~ Video Library ~
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier
Portland, Oregon-based poet Dale Favier has been blogging at mole since 2003. His first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out this month just out from Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. A subsequent sighting of a mole in the yard resulted in this video. (See Via Negativa for a more detailed description of the process.)
In Extremis by Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans reads another poem from The Throne of Psyche, out earlier this year from Mercer University Press. Film and music once again are by Paul Digby. In her description at YouTube, Marly writes:
This poem is about a visionary experience that flooded in during a harrowing passage in my life. The timing was a bit difficult; I had given birth to a third child and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Not long after we arrived, our eldest, a little boy of 8, was struck with meningitis. The short blank verse poem begins at a point where he had been immobile for a week: still and unresponsive, and was about to be moved from St. Francis Children’s Hospital to a larger hospital with an Infectious Diseases specialist.
New Year’s Eve by Thomas Hardy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX746yXs96A
With all the videopoems that have been made with her readings or for her poems, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later Nic S. would have to try making one of her own. This is her maiden effort — and the first Hardy poem in the Moving Poems archive. She used some wonderfully creepy footage of cockroaches from the Prelinger Archives. She her blog post for more about her process.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
Two poems (personality fragmented and notes from a taxi cab at 2 a.m.) by u.v. ray
U.K. photographer and musician gordon eightball made this wonderfully atmospheric film, with words and voice supplied by u.v. ray, whose website says he has been “a stalwart of the underground literary scene for 20 years.”
Three poems (Flute Boy, Marriage of Opposites and Half-caste) by John Agard
John Agard is joined on stage by the flautist Keith Waithe, a fellow Guyanan, in an extract from a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce called John Agard Live!, which was included as a DVD along with Agard’s 2009 collection Alternative Anthem, from Bloodaxe Books. (There’s also video of Agard reading the title poem.)
This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way, by Sherry O’Keefe
A film called “Nightvision” by Swoon Bildos, which he blogged about (in Dutch) here. Fortunately for us English speakers, though — and for everyone who’s been following Swoon’s work — the poet, Sherry O’Keefe, blogged a conversation with him about the process of making this video, how he got into videopoetry and more.
The poem originally appeared in PANK, and was recorded by Nic S. for Whale Sound. The video includes some camera work by Kristoffer Jansson and Keith Marcel.
Happiness by Jorge Luis Borges
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xde4fp_jorge-luis-borges-happiness_creation
Today’s Google Doodle commemorates the birth of Borges:
“Wishing Jorge Luis Borges a happy 112th birthday!” Google tweeted early this morning, adding a well-known Borges quote: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
I shudder to think what this arch-conservative and biobliophile would’ve said about videopoetry, let alone digital texts. But thanks to a Facebook contact, I saw this video and thought it worth sharing. It appears to be a quite illegal upload (and re-branding) of a snippet from the documentary Art, Poetry and Particle Physics, narrated by John Berger and directed by Ken McMullen. However, the uploaders do at least acknowledge the theft, and also reproduce the text of the translation by Stephen Kessler used in the documentary. [The YouTube user account was terminated for copyright violations. I swapped in a DailyMotion version on 15 August 2014.] And it’s a very effective selection, I thought — it works well on its own as a videopoem, even with the apparent non sequitur by Berger at the end about Borges’ lack of interest in 20th-century science.
“Bound is a Boatless Woman”: tribute to Látra-Björg
Neither a filmpoem nor a bio pic in the conventional sense, this six-minute film by Lisa Castagner, an artist from Northern Ireland, invokes the life and spirit of a fierce, 18th-century Icelandic poet I’d not previously heard about. Google Translate isn’t much help in deciphering the Icelandic Wikipedia page, except to impart the information that her given name was Björg Einarsdóttir, and “Látra-Björg” means something like “Trees, Boulders.” Fortunately, Castager’s description at Vimeo is a bit more helpful:
The title originates from a Viking proverb ‘Bundinn er bátlaus maðu’, meaning ‘Bound is a boatless man’. Likewise, a woman without a boat is a prisoner.
Látra-Björg was an 18th Century outcast fisherwoman who wrote poems believed to cast spells on those who crossed her. Fisherwomen were required to wear their skirts regardless of practicality, so they often defied the law and removed them at sea. Látra-Björg lived and died a beggar in an isolated northern fjord of Iceland during the ‘Mist Famine’ which forced many to emigrate to Canada.
I made the piece as an imaginative interpretation of Látra-Björg’s poetry and story while I stayed in that part of Iceland; her most well-known poem is ‘Fagurt er i Fjörðum’ (‘Tis fair in the fjords), a verse describing the beauty of the fjords when the weather is fair, until the extreme hardships of the winter, ‘when man and beast must die’.
