~ Author-made videopoems ~
Not My Home by José Orduña
An author-made videopoem by Mexican-American writer José Orduña from the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Triquarterly (where it’s described as a video essay). This is the first issue with videos chosen and introduced by the new video editor, nonfiction writer and illustrator Kristen Radtke. Here’s what she wrote about “Not My Home”:
In “Not My Home,” José Orduña explores negation. He invites us inside intimate images of a single home—shoes by the door, a stuffed animal on an unmade bed, pencil lines up the wall marking children’s growth. These images are repeated even as the narrator tells us over and over again that the home is not his, that the memories do not belong to him and neither does this story. Yet we as viewers get the feeling he knows this house better than anyone has ever known a home before, and that perhaps that knowledge is exactly why he needs to go about negating it—it is, in a sense, a haunting. Just the slight unease of a subtle breeze, or a motion in the corner of your field of vision, is the sense of a ghost. Orduña’s very short video clips create gorgeous moving snapshots of a disembodied life: Grass twitches. Light shimmers on a teapot. His slow, melancholic images make us ache for the space as much as his narrator seems to.
Click through to watch the other two video essays Radtke chose. I’m pleased to see that the magazine still leads off with its video selections, though I hope that the absence of videos identified as “cinepoetry” is only temporary. (Perhaps they just aren’t getting enough submissions.)
Pearls by Chaucer Cameron
An author-made videopoem by Chaucer Cameron that was sparked by an image in a Swoon videopoem. Pearls was recently featured at Atticus Review, accompanied by some process notes:
Symbolically, Pearls provides a vehicle for wisdom as well as providing a mirror in which to see ourselves, giving us insight into how we appear to others.
In a more literal sense, the “Mother” in the poem is on a mission to ‘find herself’ through some pearls that she thinks are hidden in the rocks. Her son, who is watching from down below, is trying desperately to communicate, to gain her attention, her love. In fact, he is trying to tell her that she already has pearls, if only she could see them.
The first line of the poem was inspired by a poetry-film on Moving Poems site, so it seemed appropriate to explore my text further through film. I sent the poem to Voiceover Artist and Broadcaster David Wartnaby. A few weeks later, I found exactly the right footage, music and sound and the poetry-film fell into place.
Message4u by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch
https://vimeo.com/153544328
Artists Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch have collaborated on a number of videos over the years, some of which — like this one — can be seen as videopoems. The soundtrack is by Halo Svevo, and Christa Hunter appears in the video along with footage from 1956 film On Guard! by IBM. There’s also a small folded book and CD.
Message4u is a video and folding book based on email conversations between myself and Jeff Crouch about knowledge, democracy, technology and the computer and oracle as repositories of knowledge and prediction.
.
Noman’s Land Common by Robert Peake
A new videopoem by Robert Peake (poem, concept) and Valerie Kampmeier (original music). With all the thousands of poetry videos I’ve watched over the years, I’ve never seen someone use footage shot through a kaleidoscope before—leave it to an endlessly inventive tech geek and poet like Peake to come up with it. I find the effect mesmerizing and an apt complement to the text. As usual, he’s posted the poem at his blog, along with some process notes:
With the tenth anniversary of the birth and death of our son James fast approaching, I find myself writing about the ongoing effects, including sudden and overpowering moments of grief. The text came first. I then shot time-lapse of clouds through an inexpensive toy kaleidoscope using a Raspberry Pi camera. I also shot real-time nature footage through the same kaleidoscope by holding it up to my smartphone camera. Valerie composed and performed the music. The title refers to a nearby patch of common land in North Hertfordshire that we frequent. One year, after extensive tilling, a field adjacent to the common erupted in red poppies, not unlike the no-man’s land of the First World War.
Ressacs / Backwashes by Jean Coulombe
A gorgeous, author-made videopoem from Quebecois poet Jean Coulombe and videographer Gilbert Sévigny, “Réalisé pour le blogue de création poétique CLS Poésie.” The text (shown via type on screen) is only in French, but at my request, Coulombe sent along an English translation:
RESSACS / BACKWASHES
À pelleter devant soi / Shovelling forward
des phrases-chocs / shocking sentences
que personne n’écoute / that nobody listens to
à clamer dans le vide / shouting in the emptiness
notre stupeur de vivre / our amazement to liveon désapprend le feu / we unlearn fire
on tressaille sans faire d’ombres / we flinch without casting shadowsil ne faudrait surtout pas / we certainly should not
bloquer le trottoir / block the sidewalk
ramener les illusions / bring back illusions
trop près des braises / too close to the embers
CLS Poésie is a group literary blog after my own heart, and makes me wish I knew French. The three poets behind it even have a joint Blogger/Google account, which reads:
Les poètes Jean Coulombe, Alain Larose et Denis Samson ont ouvert cet espace , libre et sans prétention, en juin 2009, pour partager leur poésie sous toutes ses formes. Cette grande aventure a débuté à Saint-Benjamin dans la région des Etchemins au Québec.
The poets Jean Coulombe, Alain Samson and Denis Larose opened this space, free and unpretentious, in June 2009, to share their poetry in all its forms. This great adventure began in Saint-Benjamin Etchemins in the region in Québec. (via Google Translate)
National Service (with added talky bits) by Luke Wright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItv206HE_Q
British performance poet Luke Wright notes on YouTube,
Four months into my six month driving ban I’m getting nostalgic about motorway service stations. I miss rating my toilet experience.
This very basic video shot with a stationary camera is rendered thoroughly engrossing by Wright’s entertaining performance and the innovative (though deliberately not seamless) co-mingling of rhyming poetry and explication.
Abschied / Parting by Sophie Reyer
A videopoetry collaboration between Austrian writer Sophie Reyer and Belgian artist Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon, who writes:
Last summer I was invited to give a workshop at the dotdotdot Kurzfilmfestival in Vienna. During that weekend I met Sophie Reyer.
We decided to collaborate on a video for one of her poems, Abschied.
[…]
Spohie is also a composer and a filmmaker. In our mailing back and forth I received some of her compositions and a short film she made a few years ago.
I decided to take pieces of her music and a short sequence of her film ‘Die Erfahrung’ and re-mix and build a new work on those pieces.A soundtrack came first; [Soundcloud link]
Most sounds and noises you hear in this track (except for the clicks, the birds, and the piano) are all made out of samples of Sophie’s music and voice.
She also provided me with a subdued reading and an English translation for the subtitles.I used the tempo (and clicks) in the soundtrack as a guide to edit the chosen film sequences. Using a lot of repetition to create a form of visual rhythm.
Once the videopoem was done I asked Sophie to do a small write up;
Image and sound. Words and pictures. In “Abschied” i try to talk about letting go and starting a new. In my work with marc neys we focused on sound- and picture- material that i associate with the subject of death. we used it as a playground. mark re- arranged and composed the material, put it into rhythm, added new layers, used filters and interpreted the fragments in a very intelligent way.
We both like what came out of this and might collaborate again in the future, but then with newly created sounds and film…
For now, enjoy Abschied!
Break and Remake by Martha McCollough
A new videopoem by artist and poet Martha McCollough always makes me do a little dance of pure delight. Break and Remake debuted on Atticus Review a week ago, and I’ve held off on sharing it till now (not wanting to steal their thunder) only with great difficulty. Here’s how McCollough introduced it:
Break and Remake came out of thinking about the recombined creatures in myths and in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The whole video is broken and reassembled, as are the griffins, chimeras, and other monsters within the video. The text is also a hybrid, combining overheard remarks, a line from a song by Son House and computer-generated text from spam.
Tiny Machine by Dave Malone
An author-made videopoem by Dave Malone that also functions as a trailer for his book O: Love Poems from the Ozarks (TS Poetry Press, 2015). The music is by Wayne Blinne. (H/t: tweetspeak.)
The Almost Prayer by Patricia Killelea
An author-made videopoem by Patricia Killelea, reading a poem from her forthcoming collection Counterglow (Mango Publications, 2016). According to the Video Poetry page on her website,
The poems from my forthcoming second poetry collection, Counterglow, are small and serious, and their sparseness prompts questions of space and the need to expand the visual-aural arc of my poetry’s scope. For these reasons, I’ve begun exploring video poetry. I’m excited about these transformations in poetics and the move toward digital experimentation. I began my video-poetry-sound experiments while I was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute during August 2013.
It is possible that video poems are a way of grounding written speech back in the body, evoking a multi-sensorial experience of language and space. It is also possible that movements in digital poetics against narrative merely reiterate the varied ways in which all experience, language, and life is inherently storied– that is, fragmented structures tell a story of fragmentation, etc. It is likewise possible that the acoustic and visual “compete” with each other as Charles Bernstein suggests (2003) and that we are in the age of poetry “music videos,” a kind of anti-MTV or a poet’s last stand against bullshit assertions that poetry doesn’t matter. It definitely matters, and video poetry makes its materiality all the more substantive.
Visit YouTube to watch more of Killelea’s videopoetry.
long rong song by OTTARAS
The Norwegian concrete poet Ottar Ormstad and Russian composer Taras Mashtalir form the duo OTTARAS, currently looking for live performance venues. This video was produced in collaboration with Russian video artist Alexander Vojjov, and “exists in different versions made for screening and live performance,” according the Vimeo description.
Projected on a grid of particles that at times seem ordered, while sometimes chaotic and always in flux, Ormstad’s constructed language poetry is exposed and read by the author while performing to Mashtalirs pulsating music. Is everything connected to one another in the sphere that is shaping before the viewer’s eyes? How does language relate to the atmospheric scapes Vojjov creates of numbers, geometric forms and abstract shapes? LONG RONG SONG (2015) conveys Ormstad’s language research project that is based on AUDITION FOR FENOMENER UTEN BETEGNELSE (Audition for Phenomena without a Name), his second book of concrete poetry (2004). In the video, Ormstad reads through a cycle of 5 poems that present combinations of four letters made of an artifical language system that he has created and which may, or may not result in words commonly used in latin languages. […] Raising awareness of electronic poetry and sonic ecology, attracting new audience to a potent yet to come genre is the inspiration for this collaboration.
The video is produced in HD 16:9 in color, stereo, duration 05:26
Animation: Alexander Vojjov
Music: Taras Mashtalir
Concrete poetry, voice & production: Ottar Ormstad
© Ottar Ormstad 2015
I find it a mesmerizing hybrid of concrete and sound poetry—a great example of how an effective video can make avant-garde poetry approachable.
But Mama, Why Do We Remember? by Sarah Kain Gutowski
It’s rare to see a poet or filmmaker’s very first attempt at videopoetry turn out as successfully as this. Fortunately the poet and co-director Sarah Kain Gutowski wrote a good blog post detailing her collaboration with the videographer, Paul Turano.
Toward the end of July, P.T. (pictured to the left, doing his tech thing) and I began work on our poetry video collaboration. We recorded the audio, then discussed various images and the sequence in the video, looked at some stock footage, brainstormed, etc. Last week, we met on campus with my little helpers, Miss Talkalot and The Boy, and we managed to film a couple of shots of them as the characters from my fairy tale poem, and then also some shots of the surrounding pine barrens, which are lovely.
This exercise is fun but strange and confusing. I have this idea of the poetry video as a piece of art unto itself, separate and distinct from a printed poem, but as we’re creating this piece I feel like we’re making a poetry video like people make music videos — which can be an art unto itself but is also just as often a simplified representation, with visuals, of what happens in the narrative of a song. I’m really hoping to avoid the latter, but I’m not sure if we’re going to get there, to that place where the video poem is lyric and metaphorical and something beyond illustration.
Do read the rest. It’s always fascinating to hear how a beginning videopoet works through the genre’s unique challenges.
The poem originally appeared (in text form) in the Spring 2015 issue of So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.
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