~ 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.
poem by Syrian refugee Tarek
Lebanese filmmaker Eliane Raheb directs. From the Free Arab website:
Since the start of the revolutions, Friday has become a symbolic day for all Arab protestors, it is the day to take down the streets and ask for changing the regime. From his refuge in Beirut, Tarek who is unable to demonstrate against the regime in Lattakia, uses his pen to write a poem, in tribute to the protesters everywhere in Syria
Putain by Peter Wullen
http://vimeo.com/40176696
(English version)
http://vimeo.com/39052134
(Dutch version)
Kris J. Yves Verdonck used “stopmotion, pixilation and edited images of Eadward Muybridge,” and notes that the “English version is slightly different from the Dutch one.”
The Lockless Door by Robert Frost
The graphics exist to support the soundtrack here, but I still thought it was an effective videopoem. Ryerson University film student Adin Dell advises, “Put on some headphones or turn up the volume to really hear the ‘soundscape.'”
Building a Dry Stone Wall by Melinda Lovell
Filmmaker Hannah Lovell notes that this is
A short extract from “The Hamlet”, a 25 minute documentary-poem collaboration with my mother Melinda Lovell, combining poems written and footage gathered over many years while living in a small hamlet in the south of France.
For more extracts from the project, see Hannah’s Vimeo page. Mother and daughter also run a literary micropress together, Inchivalla Press.
from The Mysterious Human Heart by Matthew Dickman
Mexican filmmaker Patricia Nieto’s brief but effective envideoing of a fragment from Matthew Dickman. The poem originally appeared in The American Poetry Review, and is reproduced in its entirety at a blog called The Poetry Place.
As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden
This is Your Crooked Heart. Director Peter Szewczyk notes: “W.H. Auden’s beloved poem set against London’s Bricklane. Shot improvisationally in one night.”
Exit Strategies by David Tomaloff
Videopoem chapbooks are a rarity yet, and I don’t know of any others that are six videos long. Swoon Bildos completed this sequence a month ago, adapting each of the six sections of David Tomaloff‘s e-chapbook from Gold Wake Press. He added a one-word title drawn from the text to each video, and modified the over-all title just a little. Without further ado, here’s
Exit Strategies (A bloodletting)
Atticus Review also posted Exit Strategies (No. I-III), which is worth checking out for Swoon’s and Tomaloff’s notes on the chapbook. Swoon wrote, for example:
The overall ‘storyline’ I put in these videos is a personal one, but others might see or pick up different meanings. I just hope they evoke something. It doesn’t matter if it’s not what David or I intend, but that’s the fun of poetry and videopoetry.
Tomaloff describes his intention with the poems generally, and adds:
My part in the presentation was simply the recording of the poems themselves, in which I sought to unify the voices by reimagining the pieces as field notes read into a recorder by an observer who is becoming increasingly embroiled in what is being observed.
I also did a close “reading” of the videos for my personal blog, Via Negativa, as part of a month-long challenge I’ve set myself to read and blog about a different collection of poems every day. Here’s what I had to say.
IO game over by Sergio Garau
http://youtu.be/EXIjgZ7yafM
This videopoem by Angelo Saccu, performed by Sergio Garau to music by Antonio Marra, betrays influences from all over: it’s equal parts concert video, sound poem and concrete/kinetic-text poem. I ran the YouTube description through Google Translate:
The violent encounter between political identities, economic, cultural, language here is staged through an ironic game of opposites. The ‘I’, translated into machine language 1 0 (zero), cut into pieces for binary digital misunderstood as grotesque chaos of contradictory slogans of contemporary power, explodes in a syncopated rhythm outside of himself. For tris doubly impossible breaks down the end of his world.
