I am often caught between Kant and Hegel: Am I more interested in the free play of the faculties of imagination and knowledge and the incomprehensible “aesthetic idea” of a work of art, which always gives more to think than can be understood, or is the conceptual content more important for making a work valuable than its form? In this debate I never wanted to bend in one direction. Apparently my favorite poetry films have both: they create a unique mood associated with questions that are relevant and thought-provoking, but at the same time, they also create pleasure in listening and watching, a revelry in visual stimuli, textures, surprises. The following films are not a top ten list in the sense of a canon. There are just 10 examples I would like to collect here to fill in the format. Or let’s say: they are ten invitations to watch poetry films. Please enjoy them!

Arte Poetica
Director: Neels Castillon
Text: Jorge Luis Borges

The Polish Language
Director: Alice Lyons with Orla Mc Hardy
Text: Alice Lyons

A Petty Morning Crime
Animation: Asparuh Petrov
Text: Georgi Gospodinov

Pipene / The Pipes
Director: Kristian Pedersen
Text and voiceover: Øyvind Rimbereid

What abou’ de Lô / What about the law
Director: Charles Badenhorst
Text and voiceover: Adam Small

The Desktop Metaphor
Director: Helmie Stil
Text: Caleb Parkin

Chamada Geral / Calling All
Director: Manuel Vilarinho
Text: Mário-Henrique Leiria

Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk
Director: Ye Mimi
Text: Yin Ni

Spree
Director: Martin Kelly with Ian McBryde
Text: Ian McBryde

Steel and Air
Directors: Chris and Nick Libbey
Text: John Ashbery.

I’m a filmmaker not a poet. So for me the word “poetry” means something different I think than how poets might see it. For me the poetry part of cinépoetry is not the written part, it’s a kind of magic that can suddenly bring alive an enchanting correspondence between words, sounds and images. Given this definition, here are my current favorites put into categories.

Category 1: The Interior Dilemma Comes to Light

Once
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 2000

Lyn Elliot must surely be America’s most underappreciated filmmaker. Her work is so smart, so simple and often times uproariously funny. What more do you want? Ok, how about short and to the point too. I love this film. I wish I was this smart.

On Loop
Directed by Christine Hooper, 2013
Poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold

I went to the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in October of 2014 and I saw many great cinépoems. This was my favorite one there. I still don’t fully understand how she did it, but I think she perfectly captures that moment where we are trying to sleep but our mind seems instead to dissect us into multiple fighting personalities who churn things over endlessly.

Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry
Directed by Joanna Kohler, 2010
Poem by Bob Hicok

Are all the best cinépoems directed by women? Sheesh, third in a row. I think what I really love best about this one is how it finds a way to create an enchanting dialogue between the interior voice of the poem and a kind of external visual journey of the ruminating man. Also, projecting on chest hair is a genius visual idea. I wish I’d thought of that.

Category 2: Opening up New Worlds

Closed Wounds
Directed by Lanka Haouche Perren, 2014
Poem by Michael Harding

I saw this at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in 2014. It’s haunting. A brilliant and troubling juxtaposition of images and sounds with words. Some might call the film exploitative, but all I saw was its humanity. Also, I never would have thought of putting this poem with these images. It’s a surprising confluence of words and images that would at first seem entirely inappropriate, but here, somehow, this piece elevates both the words and the visuals to levels I’m not sure they achieve on their own.

When Walt Whitman was a Little Girl
Directed by Jim Haverkamp, 2012
Poem by M.C. Biegner

I think this film takes us down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland style visual universe that’s enchanting in way that’s both completely its own thing, but also perfectly suited to the tone of the words. I also like that I don’t think it tries to be impressive – like so many calling card short films. It just makes the original work sing again with spirit and soul, transposed into a new key.

Never Too Late
Director uncredited, 2013
Poem by Michael London

I love the poem and how it sounds when read. I think the words work cleverly to open up the difficulties, paradoxes and the potential for change in what I take to be life in inner city Chicago. Also, for me at least, it feels like I am invited to feel the breathing spirit of a personal, family space and understand its value to the poet, and to all of us. I know the piece has affected me when all the natural sound drops out at at the end and I can still feel and hear it in the poem and what it describes.

Heliotropes
Directed by Michael Langan, 2010
Poem by Brian Christian

I think the sequence from :52 to 1:09 in this film are my favorite 17 seconds in cinépoetry. It’s perfect. I’m sure there is some kind of eternal punishment for being perfect, even if it’s just for 17 seconds — maybe door to door electioneering for Donald Trump(?)

Cars Will Make You Free
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 1997

I don’t guffaw, or make giant snorting sounds while watching this piece (like I do while watching certain scenes from Trailer Park Boys) but I do laugh throughout it, and you can’t really wipe the stupid grin from my face. It’s simple, fun and smart.

Massacre at Murambi
Written and directed by Sam Kauffmann, 2007

I think this is a cinépoem masquerading as a documentary. One could could characterize the words here as simply poetic, rather than a poem onto itself. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I guess I don’t care either way. But for the purists, I urge you to hang with it until its conclusion before you cinch any final judgment here. While at first the words may seem like a conventional documentary voice-over, the poetry is revealed soon enough, and the whole movie turns on a few well chosen words and their devastating reveal.

Category 3: Masterwork

La jetée
Written and directed by Chris Marker, 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLfXCkFQtXw
Well, who am I to add anything more to the volumes written about this movie. It’s an acknowledged masterwork that deserves your undistracted attention for its duration. Actually, imagine you didn’t have a phone or a computer or any devices and you were in a dark cinema in Paris in 1962. It’s still great though even if you do glance at your devices once or twice. I don’t believe it has been surpassed really — an astounding blend of visuals, sounds and words. It’s a one of a kind work that, if not a cinépoem must be instead a grandfather to the genre.

As part of a post at Via Negativa introducing a new series called Poets in the Kitchen, I started looking for some cooking-related videopoems and poetry films to include. I soon had way too many, so I thought I’d gather them here instead for this occasional “top ten” feature. As I say at VN, the contrast between the abstract—some would say spiritual—nature of writing and the essential corporeality of preparing and consuming food is fascinating. Eating is a root metaphor in probably every language, one of the fundamental ways in which we think about our relationship to the cosmos.

How to Make a Crab Cake (poet: January Gill O’Neil)
Kevin Carey, 2010

This performance-style videopoem, produced to promote O’Neil’s debut poetry collection Underlife, serves as a good introduction to one of the most common approaches to culinary poetry: poet as faux cooking-show host.

An Ode to Frybread (poet: Melanie Fey)
Trevino L. Brings Plenty/Iktomi Films, 2015

What we eat is linked figuratively as well as literally to who we are. Again, the poet is in the kitchen, this time to ponder questions of identity and belonging.

Omelet (poet: Fiona Tinwei Lam)
Fiona Tinwei Lam, 2015

Illustrative poetry animations often feel superfluous, but perhaps because the poet herself was the director here, this animation (by Toni Zhang and Claire Stewart) works for me. It’s as if Lam is sketching out ideas in her head. And that contrast I mentioned between abstraction and corporeality may be part of it, too, the animation reinforcing the abstract nature of poetry and storytelling.

The Body Show: How to Boil an Egg (poet: Nora Robertson)
Jason Bahling, 2010

Another family story centered on eggs, but there the resemblance with Omelet ends. Robertson plays the deranged host of a kitschy 60s cooking show for housewives. “The simple act of boiling an egg forces her to publicly contemplate a succession of images from the vaginal opening of a hen, to slaves working in salt mines, to the virgin-devouring snake god of Ghana. The seemingly non-sequitur imagery comes together as she remembers the horror and heartbreak of her grandmother being forced to assemble hundreds of deviled eggs for a Hollywood dinner party.”

Sogni Culinari (poem: Pedro Mercado)
Clarissa Duque, 2015

Let’s venture deeper into surreal territory with this film based on a poem in Spanish translated into Italian and here subtitled in English. One great advantage food has over poetry is that (aside from food allergies and differences in intestinal microbiomes) it doesn’t require translation. Duque told an interviewer, “I learned when I was still a child how every single ingredient of a dish is like a magic recipe, itself capable of activating every human sense and evoking all kinds of sensations in the human body.”

Arroz Con Habichuelas (poet: Caridad De La Luz AKA La Bruja)
Advocate of Wordz, 2015

This is more of a music video than a poetry video, but in the spoken word community, the line between poetry and music is regularly breached. Here, a prominent spoken-word poet’s entertaining shout-out to a favorite dish and marker of ethnic identity suggests that our identities are simultaneously more mutable and more inescapable than we might like to think.

Render, Render (poet: Thomas Lux)
Angella Kassube/Motionpoems, 2011

This is one of two films (here’s the other) that Motionpoems produced with Lux’s poem and reading, but as with Omelet, I think the abstract nature of animation makes for an especially effective contrast with the contents of the poem—which, to take things to another level, uses culinary language to talk about poetry.

Little Theatres: Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage (poet: Erín Moure)
Stephanie Dudley, 2011

Did I mention taking things to another level? This masterpiece of stop-motion film incorporates the English translation of a poem in Galician, “Homenaxe ao mineral do repolo.” According to the film’s website, it is “the second in a series of six by Erín in her award-winning book, Little Theatres. Each poem is an homage to a simple, humble food, such as potatoes, onions, and cabbage. The poems examine our relationship to food, and draw new insights to how these basic foods relate to life, as well as how we relate to each other. […] The film Little Theatres is an interpretation of what Little Theatres are. It is an exploration of layers: layers of space, and layers of words, both spoken and written. The exploration begins and ends with a simple cabbage.”

Maize Dog (poet: Trevino L. Brings Plenty)
Trevino L. Brings Plenty/Iktomi Films, 2013

One last return to the kitchen for a meditation on ethnic foodways and identity, now with a thoroughly satirical bent. The poet is present only in the soundtrack, his place in the kitchen taken by an actress (Eva Williams) and the culinary arts reduced to their most basic, industrial form: the heating and consumption of processed food.

Inimi/The Room (poet: Jessie Kleeman)
Marc Neys (Swoon), 2015

A contemporary Greenlandic poet achieves the ultimate imaginative identity with food. Horrifying or liberating? Carnal or spiritual? Maybe all of the above.

Do you have a “top ten” list of poetry videos you’d like to share? Get in touch.

The idea of my film collection was to leave behind the common definitions of what a poetry film means and offer in addition to other curators an atypical poetry film collection. In the Anglo-American definitions, a poetry film is based on a poem. As director of the Poetry Film Festival Vienna, I personally support a broader definition: A poetry film in my view is based either on a poetic experience or on a literary text. These texts can be experimental or spoken word or include letters and be in a abstract way close to fine arts (“Schriftfilm”). In some cases, text can be
missing altogether when the film circles around poetry.

Another aim was to present films which have been successful in established art contexts such as museums, exhibitions, or renowned short film festivals. I also included some examples of famous film makers who did films close to a text film, and I focused on the idea of changing the perception of the audience through the art work. Enjoy!

Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Sonnet 66
Robert Wilson with music by Rufus Wrainwright (2009)

Robert Wilson’s Shakespeare sonnets for Berliner Schaubühne became very famous. It’s a high level of visualizing a poem. Impressive threshold for every poetry film maker!

Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Lady Lazarus (poems by Sylvia Plath)
Sandra Lahire, 1991
http://vimeo.com/59413160
Sandra Lahire was a leading feminist and lesbian film maker in Britain. Her film about Sylvia Plath can be described as a mixture between a poetry film and a documentary. The film shows a deep understanding and visualization of Plath’s dangerous views to face reality. Sandra Lahire suffered from anorexia and died in 2001.

Un Chien Andalou
Luis Buñuel, 1928
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCl_8522FF0
The film Un Chien Andalou from 1928 is a famous historical film – a manifest of Surrealism. Picture and story follow a dream logic. Even though the highest valued expression in Surrealism was writing, Buñuel and many surrealists did not want to use words in their films. Buñuel created his poetic experience in Un Chien Andalou without any dialogue. The poetic spirit is part of the visual expression. This understanding became the dominating credo of the film world: Let’s be poetic without using words.

Inga Fler Ord
Tomas Stark and Jerker Beckman, 2012

This film is also nearly without words, but also deeply poetic. The subject of the film is a female writer writing poetry. She fights against writer’s block and finds her inspiration in a dog’s barking. The film starts with a credo of Antonin Artaud: “I have told you: No works, no language, no words, no spirit, nothing. Nothing except for the scale where the nerves are weighted.”

coração (heart)
Marcello Sahea, 2013

During two months, some friends and other interested people were invited to participate by sending short clips of their naked bodies, filmed by themselves with any types of cameras. The video poem shows the fragility of the human body. Even though there’s some poetry included, the film works basically with picture and sound.

Brazil
Giga Chkheidze, 2000

Watch at cultureunplugged.com.
Brazil presents a superficial view of a fictitious protagonist as a kind of satire. It exposes the emphasis on reasonable behavior and the irrationality lurking beneath. The film is part of the MOMA collection NY. The real meaning of the words is unsaid — it comes up in between all the elements: language, picture and music.

The Alphabet
David Lynch, 1968

Schriftfilm — David Lynch offers in his perfect animation a way to experience the alphabet between a children’s view and a nightmare.

Windows
Peter Greenaway, 1974

Welcome to humor! Peter Greenaway shows a great reinterpretation of how we could tell a story. The film is about falling out from the window. Greenaway combines text and picture opening up a weird logic. Rational behavior is pretended, but the opposite — irrationalism — comes through. Outstanding, very funny, a great film and a pleasure to watch!

Blue (Part 1)
Derek Jarman, 1993
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVaC3XKSi5M
The director Derek Jarman was partially blind while he made this film, suffering complications from AIDS. The film is highly biographical and this seems to be a particularly strong aspect behind the lack of visuals, which offers us a radical and minimalistic approach to how to make poetry film. Watch the full film version (75 minutes).

Confessions 7
Ignas Krunglevičius, 2011

Krunglevičius’s films are minimalistic and radical too. This film belongs to

A collection of eight confessions, hand written and court transcripts, of convicted criminals. It is then reduced to only those sentences where the criminal is talking about his or her own emotions. The perpetrator’s personal landscape of guilt is revealed with no descriptions about the actual criminal act. The most extreme act of violence contains something that we can all recognize in ourselves; the inner psychological patterns of reasoning and justification, remorse and/or the lack of it.

I have introduced poetry films to students for over a decade now. I am very lucky that my students never cease to surprise me with their great observations and analytic responses that unfold in our classroom discussions. Try it!
 

Ballad of the Skeletons
Gus Van Sant, 1996 (poem and performance by Allen Ginsberg)

Standard Oil Co.
DJ Kadagian, 2004 (poem by Pablo Neruda)

1700% Mistaken for Muslim
Masahiro Sugano, 2010 (poem and performance by Anida Yoeu Ali)

A Finger, Two Dots Then Me
David and Daniel Holecheck, 2011 (poem by Derrick Brown)

Why I Write
Masahiro Sugano, 2012 (poem and performance by Kosal Khiev)

The Dice Player
Nissmah Roshdy, 2013 (poem and reading by Mahmoud Darwish)

Forgotten Memory
Siobhan MacMahon, 2014 (poem by Siobhan MacMahon)

In the Circus of You
Cheryl Gross, 2014 (poem by Nicelle Davis)

I Can’t Breathe (Eric Garner)
Brandon Victor Dixon and Warren Adams, 2014 (poem and performance by Daniel J. Watts)

Indefinite Animals
Martha McCollough, 2015 (poem and film by Martha McCollough)

I really enjoy all forms of videopoetry, and collaborations have certainly led to some of the most groundbreaking and vital work out there, but I also have tremendous admiration for those people who work primarily as singular “videopoets.” To have the skill and talent to write a compelling poem and the ability to place that poem into an equally compelling visual and sonic context is an impressive artistic accomplishment.

But as I sat down to compile a list of ten single-author/author-made pieces that have influenced me, I quickly realized that there’s a tremendous amount of excellent work of this type out there. So I decided to narrow my list even further to focus on those poets who have demonstrated that they have the skills I mention above, and the ability to read their own poetry convincingly, and the ability to deliver the whole package in four minutes or less.

So in no particular order, here they are: Ten notable single-author videopoems under four minutes where the author also reads the poem.

Mouth
Timothy David Orme, 2012

Kleine Reise (Little Trip)
Claire Walka, 2010

The Dinosaur Book is Green Fire
Brenda Clews, 2011

the giant
Kate Greenstreet, 2009

Vowels
Temujin Doran, 2012

Where They Feed Their Children to Kings
John Gallaher, 2012

when you land in New Orleans
Ben Pelhan, 2012

Profile
R.W. Perkins, 2011

It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012

Who’d have thought
Melissa Diem, 2013

I wasn’t going to contribute a list to this series myself, since Moving Poems readers are already exposed to quite enough of my half-baked opinions, but this past week I found myself taking a closer look at multi-poem films and videos as I prepared to make one of my own. What strategies have film- and video-makers employed to gather multiple poems, whether by a single poet or several different poets, into coherent and cohesive assemblages? And what, if anything, might such longer and more complex videopoems suggest about the perennial struggle of videopoetry and poetry film to achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Bones Will Crow (poets: Aung Cheimt, Khin Aung Aye, Ma Ei, Maung Pyiyt Min, Maung Thein Zaw, Moe Way, Moe Zaw, Pandora, Thitsar Ni, and Zeyar Lynn)
Craig Ritchie and Brett Evans Biedscheid, 2012

A brilliant trailer for an anthology (Bones Will Crow, Arc Publications, 2012) that also works as a stand-alone silent film. Craig Ritchie, whose still photos appear in the film, appears to have taken the lead in putting it together. The animations by Brett Evans Biedscheid / Statetostate were “Commissioned by English PEN.”

Antiphonal (poets: Alistair Elliot, Bill Herbert, Christy Ducker, Colette Bryce, Cynthia Fuller, Gillian Allnutt, Linda Anderson, Linda France, Peter Armstrong, Peter Bennet, Pippa Little, and Sean O’Brien)
Kate Sweeney, 2014

See the original post at Moving Poems for the full story of this project. As I wrote there, this is an eight-minute filmpoem that still ends up seeming much too short. Digital artist Tom Schofield and filmmaker Kate Sweeney have created a truly masterful, immersive work that pays tribute to one of the glories of Medieval art.

First Screening (poet: bpNichol)
bpNichol, 1984

Canadian visual poet bpNichol jumped into digital literature with both feet. Thirty years on, these animated concrete poems still inspire and delight. (This is also on YouTube.)

Twenty Second Filmpoem (poets: Andrew McCallum Crawford, Mary McDonough Clark, Al Innes, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, Elspeth Murray, Janette Ayachi, Jane McCance, Donna Campbell, Ewan Morrison, Angela Readman, Gérard Rudolf, Zoe Venditozzi, Jo Bell, Sally Evans, Pippa Little, Tony Williams, Robert Peake, Stevie Ronnie, Sheree Mack and Emily Dodd)
Alastair Cook, 2012

For his 22nd Filmpoem, Alastair Cook got the brilliant idea of asking 20 poets to write short poems to accompany 20-second clips of found footage. The result—as I wrote on Moving Poems at the time—is both playful and profound, a lovely demonstration of the magic that can happen when poets write ekphrastically in response to film clips.

the rest (poems: Michelle Matthees)
Kathy McTavish, 2013

Something about those long bass notes on McTavish’s cello and the shifting play of lights and shadows behind the slowly scrolling texts makes this feel distinctly heroic (I was going to say “epic,” but the kids have ruined that word through overuse) somewhat in the manner of Pindar’s odes. McTavish is a terrific multimedia artist, and if you like this, there’s much more where it came from: “transmedia landscapes which flow from the digital web into physical installation and performance spaces.”

Cirkel – Circle (poets: Charles Ducal, Delphine Lecompte, Jan Lauwereyns, Leonard Nolens, Lies van Gasse, Marleen de Crée, Michaël Vandebril, Stefan Hertmans, Stijn Vranken, Xavier Roelens, and Yannick Dangre)
Swoon, 2013

A videopoem by Swoon (Marc Neys) incorporating 11 poems by 11 different Belgian writers, telling a single story of life, lust, love and loss. The poems range in style from experimental to formal verse, all ably translated by Willem Groenewegen. (Read more at Moving Poems.) Using visual storytelling to maintain viewer interest in lyric videopoetry is a strategy I often see makers of longer films adopting.

Twelve Moons (poems: Erica Goss)
Swoon, 2013

The connective glue here, I think, is the singular yet compound voice—words by Erica Goss, readings by Nic S. and music by Kathy McTavish—as well as the semi-narrative device of tracing “the hidden influence of the moon on one person’s life,” as Atticus Review‘s summary put it. Released to the web originally as 12 separate videopoems, Marc Neys also conceived of the series as a cohesive unit. I saw it screened at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin last October and I’d say that he succeeded, based on one unsophisticated but dependable metric: I was disappointed when it was over.

In the Circus of You (poems: Nicelle Davis)
Cheryl Gross, 2014

Like Twelve Moons, this animated cycle of four poems from Nicelle Davis’ latest collection is unified by her distinct voice — and also by Gross’ unique artistic vision. Together, as Davis puts it, they “create a grotesque peep-show that opens the velvet curtains on the beautiful complications of life.” Their collaborative partnership works in part I think because they both gravitate toward a similarly high level of quirk.

Cento for Soprano (poetry by Christopher Phelps, selected and rearranged by Kevin Simmonds)
Kevin Simmonds, 2012

Composer and pianist Simmonds underplays his role as filmmaker in the credits and in the Vimeo description, which reads: “A cento is a poem comprised of various lines taken from different poems. This work for soprano, piano and voice is inspired by the poetry of Christopher Phelps.” I’ve seen the cento technique used effectively for poetry book trailers, too. What makes this film so powerful, to me, is the juxtaposition of soprano Valetta Brinson’s beautiful, seemingly disembodied head with the opening line, also repeated at the end: “It’s hard remaining human in the city.”

These sentences are not a poem.
Dot Devota, Emily Kendal Frey, Caitie Moore, Laura Theobald, and Kate Greenstreet, 2011

“Whose story is it, anyway?” asks Laura Theobold near the end of this uniquely improvisational, collaborative videopoem. Whether or not the texts here are poems or lines from a poem, the over-all effect is certainly lyric (with a narrative thread), and I love the quiet radicalism of the multi-author/filmmaker approach. Greenstreet is a masterful videopoet and no stranger to longer compositions, but here her role (according to the credits) was that of an instigator, co-writer and editor.

*

That last film in particular points to one of the things I most prize about videopoetry: at the same time that it expands our notion of poetry beyond mere text on a page, it also challenges the Romantic conceit of a single, genius creator, and exposes the polyvocalic essence of poetry. Influenced by remix culture, even the director’s pedestal seems to be shrinking, and the line between director and writer blurring where it still exists. While I love short, shareable poetry videos on the web as much as anyone else — and Lord knows they’re Moving Poems’ bread and butter — I hope this selection inspires other filmmakers to be a bit more ambitious with their translations of poetry into video or cinematic art.