~ Miscellaneous ~
Cloth by Kate Greenstreet
This video essay on poetics by Kate Greenstreet is itself very poetic in its use of metaphors, intuitive leaps and interesting visual juxtapositions. It features Carrie Lincourt, and credits Max Greenstreet for “second camera and second opinion.” “Cloth” was produced for Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics (Issue 8: August 2011).
poetry by Laura Theobald
An homage to the Gray Lady of American poetry magazines.
Death By Water (art installation)
The artist, identified only by his Vimeo handle miaoniu, explains that the installation is so rigged that when anyone approaches it, the “Death By Water” section of “The Waste Land” is dunked into a tank of water, and slowly rises when the audience departs. “As time passed by the poem will dissolve and disappear finally.”
Call me simple-minded, but I love the literalism here. I only wish the video included a time-lapse segment so we could watch the wasting of “The Waste Land.”
Three Hundred Tang Poems: “water” fragments
Another video of an interactive video-art installation involving poetry. The artist is Yan Da (see also his Vimeo profile), and the piece is titled Water Poem. To say this is high-concept would be a bit of an understatement. Here’s how Yan describes it:
Water Poem is an interactive video installation. The audiences are encouraged to interact with the projector by simply moving it and project wherever they want. The projected content is texts coming from English website of 300 most famous ancient Chinese poems from Tang dynasty. Water Poem will search any sentence that contains the word “water” and randomly display each sentence based on a pre-designed condition. If the projector is not moved, the text will change in a random interval from 30 to 45 seconds, if it is moved, based on the strength of the motion, when it reach a certain threshold, the text will change immediately. The visual of the text is in a constant fluid status, the more motion applied to the projector, the more fluid the text will appear until it totally become illegible. Once the motion become subtle, the text will gradually turn back into a relatively stable mode that makes itself legible again.
Water Poem tries to express a sense of dislocation. By this dislocation of space, time and meaning, Water Poem tends to reflect the artist’s current experience and feelings, a dislocation of life in a foreign country with different culture and way of understanding. By inviting the audience to control and to transform the text in space, time and meaning, Water Poem also hopes to dislocate the audience into their own floating memory and imagination.
The poetic meaning related to water that the text reflects and the fluidity of the visual are embodied into the space, transforming its concrete character of the space into a constant flux, a liquid skin. Meanwhile, the difference between the meaning of English translation and the original Chinese text, the fragmented phrases from randomly chosen poem all contributes to the dislocation of the meaning, making it ambiguous and fluctuating. Water Poem encourage the audience to control the projection of the text thus to embody the literal and visual content onto anything they want, the de-construction of the meaning might be enhanced. By encountering the thousand years old content of the poem to the modern technology of Internet is another way of dislocating the time.
Read the rest of the description on Vimeo to learn about the technical aspects of the installation.
Three Hundred Tang Poems (Tang Shi San Bai Shou) is one of the most famous and widely read of all Chinese poetry anthologies. See the Classical Chinese Poetry website for English translations of all 300 poems by Innes Herdan, or the Wengu website for translations by Witter Bynner and the Chinese texts supplemented with character-by-character definitions on mouseover that allow one to attempt one’s own translations.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Not a video poem, but a video of an interactive digital installation, a piece called Dinner Party, which involves the animated text of “Jabberwocky.” Artist Hye Yeon Nam explains,
Dinner party provides a space where people meet and interact with Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, inspired creatures hiding in the shadows.
At first glance, the single chair and place set for one, seemingly provides a solitary dinner; rather the interaction offers a communication between oneself and the imaginary creatures. Initially gathered under the shadow cast by the plate, disturbed creatures will nervously scatter attempting to go around any other shadow cast on the table. A period of quiet status will encourage the creatures to reveal themselves.
Zach Lieberman and Jeremy Rotsztain are listed as collaborators. I’m not sure who created the video itself, but I’ll credit Hye Yeon Nam in the filmmaker category, since I don’t have a separate taxonomy for video artists here.
Poetry in advertising: Poetas Malos (Bad Poets) for Coca Cola Light
A couple of the YouTube uploads of this ad attribute it to Andy Fogwill of the advertising firm Santo Buenos Aires, so I’ll assume that’s correct. I first saw it in the dubbed English version below, via Don Share’s blog.
For those of us immersed in the world of poetry, it may come as a bit of a shock to realize that for many other people, poetry is synonymous with bad poetry. Had it not been for that sleight of hand there at the end, I would’ve thoroughly enjoyed this. For all that bad metaphors and aching sincerity set my teeth on edge, it is still preferable to the ad man’s cynicism in the service of idolatry.
Robots are Blue
Not a video poem, but a short film about robots and poetry by Bill Sebastian. Enjoy.
Meta-Free-Phor-All
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer’s Day? | ||||
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Something for April Fool’s Day — and the first day of (Inter-)National Poetry Month — from a king of fools. This episode of the Colbert Report aired on April 19, 2007. Colbert seems to genuinely like poetry, and has interviewed a number of poets on his show. I like the way this skit plays off the misconception popular with people who “just don’t understand poetry”: that a poem (or metaphor) is basically a code with one correct solution. I’m also impressed by Robert Pinksy’s stage presence and acting skills.
