~ Video Library ~
Cold by Emily Kendal Frey
With the northeastern U.S. just coming out of a heat wave, winter seems a far-off and delicious prospect. This is a poem from the collection The New Planet by Porland, Oregon-based writer Emily Kendal Frey. The video is by Zachary Schomburg, with whom Frey has also done some collaborative writing, according to this interview with her at The Collagist. For this project they also brought in Emily’s sister Elinor Frey, an accomplished cellist, whose music helped create a very wintry ambience indeed.
Television by Todd Alcott
Beth Fulton writes,
The inspiration of this video comes from Todd Alcott’s poem, Television. I own no rights to his reading of the poem and intend only to share my own personal interpretation. Hope you like!
This is to my knowledge the first English-language videopoem to have gone viral. I first saw it last week on Facebook, where it seems to have been posted quite heavily. It’s been played 445,537 times in just three months, making it currently the most popular videopoem on Vimeo, and second only to Juan Delcan’s animation of Billy Collins’ “The Dead” on YouTube, which has amassed 761,494 views — but over the course of three years. So “Television”‘s refrain, “Look at me!” seems to be working.
Todd Alcott is a screenwriter living in Santa Monica, and judging by the comment he left below the video on Vimeo, seems to be a friend or acquaintance of the filmmaker doesn’t know the filmmaker (though he likes the video — see comments).
How to Make a Crab Cake by January Gill O’Neil
Another in our brief series of videopoems that riff on television. January Gill O’Neil makes nice use of TV cooking-show conventions for a poem from her debut collection Underlife. She blogged briefly about the making of the video here.
(Hat tip: Christine Swint in the Moving Poems forum.)
“And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake
Continuing the theme of videopoems that riff on television conventions, here’s a poetry promo from the BBC disguised as a sporting news story from the BBC. The poem is referred to as “Jerusalem,” but it’s actually from the Preface to Milton. A popular hymn adaptation by Hubert Parry a century after Blake wrote it is reponsible for the new title, according to the Wikipedia.
The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, travelled to the area that is now England and visited Glastonbury. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation (3:12 and 21:2) describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian church in general, and the English Church in particular, used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.
That’s one of those metaphors that would seem to have outlived its relevance, except perhaps in the writing of the late Mahmoud Darwish.
Some Last Questions by W. S. Merwin
Another section from the production Men Think They Are Better Than Grass by the San Francisco-based Deborah Slater Dance Theatre, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. The two featured dancers here are Travis Rowland and Breton Tyner Bryan. The inclusion of sound effects from the TV quiz show Jeopardy is brilliant, I thought.
Last Thursday, Merwin was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate.
Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy
Update: this video is no longer online.
Directed by Gerard Docherty. Aside from the sloppy spelling, this is a fine video and seemed worth sharing. Duffy is, of course, the current Poet Laureate of Great Britain. I assume this video was made without her permission, and thus represents a kind of stealing itself — and/or an homage and act of generosity, depending on your view of intellectual property rights.
I’m going back to posting five videos a week here, at least until I can shrink the current queue of draft posts. So much good stuff coming out these days!
Look Through a Complex Eye and See 1000 of Everything by Zachary Schomburg
Layne Braunstein directed, designed and animated this film for Born Magazine, where the original Flash version still lives (along with the text). Thanks to producer Fake Love for uploading it to Vimeo.
Zachary Schomburg’s website appears to be out of commission, but he does have a blog, as well as a Vimeo account — turns out he makes videopoems himself, too. (Look for examples here in the coming weeks.) The poem is from his second book, Scary, No Scary.
Oblogo Concerto by Atukwei Okai
Ghanaian poetry videos are a little thin on the ground, but I found three in the International Poetry Festival of Medellín’s massive video archive (African poets section), and was fascinated by Okai’s dramatic style and use of extreme alliteration. Atukwei Okai “was the first to try to take African poetry back to one of its primal origins, in percussion, by deliberately violating the syntax and lexicon of English, creating his own rhythms through startling phonetic innovations,” according to the Nigerian scholar of African Studies Femi Osofisan. In typical Medellín video style, we are shown the audience’s reactions — or lack thereof — as the poet recites.
For more on the festival, see the Guardian Weekly article, “Medellín’s poems of peace.” I would love to see the same kind of media coverage given to this festival as to the World Cup, at least on Univision. But I imagine it would have to be turned into a poetry slam-style competition for that to happen, and that would probably clash with the festival’s peace agenda.
“I reason, Earth is short” by Emily Dickinson
Another animation by Francesca Talenti. You can watch dozens, maybe hundreds of Emily Dickinson videos on YouTube and not find anything so free of cliché as this.
I reason, Earth is short—
And Anguish—absolute—
And many hurt,
But, what of that?I reason, we could die—
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?I reason, that in Heaven—
Somehow, it will be even—
Some new Equation, given—
But, what of that?
