~ Videopoems ~
Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.
Bees in the Eaves by Bill Yarrow
Bill Yarrow’s poem “Bees in the Eaves” has had many lives. It originally appeared in Mad Hatters’ Review along with audio of the author’s reading, was reprinted in his collection Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012), and was reprinted again at The Poetry Storehouse, where it garnered a reading by Nic S. and this video remix by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon. Coming back full-circle to the mad hatters, perhaps, the video uses footage from the 1940 documentary Symptoms Of Schizophrenia, via the Prelinger Archives. Marc notes:
There was a track ‘Tsukuru Swims‘ I had just finished that was right for Nic S.’s reading of the poem.
It took a bit of re-editing but the combination worked beautifully […]The lines ‘There’s a remedy for everything. And a remedy for every remedy.’ made me think of a short and uncomfortable docu I saw on Prelinger last year.
I took out the footage I thought was disturbing and confronting and edited it to the rhythm and the noises in the soundtrack. I layered the result with moving lights, shot from a train, to give it an extra edge and some depth.
Bill Yarrow spoke of his experience with Poetry Storehouse remixes in an interview at the Moving Poems forum back in March (prior to the release of this video).
Boy in a field by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
https://vimeo.com/90072086
I could watch this again and again. Nic S. makes great use of artwork by Michael Vincent Manalo in this kinestatic video remix of a poem from The Poetry Storehouse by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
A Boy by John Ashbery
John Ashbery reads his poem (from Some Trees, 1956) in this film by Kurtis Hough with original music composed by Christopher Tignor, from the album Thunder Lay Down in the Heart. The Vimeo description quotes Tignor:
The poem “A Boy” rang out to me while I was writing “Thunder Lay Down in the Heart”. Titles usually come in response to the music and I often find myself looking through books of poetry to turn my mind on in that way. I studied poetry myself with John Ashbery many years ago while a student Bard College – indeed he was my advisor. I really responded to the inner psychic conflict of the protagonist against the visceral narrative tension of the storm – the sound, like thunder, of falling “from shelf to shelf of someone’s rage”, the rain at night against the box cars, the inevitable flood.
But to say I’ve completely understood the poem – on whatever terms – is to short change its mystery. I find something new in this poem every time I read it. It’s precisely that kind of altruistic unfolding that I hoped to embody in my musical work with its own flooded lines, dry fields of lightning, and cabbage roses. One reviewer recently described the work as its own “vast electrical disturbance”. Hard to disagree.
For more information on the album, see the Western Vinyl catalog description.
The story of Thunder Lay Down in the Heart begins with the poem “A Boy” written in 1956 by John Ashbery, well before he became the world renown, Pulitzer Prize winning poet we know him as today. In a rare collaboration, Tignor recorded Ashbery reading the work in his Chelsea apartment, surrounding it with his own original musical setting for strings that opens the record. A line from this poem became the title of Tignor’s twenty-minute work for string orchestra, electronics, and drums, featuring eminent Boston-based ensemble A Far Cry. The album’s B side continues the process of reinterpretation as Tignor electronically reimagines and remixes the title piece into “The Listening Machines” and “To Draw a Perfect Circle”, creating spellbinding ambient adventures derived directly from the tapes of this ensemble’s gut-wrenching virtuoso performance. Ending as we began with collaboration, the record’s final remix, “First, Impressions”, was created with composer / pianist Rachel Grimes (of Rachel’s).
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath
This is Confessions of a Lacking Pursuit,
Directed, choreographed & edited by Maggie Bailey. Filmed by Paul Nguyen. Performed by Heather Bybee. Sylvia Plath’s recitation of her poem “The Applicant.” Music by Shane Carruth.
Maggie Bailey is majoring in Theatre/Theatre Arts Management and Dance, concentrating in Performance and Choreography, at College of Charleston, according to LinkedIn. Confessions of a Lacking Pursuit was her senior project.
Pigtail by Tadeusz Rózewicz
In honor of the great post-war Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Rózewicz, who died yesterday at the age of 92, here’s one of his Holocaust poems in a multivocal animation by Dawid Jagusiak (A.K.A. 2wid), who described it on YouTube as:
my final 3rd year Christ Church University animation about holocaust(s), poem: Tadeusz Różewicz, music: Pavol Kajan, voices: Kinga Marchelak, Marta Jagusiak, Lorna Archer
The translation is by Adam Czerniawski, and may be read online at The Legacy Project.
In The Garden by Steve Klepetar
Marilyn Monroe meets a poem by Steve Klepetar in this simple but effective Poetry Storehouse remix by Othniel Smith. According to the Vimeo description, the Marilyn Monroe footage is from Home Town Story (Arthur Pierson, 1951), via the Prelinger Archives.
Secrets by Ruth Foley
https://vimeo.com/92025859
Another of Nic S.’s innovative video remixes for a poem from The Poetry Storehouse, this time by the Massachusetts-based poet and editor Ruth Foley. Sebastian blogged some process notes; here are a couple of snippets:
The language of Secrets was slow and rather sensuous, and when I first read it, I took it as the description of a gradual process of discovery, an uncovering, a blooming of sorts. It was only on the second and subsequent reads that I took in the extent to which it was actually a slow process of flaying, and of destruction. Then it struck me as really incredibly violent, and all the more so for being presented in so meditative and lush a fashion.
[…]
For the soundtrack, I used a track appropriately titled ‘A rotten fairytale’ by a Soundcloud member called Mustafank, whose work I had run across in a video elsewhere (wish I could remember where now). It starts with a toy piano solo and moves into an electric guitar solo, with a faux-innocent sinister feel that really makes you think Hansel & Gretel, sweet gingerbread house & related bad things.
Ruth Foley doesn’t seem to have a website (though she is all over the Google), but she does keep an amusing blog called Five Things.
Blue Notebook No. 10 by Daniil Kharms
https://vimeo.com/77906248
Jacky De Groen, a masters student in animation from Belgium, made this videopoem last year based on a text by Daniil Kharms, the early 20th-century Russian author of surrealist poems and absurdist short stories; “The Blue Notebook, No. 10” is one of the latter.
This is the second film based on this text that I’ve shared here. Compare Franco Geens’ version.
Counting by Steve Klepetar
Steve Klepetar’s poem from The Poetry Storehouse gets the Swoon treatment. Marc Neys writes,
I wanted a more experimental (frantic even) sequence of images for this one. I constructed a soundtrack around Steve’s reading. Re-edited sounds I created before, a sample from I.M. Rawes, taken from London Sound Survey, and new addings of heavily treated recordings (a boiler room) […]
I found the perfect images and atmosphere in one of the hundreds of excerpts out of “The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories” on IICADOM.
A weird combination of naive stop motion (with clay, hands and beans) with some alienated dancing and dark faces in between… A strange string of associations, perfect for what I had in mind.
Steve Klepetar’s home page has some links to his poetry collections (scroll down). And of course check out the rest of his stuff at The Poetry Storehouse.
Crepuscule with Nellie (Take Six) by Ken Taylor
https://vimeo.com/91922709
It’s been three years since Ginetta Correli (Marshmallow Press Productions) last made a filmpoem; it’s good to see more work from her. This one was created for the Poetry Society to be featured at the Filmpoem Festival in Antwerp Belgium, June 14, 2014. American poet and artist Ken Taylor won a commendation for this poem from the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2013 (read the text on their website). His reading is included in the soundtrack.
Items of Value to a Dying Man by Kristin LaTour
https://vimeo.com/90582292
This Poetry Storehouse remix by Nic S. deploys still images by artist Peter Gric and a soundscape by Jarred Gibb for a strangely compelling and disturbing accompaniment to Kristin LaTour’s poem.
The astounding reception of this kinestatic video might offer some lessons for those interested in videopoetry as a way to reach new and larger audiences. In a post on her personal blog, Sebastian pondered “What happens when a poetry video gets 3,000 plays in 5 days?” I encourage everyone to click through and read the whole post, which is much more angst-ridden than boastful (we poets do not always handle success well). I particularly liked this part:
A poem has no life outside its interaction with people. When they are not being interacted with, poems lie dead in the dark, where they are purposeless, and meaningless.
The role of the curator, remixer or publisher of poetry is to maximize the number of interactions each poem has with people. In the hands of the successful curator/publisher, the poem lives in interaction repeatedly and reaches a higher level of its interaction potential than poems in the custody of less successful handlers.
That’s the role of the curator/publisher in the scheme of things poetry. But it doesn’t have to be their motivation. This is where I got confused. If things go well, more people will interact with poems as a result of my remixing and curating. If things don’t, they won’t. But that’s not why I do what I do. I do what I do because I like voicing poems, I like exploring the technology of putting poems online in different ways, I like the challenge of combining poetry and digital imagery in video, and experimenting with sound.
To Find Stars In Another Language by Elizabeth Bradfield
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a poetry reading by Elizabeth Bradfield at Penn State, which concluded with this videopoem projected onto the wall behind her, following a section of haibun riffing off photos that used Powerpoint. It was great to see multimedia casually included as part of a very well-attended reading in an academic setting — though Bradfield herself works not in academia but as a naturalist-interpreter on Cape Cod, which showed, I think, in the ease and common touch with which she introduced her poems. The students seemed very energized by the reading, even before the multimedia portion, and following a 20-minute question-and-answer period, they formed a lengthy queue to buy her books and get her autograph. It was gratifying to see a good poet get the sort of reception she deserved, for once. I bought a copy of her 2010 book Approaching Ice, a personal take on the history of polar exploration, and am enjoying it immensely.
Though this video and its two companions (one of which, Deliquescence, I shared last December) represent Bradfield’s first foray into videopoetry, she and her collaborator Demet Taspinar seem to have all the right instincts. In part, I think, this is because they proceeded ekphrastically: footage first, then the words.
A collaboration between video artist Demet Taspinar, who made this film, and me (Elizabeth Bradfield) who wrote a poem to it. Demet made the movie when working in Antarctica, which is where we met aboard an expedition ship. She was the ship’s doctor; I was a naturalist. We’ve made three of these collaborations so far. First published on “The Rumpus” as video and also as a printed poem in April, 2013.
