~ 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.

The Lab Aquaria by Colette Bryce

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.

Clenched Soul by Pablo Neruda

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.

Darkroom by Erica Goss

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.

locating faraway objects by Kate Greenstreet

This was made for The Volta: Medium, a weekly video column that often features poetry. Greenstreet also posted the text to her website.

Radio Carbon by Tim Cumming

Tim Cumming is a major British poet-filmmaker whose work I’ve just recently learned about. Radio Carbon was especially interesting to me since I’ve been watching a lot of archaeological documentaries in which radiocarbon dating features heavily. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

When cosmic rays strike the atmosphere they create the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which can be detected in living matter and decays at a fixed rate over many millennia. Radiocarbon dating is the method by which we measure prehistoric time, and with which our own detritus will one day be measured.
The filmpoem Radio Carbon takes this transient yet permanent record of time as a personal metaphor, fashioning a hypnotic journey into the human past, from the neolithic to the present moment.
It’s a film with eternity at its centre, the vastness of space at its core, and a reverie of images clustering to the lens like the flashing in a stranger’s eye.

This is in 24 numbered sections, and may be viewed as a sequence of separate, interlocking filmpoems with recurring motifs. Cummings shot the film’s 8mm footage in addition to doing all the editing — a major undertaking for a film of this length. His profile at Salt Publications says that Radio Carbon “was premiered at the Renoir cinema in 2009 and at Port Eliot Festival in 2010.”

I Want To Die While You Love Me by Georgia Douglas Johnson

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.

Three poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

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
el amor es posible

-llévame-

llévame entre las dulces sustancias
que mueren cada día en tu memoria

[Oblivion]

on the other side of night
love is possible

-take me-

take me among sweet substances
which every day vanish from your memory

[no. 22 de “Árbol de Diana”]

en la noche
un espejo para la pequeña muerta
un espejo de cenizas

[from “Tree of Diana,” #22]

in the night
a mirror for the dead little girl
a mirror of ashes

[de Aproximaciones]

La niña que fui
ahora en mi memoria
entre mis muertos.

De lágrimas se nutrirá mil años.
De destierro el sonido de su voz.

[from Approximations]

The girl I was
lives now in my memory
among the dead.

Fed on tears for a millennium.
Exiling the sound of her voice.

What we had has not yet been by Jan Baeke

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.

El pájaro revolucionario (The Revolutionary Bird) by Oscar Alfaro

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.

Apocalypse Later by Michael Anthony Ricciardi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XATMw6d8DMk

A great example of remix videopoetry from before the YouTube era. Michael Anthony Ricciardi, whose YouTube channel is called Video Poetry TV, says of this piece:

An alternative perspective on ‘the end of the world’. This video poem received a ‘top ten finalist’ award at the Cin(e)-Poetry Festival XXII (San Fran, 1998). It was made with original, found, and some appropriated footage (analog). Soundtrack composed of sampled radio, original moog, acoustic guitar riffing and vocal.

Mouth by Timothy David Orme

You’ve probably heard of erasure poetry, “a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem.” This is an erasure film with a poem in the soundtrack, as Timothy David Orme explains at CutBank, where “Mouth” is the December feature in their recently launched new media series, jərˈmān.

“Mouth” is a short erasure film that visually displays the remaining portions of a 35mm trailer that have not been scraped away, and aurally features the reading of a poem titled, simply, “Mouth.”

Oseka (Low Tide) by Marina Cetkovic

In Croatian (or possibly Serbian; Google Translate indicates the former) with subtitles. The English version of the description reads:

Stop-motion video poetry after an original poem.
A moving poem. A shore-body. A picture of words. A moving picture of the body. A body-picture. Aground on the shore. A wave of words on the body shore. A wave is a body of the wave. The word is a wave of the body.