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.
This was the first of the three films Kate Sweeney made in collaboration with poet Colette Bryce for her residency at the Dove Marine Laboratory. (The other two are Ballasting the Ark and Turbines in January.) Sweeney wrote:
‘The Lab Aquaria’ seeks to capture a tone, a feel of the lab; a sort of visual mood or reflection that leaves an after-image of the poem. Colette wished to include one site-specific piece about the Dove laboratory and we visited together to collect imagery in photography and video.
Though there are a couple of direct matches between text and film image, the film as a whole escapes the trap of excessive literalism, and comes across as a lyrical meditation on marine life and the work of science.
[UPDATE] The three films were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for new works in poetry in 2013.
This is — the credits tell us — a production of the San Diego State University School of Theatre, Televison, and Film. Alexander Ameen, Miles Feld and Kurt Conety jointly directed a disturbing and imaginative interpretation of Neruda’s “Clenched Soul” as translated by W.S. Merwin.
Erica Goss should be familiar to regular readers of Moving Poems for her monthly column about videopoetry, The Third Form, but she is also a very good poet in her own right, as this new collaboration with Swoon (Marc Neys) demonstrates. This was actually a tri-national collaboration, because the cinematography was by Alastair Cook, re-edited by Marc. For the text of the poem, as well as some process notes, see Marc’s blog.
This mash-up by Othniel Smith is so wrong, it’s right: images from Red Detachment of Women accompany a Librivox reading of a classic poem from the Harlem Rennaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. I hope her heirs have a sense of humor.
I wanted to start the New Year with one of my favorite poets. This is Todo hace el amor con el silencio: tres poemas de Alejandra Pizarnik by Hernán Talavera. Here are the three texts along with some rough translations. (Feel free to suggest improvements in the comments.)
[El olvido]
en la otra orilla de la noche -llévame- llévame entre las dulces sustancias |
[Oblivion]
on the other side of night -take me- take me among sweet substances |
[no. 22 de “Árbol de Diana”]
en la noche |
[from “Tree of Diana,” #22]
in the night |
[de Aproximaciones]
La niña que fui De lágrimas se nutrirá mil años. |
[from Approximations]
The girl I was Fed on tears for a millennium. |
Another one of the Public Thought collaborations between Dutch poet Jan Baeke and media artist Alfred Marseille. Let me quote the description at Vimeo in full:
Originally conceived as an interactive installation for the 2007 Literature and New Media project in the Waag, Amsterdam, this production by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille mixes poetry, moving images and sound in a movie directed by words, and talks about memory, longing, the misguided monologue and the meaning of the kitchen in modern society.
Images and sounds are mainly drawn from the Prelinger archives.
This version is an entirely new edit made for the 2011 Beijing Book Fair and also featured at the 2011 Noorderzon festival in Groningen (Netherlands).
Text: Jan Baeke
Editing: Alfred Marseille
English translation: Willem Groenewegen
(The Waag, incidentally, is an old city gate and guild hall, “the oldest remaining non-religious building in Amsterdam.”)
There’s also a version in Mandarin Chinese.
This is LoCo by Azucena Losana, a Mexican multimedia artist based in Buenos Aires. The soundtrack is a poem by the Bolivian poet Oscar Alfaro, recited by Jorge Cafrune with English subtitles translated by Roger Colom.