~ 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 Albatross (L’Albatros) by Charles Baudelaire
A nicely non-literal interpretation that feels true to the spirit of Baudelaire. This is a Catalan film of a great French poem with an English translation in the soundtrack — specifically, the English of Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974). That and several other translations may be read at fleursdumal.org. Here’s the original French:
L’Albatros
Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.
Mountain High by Tal Nitzan
Avi Dabach directs. The original music and soundtrack are by Anat Gutman, and the reading is from the poet herself. A recent online publication of two poems by Tal Nitzan in English translation, at Writestuff, includes this bio:
Tal Nitzan has published four collections of poetry: Domestica, An Ordinary Evening, Café Soleil Bleu, [and] The First to Forget and won many awards. Nitzan is the editor of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984 – 2004.
The Green Man by Dick Jones
A Moving Poems production by yours truly. The text and reading are by the English poet and blogger Dick Jones. Thanks are also due to the blog carnival The Festival of the Trees, edition #60, which reprinted Dick’s poem, and featured as well a number of videos, helping to inspire this effort.
Help Motionpoems animate some “Best American Poetry”
In case you missed the note to “Sea Salt” by David Motion on Monday (or the Kickstarter widget in the main site’s sidebar) let me repeat what I wrote there:
Motionpoems has some pretty exciting news: they’ve partnered with David Lehman and Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2011, and are lining up animators to produce videos for poems in the anthology. If this is the kind of thing you’d like to help support, please consider making a donation to their Kickstarter campaign. With 15 days to go, they’ve raised more than $10,000 in pledges toward the $15,000 needed. Click through for the details, including a video that tells the story of how they got started.
Here are Angella and Todd to tell their story and give their pitch:
Please note that I am not connected with Motionpoems in any way other than that I like Angella and Todd and believe they are advancing poetry animation enormously in this country, comparable to, but more ambitious than, the efforts of Comma Press in northwest England. Of course, there is some enlightened self-interest at work here: I’m eager for more quality poetry videos! But I would also encourage other poetry video makers to consider following Angella and Todd’s example and get more aggressive about fundraising — and let me know if you do, so I can promote your efforts here.
Once again, here’s the link to help Motionpoems meet their $15,000 goal. The deadline is June 15.
Poem by Alan Dugan
A videopoem about a poem called “poem” (from the collection Cross Section 1947): Stephen Ausherman brings a fresh approach to the genre of concrete videopoetry here. According to the note on Vimeo,
Camera obscura transforms a page from an anthology into visual poetry. Alan Dugan is one of several Cape Cod writers interpreted by Stephen Ausherman during his 2010 art residency at the C-Scape dune shack.
This sounds like a fascinating project, dedicated to “interpreting local literature through new media,” as Ausherman puts it on his website. The five videos completed during his residency in the shack on the National Seashore were first “screened” for visitors in and around the shack itself.
For more about Alan Dugan, see the Poetry Foundation page (and check out the PF’s slick new revamped website!).
Apocrypha by Gerard Wozek
Gerard Wozek and Mary Russell have been collaborating on videopoems for years; since the inception of this website, I’ve included on the About page a quote from, and link to, the page about poetry video on Wozek’s website (q.v. for more on both of them and the history of their collaboration). But I believe this is the first example of their work to be uploaded to a video sharing site for embedding elsewhere. It’s rather more like a video slideshow than a film, but includes just enough moving images to meet my admittedly subjective standard for inclusion here. (Also, as a nature lover, I really appreciated the content!) Here’s the description Russell included at Vimeo:
Apocrypha: What secretive inspirations nurture one’s ability to draw, sketch or write? The word “apocrypha” comes from the Greek language meaning “those having been hidden away” and this video hints at some of the esoteric mystery that is involved in the creative process—in particular, the translation of images of nature into works of art.
Apocrypha premiered at the 2010 Visible Verse Poetry Video Festival in Vancouver, and was selected for the University Film and Video Association Conference at Emerson College, Boston for a June, 2011 screening.
Sea Salt by David Mason
Amy Schmitt designed and animated this Motionpoem, with assistance from Kelly Pieklo (sound design), Emily J. Snyder (calligraphy) and Vera Mariner (reading). David Mason is the current poet laureate of Colorado. In a press release from Motion504, where she works, Schmitt says, “I was inspired by print design and other traditional media, and I wanted to create a moving illustration of the poem that was not done in a literal way.”
Motionpoems, by the way, has some pretty exciting news: they’ve partnered with David Lehman and Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2011, and are lining up animators to produce videos for poems in the anthology. If this is the kind of thing you’d like to help support, please consider making a donation to their Kickstarter campaign. With 15 days to go, they’ve raised more than $10,000 in pledges toward the $15,000 needed. Click through for the details, including a video that tells the story of how they got started.
Die unsichtbare Hand (The Invisible Hand) by Daniel Falb
http://www.vimeo.com/23368191
The last of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Christian Hawkey is credited as translator for the English subtitles. I was struck by how the inclusion of a song at the end, during the credits, helps unlock the meaning of the videopoem.
For more poems from Daniel Falb in English, as well as a bio, see Poetry International Web.
Teich (Pond) by Monika Rinck
Another of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. The text seems like an especially good one for a poetry film, since it imagines multiple interpretations or applications for a central image, accentuating the synergy of the text-film combination.
For more English translations of Monika Rinck’s work, see her section on the Poetry International Web site, as well as the volume 16 Poems translated by Alistair Noon.
Christmas in Huntsville, Texas by Jan Wagner
http://www.vimeo.com/23368453
The world’s premiere poetry film festival, ZEBRA, in Berlin, has now begun sponsoring the production of new videopoems as well, as the video description on Vimeo makes clear:
The result of the Film-Workshop held during the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Three pairs of artists comprising Israeli filmmakers Emanuella Amichai, Avi Dabach and Joshua Simon and German poets Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck and Jan Wagner were working together to produce scripts and create poetry films in six days.
The poet here, Jan Wagner, is also a “translator of poetry from the English (including Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Jo Shapcott, Louis MacNeice, Kevin Young),” according to this online CV.
