~ Author-made videopoems ~
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.
Cat by Gary Hoare and Joe Cronin
This delightful videopoem by Gary Hoare and Joe Cronin was the winner in the Best Smartphone Production category at the 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. (Watch all six finalists on YouTube.) The internet may already be cracking under the cumulative weight of tens of thousands of cat videos, but I think there’s always room for one that pushes beyond the mere cute factor to ask larger questions about cats, people, and (in this case) worship.
One of the unique features of Rabbit Heart is that they require all films/videos to be made by the author, either alone or in close collaboration with the filmmaker. In this case, I’m not entirely sure which of the named authors did which, but that’s O.K. I guess.
Péndulo (Pendulum) by Celia Parra
This is PalabrapeliculA (WordmoviE), directed by Belén Montero of Versogramas and the poet herself, Celia Parra. The poem, read by Parra, is in Galician; be sure to click the CC icon for Spanish or English subtitles, translated by Parra and Mylece Burling. As with yesterday’s video, I learned about PalabrapeliculA thanks to the 2015 Ó Bhéal shortlist, which includes this thumbnail bio of Parra:
Celia Parra is a film producer and award-winning poet. With experience in literature, audiovisual communication and production, she has worked for the most representative Galician producer companies. As a poet, she has received diverse prizes (Ánxel Casal, Avelina Valladares…), published an individual poem collection (No berce das mareas, Ed. Fervenza), an audiopoetry CD (RECVERSO) and participated in several collective publications. She currently drives her creative processes towards the hybridisation between poetry and other formats.
She certainly sounds like someone to watch.
Best of luck to all the filmmakers in the 3rd Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, and thanks to the organizers for sharing such a well-annotated shortlist for the benefit of those of us who can’t make it to Cork this weekend.
Your Mouth is a Wound, and That Fly is a Nurse by Cindy St. Onge
A wonderfully creepy, author-made videopoem by Cindy St. Onge, with sounds sourced from freesound.org and footage from Shutterstock. Visit her poetry site for the text of the poem.
Insomnie (Insomnia) by Daniel H. Dugas
https://vimeo.com/53532151
An author-made videopoem from 2012, in French with English subtitles, by Canadian poet, musician and videographer Daniel H. Dugas. From the description on Vimeo:
Synopsis: A television show on the Big Bang theory adds to the anguish of not being able to sleep. What would happen to dreaming if time itself disappeared?
Statement: Dictionaries hold all of the words of languages and images hold all of the feelings in the world. As time races on the linear track of our lives, sleeplessness becomes a fragile stand against the disappearance of being.
Summer’s End by Kaspalita Thompson
To mark the equinox, here’s a new, author-made videopoem by Kaspalita Thompson, a Pureland Buddhist priest and psychotherapist from Worcestershire. In the Vimeo description, he notes:
The words are by me. Special thanks to everyone who created the other various bits and shared them under licences which allowed me to use them. Credits at the end of the film.
This was as a much a process of getting to know lightworks, which I used for the first time, as creating a videopoem.
It’s Complicated by Jade Graves
A love story with a surprise ending from teenage videopoet Jade Graves. This is one of several more videos uploaded to Vimeo by Media Poetry Studio since we ran Erica Goss’s report on the videopoetry summer camp in Moving Poems Magazine.
How many luxury cars in your town? by Daniel H. Dugas
Newly uploaded to Vimeo, Canadian poet and filmmaker Daniel H. Dugas‘ 2004 experimental videopoem
analyses the traffic on highways and in one projection, merges fragments of vehicles, with lines from the Book One* of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This project looks at the symbolic of cars as an anthropomorphic fantasy of individualism.
The Essence of Instinct by Robert Peake
The first use of Google Deep Dream technology for poetry film of which I’m aware. American-British poet and filmmaker Robert Peake worked with his usual collaborator, Valerie Kampmeier, who created the soundscape. Robert shared some process notes (along with the text of poem) on his blog:
This film-poem began as an exploration of the possibilities of using Google Deep Dream technology for film. I ran the Deep Dream software on frames of time-lapse clouds. Initial experiments were not deterministic enough, flickering wildly between very different images from frame to frame. I then composited dreamed-upon frames with their siblings to create a kind of motion blur frame, which when dreamed upon a second time created greater continuity both of movement and shape. To create further continuity, I also morphed various dream frames into each other.
The process is an attempt to simulate pareidolia — the phenomenon whereby we “recognise” patterns in random data, which is very much what Deep Dream is doing here, and what we humans do when we see shapes in clouds. The solid, iridescent imagery reminded me of William Blake, but the constantly-changing nature of these creatures made me think of the evolution of species. In researching Charles Darwin’s early life, the poem took shape. Valerie then designed the soundscape to accompany and complete this piece, drawing on her own childhood experience of hearing distant, indistinct voices.
To see more of Robert’s experiments with Deep Dream and morphing technologies, check out his recent uploads to Vimeo.
American House Fire by David Campos
https://vimeo.com/135318578
A highly effective author-made film by the Fresno, California-based poet David Campos. The text originally appeared in Luna Luna.
Thanks to Nicelle Davis for the tip.
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