~ 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.

Aliénation et Magie Noire by Antonin Artaud

Update: this video is no longer online.

I know hardly a word of French, yet I still enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s a remix of some public-domain footage from the Prelinger Archives by Fabrice Aussel, A.K.A. DJ Spooky. The reading by Artaud was recorded for radio broadcast in 1946.

Names I’d Forgotten by Joseph Millar

Directed by David Hambridge and David Sherrill. The poem appears in Millar’s book Overtime.

My Insomnia and I by Charles Simic

Geoff Tarulli made this one. It’s kind of slow-moving, but maybe that’s the point.

Poem (As the cat) by William Carlos Williams

Gotta love film students for keeping the medium irreverent. This is by Kurt Snyder. Here’s the text of the poem:

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin

http://www.vimeo.com/10534508

An exceptionally fine videopoem by Nicole Prowell.

Shot at Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport/Stratford, CT March 2010. Music by Harold Budd and Brian Eno.

Filmed on the Sony EX3, 1080 24p.

A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body by Andrew Marvell

A delightful experiment in machine translation by Michelle Phillips.

A conversation between two computers. One read a verse aloud and the other transcribed it through voice recognition and vice versa. The process was repeated until Andrew Marvell’s poem “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” had been completely re-written.

I am thinking we could dub the result a meta-metaphysical poem.

Stone by Charles Simic

There’s a video of Simic reading this poem, but it’s not as interesting as the two videos included here. About the musical performance above I could gather nothing, though it appears from the one comment that it may have been uploaded by one of the performers. I love the interpretation of the poem as a Sufi teaching, though I’m not sure how Simic would feel about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JG7F9dDnAA

Brian Watterson is the filmmaker here.

The Hanging Stanes by Sam Meekings

http://www.vimeo.com/10287177

Ginnetta Correli directs. The poem is #65 in This Collection’s Top 100 poems about Edinburgh, and is read by Alastair Cook.

Gacela of Unforeseen Love by Federico Garcia Lorca

I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.

To Be Said When Going To Sleep (Zum Einschlafen Zu Sagen) by Rainer Maria Rilke

Susanne Stich is the filmmaker, and she used a translation by Cal Kinnear for the English subtitles. I found this a very effective film.

e.e. cummings in an ad for Sonic audiobooks

If there’s a non-controversial way to use a classic poem in a commercial, this might be it. The line from cummings (a fragment of #35 from 100 Selected Poems) is read and “un-read” by four very different voices in a way meant to dramatize the variations in a reading voice, unlining the audiobook publisher’s slogan: “Giving literature a personality.” My immediate reaction is, “Wow. There’s a market for audio books of poetry!?” Since the product being advertised here is so close to the poet’s own characteristic production, the use of his words seems entirely appropriate. And freed from the kind of angst evoked by the Levi’s Whitman ads, we can see that in fact the ingredients of a successful short videopoem — simplicity, quirk, surprise — are not too different from the ingredients of a successful television spot.

Dinosauria, We by Charles Bukowski, (not) brought to you by Levi’s

“Levi’s drops their pioneer posturing and tries a poet better suited to this time of collapse.” Nice parody by The Midnight Show. (See YouTube for the complete credits.)