~ 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.
Standard Oil Co. by Pablo Neruda
Poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jack Schmitt (reading by Allen Dwight Callahan) — the text is here
Video by Four Seasons Productions
Here’s the Spanish original:
Cuando el barreno se abrió paso
hacia las simas pedregales
y hundió su intestino implacable
en las haciendas subterráneas,
y los años muertos, los ojos
de las edades, las raíces
de las plantas encarceladas
y los sistemas escamosos
se hicieron estratas del agua,
subió por los tubos el fuego
convertido en líquido frío,
en la aduana de las alturas
a la salida de su mundo
de profundidad tenebrosa,
encontró un pálido ingeniero
y un título de propietario.Aunque se enreden los caminos
del petróleo, aunque las napas
cambien su sitio silencioso
y muevan su soberanía
entre los vientres de la tierra,
cuando sacude el surtidor
su ramaje de parafina,
antes llegó la Standard Oil
con sus letrados y sus botas,
con sus cheques y sus fusiles,
con sus gobiernos y sus presos.Sus obesos emperadores
viven en New York, son suaves
y sonrientes asesinos,
que compran seda, nylon, puros,
tiranuelos y dictadores.Compran países, pueblos, mares,
policías, diputaciones,
lejanas comarcas en donde
los pobres guardan su maíz
como los avaros el oro:
la Standard Oil los despierta,
los uniforma, les designa
cuál es el hermano enemigo,
y el paraguayo hace su guerra
y el boliviano se deshace
con su ametralladora en la selva.Un presidente asesinado
por una gota de petróleo,
una hipoteca de millones
de hectáreas, un fusilamiento
rápido en una mañana
mortal de luz, petrificada,
un nuevo campo de presos
subversivos, en Patagonia,
una traición, un tiroteo
bajo la luna petrolada,
un cambio sutil de ministros
en la capital, un rumor
como una marea de aceite,
y luego el zarpazo, y verás
cómo brillan, sobre las nubes,
sobre los mares, en tu casa,
las letras de la Standard Oil
iluminando sus dominios.
Semishigure by steve d. dalachinsky
Poem by steve d. dalachinsky
Video by rousseaujj2, using audio from a live reading in Sasebo City, Japan, June 2006
Dalachinsky is a major New York performance poet whom I’ve gotten to know by publishing some of his work at qarrtsiluni. While there are various videos of his live readings on YouTube, this is the only video interpretation of his poems I could find. The video is pretty good, but the reading is extraordinary, I thought — a great evocation of cicadas from someone not generally thought of as a nature poet. Dalachinsky evidently also collaborated with the composer Vito Ricci on a CD called Cicada Music — Ricci says, “Steve Dalachinsky came back from Japan with a tape of cicada singing and a journal. This is the music including the cicada singing.”
I Hang Myself by Saghi Ghahraman
Poem by Saghi Ghahraman, translated from the Farsi by Niloufar Talebi — read it here
Video created by The Translation Project and Invision Productions for the DVD, Midnight Approaches
Narration by Niloufar Talebi
Dance by Larissa Verduzen
Percussion by royal hartigan
I discovered this organization and its very fine videos completely by accident last night — just doing keyword searches on YouTube. It’s not entirely clear who the performers are on this particular film; the credits for the DVD as a whole are at the bottom of this page.
Iran has one of the richest poetry traditions in the world, so I’m very pleased to be able to feature some contemporary Iranian poets here, thanks to The Translation Project.
La Bailarina (The Dancer) by Gabriela Mistral
http://youtu.be/Q7n3Ki73D1Q
Poem by Gabriela Mistral — full text here; excerpts used in the poem below
Animation by ultapopdsgn
La Bailarina
The Dancer
La bailarina ahor est danzando
la danza del perder cuanto tenia
The dancer now is dancing
the dance of losing it all
Se solto de su casta y de su carne
She loosed herself from caste and flesh
desnuda de todo y de si misma
stripped of everything and of herself
sigue danzando sin saberse ajena
she dances on, not knowing she is changed
unica y torbellino, vil y pura
alone, a whirlwind, foul and pure
(Ursula K. Guin, trans.)
An interesting attempt to convey the mood of a work with just a few fragments of text, given out of order, and a rapid, pop music-video-style succession of images. I like it!
Since this is Women’s History Month (in the U.S., at any rate), I thought this would be a good time to recall that Pablo Neruda was not the first Chilean poet to win the Nobel Prize. I’m not sure which are the best English translations, but the volume I own seems pretty good: Gabriela Mistral: A Reader, tr. by Maria Giachetti and ed. by Marjorie Agosin. Its only drawback is that it does not include the original Spanish. The translation used above comes from a more recent book — Selected Poems of Gabriala Mistral, tr. by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I haven’t seen.
Though never well known in North America, Mistral remains a beloved figure in Latin America. She appeals strongly to conservatives and leftists alike, who tend to project their own values onto the clear and deceptively simple surfaces of her poems, much as readers do here with Emily Dickinson. Unlike Dickinson, Mistral was very active on the world stage, and her mix of progressive activism and traditional Catholic religiosity makes her supremely dificult to pigeonhole. According to Petri Liukkonen,
In 2001 Mistral’s sexual inclinations arose fierce debate in Chile. Yuri Labarca’s film, La Pasajera, written by Francisco Casas, dealt with her relationship to Doris Dana, her American secretary. Mistral’s devoted readers considered the film outrageous and said that her true, traditional views of life and love were present in her works. However, an independent woman, Mistral has also been presented as a feminist icon. The absence of male friendship and her life as an unmarried woman has contributed to her image of a defender of all racial minorities and “the mixed-race mother of the nation”.
As for me, I am of course fondest of her nature poetry.
Recipe by Anne Carson
Poem by Anne Carson, from Possessive Used as Drink (Me), a lecture on pronouns in the form of 15 sonnets
Video by Sadie Wilcox
Dancers: Julie Cunningham, Rashaun Mitchell, Andrea Weber
Carson writes,
I had to compose a lecture on pronouns for a conference at Harvard and this was the result. I wrote a sonnet sequence, which Stephanie Rowden recorded and made interesting. Then three Merce Cunningham dancers improvised choreography in response to the sonnets. Sadie Wilcox videotaped everything they did and edited it to fit (or not) the sound score.
Carson has generously uploaded six excerpts from the 25-minute performance to YouTube. I’ll probably link all of them eventually, but in the meantime they can be accessed via playgallery.org.
The Untrustworthy Speaker by Louise Glück
http://youtu.be/gtSLsSQ1clQ
Poem by Louise Glück — text is here (sorry for the popups)
The video credits say “created by: Jackie, Jaclyn, Mat” — no doubt without the knowledge or approval of the poet. I hope they don’t get a takedown notice from Glück’s publisher, because I think this really expands upon the message of the poem, as the best video poems seem to do. Some intelligibility is of course sacrificed with this spliced-recitation technique, but I think it’s worth it.
Snowmen by Agha Shahid Ali
http://youtu.be/H4qk62qcG9w
Poem by Agha Shahid Ali (reading by Carl Hancock Rux) — text here
Animation by Kyle Jenkins for the Poetry Foundations’ Poetry Everywhere series
A posthumous volume of Ali’s collected poems, The Veiled Suite, has just been released. He was a master who died much too young. As for the video, I’m not sure it adds anything to the poem or not.
Yo no sé cómo saltar (I Don’t Know How to Leap) by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez (Estío, 11)
Reading and video by sonolopez (Javier López Clemente)
Here’s the poem, which I think should be in the public domain by now, together with my translation (feel free to offer corrections in the comments).
| Yo no sé cómo saltar desde la orilla de hoy a la orilla de mañana. El río se lleva, mientras, Miro al oriente, al poniente, …Y no sé como saltar |
I don’t know how to leap from the brink of today to the brink of tomorrow. Meanwhile the current bears Look to the east, the west, …And I don’t know how to leap |
I imagine Jiménez is rolling at his grave at the video’s use of the soundtrack from The Matrix — he was pretty uptight, I hear — but it works for me.
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Poem and reading by Sylvia Plath — text here
Video by mishima1970
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Another video with the same poem, this time by Jim Clark, who makes
Virtual Animated movies of great poets reincarnated through the wonders of computer animation reading their best loved poems and presented in the style of old scratchy movies.
My Entrepreneurial Spirit by Aaron Fagan
Poem by Aaron Fagan, video by Jeffrey Texas Schell
In an article in the March/April 2009 issue of Poets & Writers — published coincidental to the launching of this website (chalk it up to zeitgeist) — Alex Dimitrov writes,
The sharing of video poems began sometime in 2005, when artists discovered YouTube as a tool through which they could easily distribute their work and reach a broad audience. Aaron Fagan, author of the poetry collection Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007), describes seeing an early video poem that “began with a line about standing in the kitchen slicing an orange, and sure enough the video showed someone standing in a kitchen slicing an orange. The literality seemed to be the pitfall this potential genre was falling into right out of the gate.”
Collaborating with his friends, visual artists Jeffrey Schell and K. Erik Ino, Fagan made several videos for poems from Garage and tried to avoid such a literal approach. One of these videos, “My Entrepreneurial Spirit,” features a collage of images, ranging from footage taken in a moving car to a woman walking on a rooftop, that cannot be explicitly traced back to the narrative of the poem but nonetheless add a rich texture of meaning. For Fagan, working with video is “yet another among many Hail Mary shots to get poetry some attention or readership,” he says.
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
Poem by Langston Hughes (read by Allen Dwight Callahan) — text here
Video by Four Seasons Productions
Most of Four Seasons’ videoems strike me as too literal and cliched in their interpretations. This is one of the few I kind of liked.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
Poem and reading by T. S. Eliot (text here)
Animation by Everett Wilson, who writes:
I produced the visuals for this poem by T.S. Eliot in the fall of 2001, during my brief time in the Media program at the University of Lethbridge. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, an Animated Rendition of T.S. Eliot’s Poem” appeared in the “highlights reel” of the Melbourne International Student Animation Festival, which traveled to select universities across Australia. After receiving feedback on YouTube, I replaced the original narration with T.S. Eliot’s voice in this 2007 revision.
There are other Prufrock videos on YouTube, but this is by far the best of those I’ve seen.
