Marianne’s blog.
Gerald Stern: Still Burning
A very well-done documentary portrait from PoetryMattersNow.org, directed, produced and edited by Norbert Lempert. Here’s the description at the Poetry Foundation website:
Produced by Norbert Lempert of REMproductions in association with the Poetry Foundation. Gerald Stern is as much the poet warrior now as when he stunned the poetry world thirty years ago with his book Lucky Life. In that book he first staked out a place for himself and readers that he has continued to make, a place that in his words is “overlooked or ignored or disdained, a place no one else wanted.” This short documentary film, illustrated with materials from Stern’s own archive, features some of Stern’s best known poems. It also includes commentary by poets Ross Gay, Edward Hirsch, Anne Marie Macari, Heather McHugh, and Thomas Lux, each with a unique perspective on Stern as artist and friend.
I thought this would be a good pick for the U.S. Independence Day holiday, especially given the way Stern, Hirsch and Macardi discuss the climate for poetry in the U.S. starting around 2:30 in Part 1. There’s also this from Stern in Part 2, beginning at 2:58:
We remember the famous words: After the Holocaust, after Shoah, there can be no poetry. And the alternative is: After the Shoah, there can be ONLY poetry. “How about no parades, no cannons, no atom bombs? How about no concentration camps, the way the United States runs concentration camps now?” is another way of thinking about it.
I also like Hirsch’s description of Stern in Part 3, starting at 0:38:
He’s really a poet of the egotistical sublime. The I stands in for the natural world, and for the whole world. And he’s experiencing everything himself.
For more on Gerald Stern, and to read samples of his work, see the Poetry Foundation’s page, which includes 32 poems in text form and 12 audio files.
Parler seul / Speech Alone
A poem by the great Jean Follain, read by Nic S. for Pizzicati of Hosanna. The translation by W.S. Merwin is from his book-length selection of Follain poems, Transparence of the World, which belongs on every poetry lover’s bookshelf.
I don’t make any great claims for this video; I just wanted some Follain here at Moving Poems and no one else was envideoing him in English.
The Art of Drowning
This film by Diego Maclean is currently one of the most popular poetry videos on Vimeo, with 3,294 likes and 97 laudatory comments. Though the rotoscopy succeeds in mimicking the effect of a graphic novel, assuming that was the intent, I personally find it less interesting as a video interpretation of the poem than the student film by Lindsey Butler which I shared two years ago.
According to Jason Sondhi at Short of the Week, this too was a student production:
Maclean created this short film as his graduation film from the Emily Carr Institute in 2009, and it has wrapped up an impressive festival run, playing at Sundance, Annecy and SXSW among others.
