~ 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.
Billy Collins and his animated poems at TED conference
You’ve probably seen these animations before — if not, check out the dedicated site Billy Collins Action Poetry, or watch them (and others) on Moving Poems. What I found interesting here was Collins’ explanation for why he decided to let the animators go ahead and illustrate his poems, since in general he didn’t understand why a poem would need to be animated. His remarks evince little familiarity with the genre, and in questioning why any poem would need to be illustrated in this manner, strangely echo Ron Silliman’s criticism of one of them:
Thus Billy Collins’ The Dead is animated by Juan Delcan, neither poem nor cartoon threatening to break any new ground whatsoever. … [It’s] nothing more than a reading of the piece over which a cartoon has been superimposed.
But he gave in because he says he’s always loved cartoons, and because he figured it would bring his poems to a wider audience.
Advertising Lullaby by George Carlin
Found text has played a central role in the development of videopoetry, so this montage of advertising tropes by the late comedian George Carlin becomes a full-fledged poem merely by adaptation to the kinetic-text medium. An inspired choice and execution by Jenny Lien.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
“People and places from a recent trip to San Diego, CA,” says documentary photojournalist and filmmaker Kristyn Ulanday in the description at Vimeo. I think she rather understates the awesomeness of this videopoem. (For the text of the poem, see Poets.org.)
“Subcutaneous”: Three poems by Dan Godston
http://vimeo.com/38687396
Three poems in one video by the indefatigible Swoon. The poems are: “Spread Out,” “Trash” and “A Sonnet for Edgar Allan Poe.” For the texts, see Swoon’s blog post about the video.
Becoming Judas: five poems by Nicelle Davis
These poems are from Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The wonderfully whimsical drawings by Cheryl Gross are animated in a fairly basic style which the description at YouTube dubs “motion graphics.”
The Itch by Mark Gwynne Jones
http://vimeo.com/37387784
According to the description on Vimeo, these are
Words and pictures from the English Peak District, courtesy of Mark Gwynne Jones and Andy Lawrence… 2012
This film was made in one day, using the Canon 220 sx powershot HS, a cheap compact camera, and iMovie..
Lawrence and Jones are part of a band/multimedia partnership called Psychicbread which has produced a whole series of filmpoems with texts by Jones. According to the Horizon Review,
Four times fringe-award winners, Mark Gwynne Jones and the Psychicbread use poetry, music and humour as their messenger. From the girl who spent too long on a sunbed to the joys of driving a Sherman Tank at rush hour. . . the result is contagious, gritty and sometimes startlingly sensitive.
Voices from Haiti: Boy in Blue by Kwame Dawes
This is the English version of the “visual poem” Boy in Blue with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by photographer Andre Lambertson, editing by Robin Bell and music by Kevin Simmonds. See YouTube for the text.
I’ve decided to change course here and begin occasionally posting films that consist entirely of still images so I can feature projects like this. The technical term for a film montage of still images (often found in documentary films) is kinestasis, so that’s the name of this newest category at Moving Poems.
I previously shared Dawes’ kinestases with photographer Joshua Cogan, Live Hope Love, which was about living with HIV in Jamaica. Voices from Haiti is a newer series, also produced by the Pulitzer Center, which explores life after the earthquake in Haiti, focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS.
At the AWP conference in Chicago the week before last, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Dawes speak about the collaborative process involved in making these videos, and was impressed by the extent to which he and the other artists involved in these projects seem to have stumbled upon some of the same principles that make regular videopoems or filmpoems work: the importance of the soundtrack and the need for juxtaposition rather than simple illustration to created multiple narratives in the listener’s head — “reportages in dialogue,” as he put it. These visual poems are creations in their own right, different from purely textual poems, and would not have happened without collaboration between poet, photographer and composer, he said.
