~ Video Library ~
Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Concepción Before Entering Sears by Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Best bilingual poem ever? Well, maybe not, but the last line is perfect.
For background on Guevara, see the Poetry Foundation site.
won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton
Rest in peace, Lucille Clifton.
“Leave Your Sleep”: Natalie Merchant interview and performance of a Charles Causley poem
Natalie Merchant talks about her new album Leave Your Sleep, which uses children’s poems and nursery rhymes for lyrics, in an interview with Ellah Allfrey of Granta.
Here’s a live performance of one of the pieces included on the album, from the September 2009 Grand Opening of Poet’s House in New York. This is by British poet Charles Causley: “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience,” the opening track of the two-disc set.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-yc3UN_BZg
Watch more live performances of songs off Leave Your Sleep at BBC Radio Scotland.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey’s macabre alphabet is brought to life by Wayland Bell and a bunch of other people.
Where shall we go? (¿A dónde iremos?) by Nezahualcoyotl
A class project, according to the Colombian videographer, Felipe Meneses, but this is by the far the best Nezahualcoyotl videopoem I’ve found on the web. The poem is read in the original Nahuat with Spanish subtitles. Here’s a quick and dirty English translation (from the Spanish):
Where can we go
that death does not exist?
But should I live in tears because of that?
Your heart might as well make itself at home;
no one will live forever here.
Even great lords go down to death,
their worldly possessions put to the torch.
Your heart might as well make itself at home;
no one will live forever here.
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Another of Josep Porcar’s videopoems for the Catalan literary site Blocs de Lletres. Stevens’ poem is now in the public domain, so here’s the text:
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
and, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
To Make a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara
A literal illustration of Tristan Tzara’s technique by Yeju Choi. An alternate translation of the 1920 text appears on Red Studio’s page for an online equivalent of this technique. I love the closing lines:
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Night Flight Turbulence by Franz Wright
Pete Shanel is the videographer for this track, released as a promo for the CD Readings From Wheeling Motel, a collaboration between Franz Wright and the folk-pop group Ill Lit.
Room in Brooklyn by Anne Carson
Expand this to full screen and turn the sound up: this is Hopper Confessions: Room in Brooklyn for cello, interactive electronics and interactive video. The music is by Joseph Butch Rovan, and the video is by Rovan and Katherine Bergeron. The page on Vimeo includes a rather academic disquisition from which I’ll quote only the opening paragraph:
This multimedia work draws its inspiration from “Room in Brooklyn,” a poem by Anne Carson, published in her collection Men in the Off Hours (New York: Knopf, 2000). Carson’s poem is itself polyphonic, exposing two different voices that speak to the condition of passing time: a painting by Edward Hopper (the 1932 canvas “Room in Brooklyn”) and a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Carson measures the nostalgia of Hopper’s Americana with a tiny thread of verse that hangs on Augustine’s temporal philosophy like a second melodic voice over a stolid cantus firmus.
