~ 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.

Dog by Richard Scott

On 31 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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An animation by Kate Jessop:

A young man comes to terms with his sexuality and confronts his bully in his home neighbourhood of Merton (London).
Specially commissioned for the Southbank Festival of Neighbourhood 2013, adapted from the poem by Richard Scott.

Click through to Vimeo for the text of the poem (or watch the newly uploaded version with subtitles).

Marchant grenu / Walking Grainy by Henri Michaux

On 28 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This film version of an Henri Michaux poem by Francois Vogel was one of my favorites at the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. The program description:

A whimsical look at movement in the city. While reciting the poem, Francois Vogel »walks grainy« on the stairs of Montmartre, in Paris.

For this version, Vogel recites an English translation of the poem, but if you know French, the original is also on Vimeo.

(Hat-tip: ZEBRA Poetry Film Club.)

Song for Koko by Tommy Becker

On 27 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Musical settings
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A poetic music video or a musical videopoem? Tommy Becker‘s videos for his Tape Number One project are hard to categorize, which is why I haven’t featured them here as often as I should. They blend “the artist’s poetics, songwriting, performance, costuming with found footage and computer design,” according to the statement on his website.

“Song for Koko” is from 2015. The accompanying text on Vimeo reads:

An elephant escapes from the circus and begins a rampage down a city street. His trunk tosses aside everything in his path. We cheer for him. Why? A man sits on an alligator and attempts to tie his mouth shut. The alligator contorts his body, throwing the man off before turning to bite. We are unsympathetic. Why? We take our children to the zoo to look at the monkeys. The children complain about their inactivity and we feel a sense of betrayal as we admit to ourselves that our observations are a fraud. What’s important in these situations of conflict and captivity is that we are seeing animals as equals. They are no longer the lesser species. A life force is being held against its will or once again running wild through the streets. The moment the lion lunges at the tamer we understand his motives. We relate viscerally to his oppression as we connect to the soul of its being.

Rapunzel Brings Her Women’s Studies Class to the Tower by Susan J. Erickson

On 25 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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Bellingham, Washington-based poet Susan J. Erickson reads a poem from her 2016 collection Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine in this film by poet and editor Ellie A. Rogers. The soundtrack is by Louis McLaughlin.

Rogers has just blogged about making the film:

Susan J. Erickson has red cowboy boots and impeccable diction. She’s a poet hero of mine who I met back in the land of Douglas fir, though we’re both ladies of the 10,000 lakes.

Sue won the Brick Road Poetry Press prize last year, and her book, Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine, is out now. Her collection of lady persona poems is tonally diverse, smart, and powerful.

Sue asked me to make a book trailer for her. We chose to work with her poem “Rapunzel Brings Her Women’s Studies Class to the Tower” partially because I now live near a giant bell tower and tracts of forest, but mostly because this poem is a linchpin poem. Rapunzel is trying to “relinquish the rib of victimhood.” She pushes back against the story we tell about her. She tells her class “your voices are searchlights that can sweep the horizon to reveal fault lines and illuminate passage.” What a good lesson.

Âne Dormant / Donkey Sleeping by Jacques Prévert

On 24 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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A charming animation made for French television in 2014 by Caroline Lefèvre. (There’s also a version without subtitles.) It’s one of thirteen shorts made by different directors for the collection “En Sortant de L’École,” a televised tribute to Prévert. For more on the making of Âne Dormant, see the blog.

Archipelago by Conceição Lima

On 21 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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Moving Poems’ first poet from São Tomé and Príncipe, Conceição Lima, is featured in this ultra-short but effective video by David Shook filmed in São Tomé earlier this month. The poem is from her second collection, A Dolorosa Raiz de Micondó, and if its brevity left you hungry for more, check out the four additional poems Shook translated for World Literature Today. There are also three of Lima’s poems in translation by Amanda Hopkinson at Words Without Borders.

Now is the Time by Lucy English

On 20 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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From the filmmaking duo Katia Viscogliosi and Francis Magnenot, AKA Cinéma Fragile, a new addition to UK writer and poetry-film expert Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project. The voiceover (by Viscogliosi, I’m guessing) is very effective, but her accent may present occasional difficulties for some listeners, so they’ve helpfully supplied subtitles — click the CC icon.

Moments That Breathe by Meghan McDonald

On 19 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made video from 2015 by Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Meghan McDonald, who evidently stumbled upon the idea of videopoetry herself, judging by what she wrote on YouTube:

This little tidbit is an idea I’ve been crafting for a while. It is intended to literally bring an imagery aspect to poetry (like a music video, but with poetry). I also wanted to incorporate beautiful moments that take place every day that may be overlooked.

Last year she uploaded six more videos to her Poetry Videos playlist, in addition to going busking across the U.S. Definitely someone to keep an eye on.

Bayside Reporter by Ian Gibbins

On 18 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Australian videopoet Ian Gibbins is a retired neuroscientist with three books of poetry under his belt and a penchant for experimental video and electronic music. His Vimeo description for Bayside Reporter reads:

Suspicions of criminal activity along the beachfront… Filmed between St Kilda and Port Melbourne, Victoria. Sounds were recorded beside the Yarra River, on trams between the City and Middle Park, and along the beachfront itself. A version of “Bayside Reporter” was published in Australian Poetry Members Anthology 3, Digital Edition, 2014. Here is the link.

No Black Scorpion Is Falling Upon This Table by Aaron Fagan

On 17 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Aaron Fagan from 2014. Fagan has been experimenting with video for a number of years now, initially in collaboration with visual artists Jeffrey Schell and K. Erik Ino. In more recent years he’s been mostly working on his own, and he described his philosophy about multimedia poetry in an interview with huck magazine (which also featured this poem and video):

Why did you decide to turn some of your poems into videos?
I wanted to use sound and image with the poems for texture and offer a different, hopefully more inviting, way to experience poetry. I’m not looking for any literal relationship, I just like how the language, the music, and the image correspond with each other like a dialogue.

The interesting thing about making the videos is that it was totally arbitrary. The length of the movies, the length of the poems, and the length of the songs drove it all. I had a few movies I made with my phone and a few I used my phone to film stuff I liked online off my laptop. So that became a collection of images I liked. Then I looked at a bunch of poems I recorded in a friend’s studio back in 2010. If a film and a poem were the same length I just dumped them together and found a piece of music in my music library that was the same length. They are all like these happy accidents to me. They seem harmonised.

หลงทางในประเทศของตัวเอง / Lost in Homeland by Rossanee Nurfarida

On 14 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 5 Comments - Videopoems
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Thai poet Rossanee Nurfarida recites her poem about the plight of Rohingya refugees in a video by German-American filmmaker Ryan Anderson for the OXLAEY multimedia project. Anderson’s English translation appears as text on screen.

Lost in Homeland was featured last week in Atticus Review‘s Mixed Media section, which is edited by videopoet Matt Mullins. Here’s how Anderson described the video there:

LOST IN HOMELAND is a video poem read by the author Ms. Rossanee Nurfarida while stranded on a boat perched at the top of a four-story, urban house. Ms. Nurfarida’s current collection of poetry, Far Away From Our Own Homes, is a Finalist for the 2016 South East Asian Writers Award. Lost in Homeland was written in 2015 during the Rohingya refugee crisis when thousands of stateless Rohingya from Myanmar set out on old fishing boats seeking a better future. The video’s visual references to Islam extend the poem’s metaphor, commenting on southern Thailand’s Muslim minority as a people stranded in the country of their birth.

Click through for more about the OXLAEY project and for bios of Nurfarida and Anderson. Additional credits are given in the YouTube description.

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Two Poems About X, 2009 and 2014 by Blair Braverman

On 13 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Wisconsin-based writer Blair Braverman that combines two poems in the soundtrack, read, one presumes, by the poet herself, for an interesting interplay of text and video imagery. It’s from the Summer/Fall 2016 issue of TriQuarterly, where the video editor Kristen Radtke says this about it:

Blair Braverman’s “Two Poems About X, 2009 and 2014” features dueling narratives, competing for our attention as they volley back and forth, left to right. The viewer must make a choice: focus on one and experience it fully, or alternate between the two and splice them together into a new, tailor-made narrative—a rare quality in a medium where the viewer is often a passive participant. Braverman’s video invites rewatching, and as one narrative becomes familiar, we’re more capable of digesting the other—most interestingly, opening up a space in which we can experience those narratives in conversation. Much of Braverman’s video is concerned with desire made complicated by gender and terrain, and near its end comes one of its most powerful and beautifully voiced lines: “Half my problems come from wishing that men who have been bad to me would be worse, and the men who have been good would confront them.”

I notice by the way that all videos at TriQuarterly now seem to be designated video essays, which is perhaps a good way to side-step the whole controversy about what to call poetry films; their cinepoetry category hasn’t had any new additions since the previous video editor’s departure. Regardless of what they call them, though, it’s great that such a prominent American literary magazine continues to place such value on literary short films. And I’m pleased to see that they now have a fully public page at Vimeo.

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