~ Author-made videopoems ~
After Mowing by Jeffery Oliver
A quiet, one-shot video from US poet-filmmaker Jeffery Oliver, After Mowing gives mindful attention to a tiny detail of an ordinary day. I appreciate the simple and personal quality of this piece that was uploaded just two weeks ago. As the poem appears on his website:
After Mowing
gnat wings and green grass
specklethe white porcelain
day’s work
almost done
Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells
Humour and silliness are not commonly found in poetry films. I rejoice when I stumble upon a piece that tickles my funny bone. Writing Advice by Brian Mackenwells is one such rarity. The synopsis:
A pencil-powered matchbox theatre outlines the risk of using sub-par pencils.
This is a one-man show, with Mackenwells as writer, narrator and film-maker. The video animation is amusingly home-spun and original. A bio:
Brian Mackenwells is an Irish writer living in Oxford. Despite being quite tired, he has written for the BBC about pencils, told stories on stage about not getting sick in zero gravity, performed standup about strange superheroes, and co-wrote an audio drama every month for five years.
I found Writing Advice among the finalist films in the 2022 Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland.
Nomad Palindrome by Kai Carlson-Wee
This is I think the first palindromic poetry film I’ve seen, but it’s a very good one. The author-filmmaker, Kai Carlson-Wee, previously appeared with his brother Anders, also a widely published poet, in a documentary short called Riding the Highline, which they co-directed, as well as several poetry videos of Kai’s own (including Cry of the Loon, which I shared here).
A note at Vimeo says the poem previously appeared at Agni, and I got all excited thinking that maybe another major literary journal had followed Triquarterly‘s lead and was publishing poetry films online, but it appears to be still just a print publication. Oh well.
The Future is Ours by Andrew Roberts
https://vimeo.com/94697197
A stop-motion videopoem by Brooklyn-based animator Andrew/Drew Roberts, uploaded to Vimeo nine years ago when he was making a whole series of poetic shorts under the banner Stop Motion Haiku, apparently once featured on a dedicated website that no longer exists, though several may be viewed on his own website (scroll down) and on Vimeo.
Moving Poems turned 14 on Thursday, so I wanted to find someone I’d overlooked just to remind ourselves how much good work is still out there. I’m sorry I missed Roberts’s work when it first appeared but happy to have found it in the end.
Wash/Backwash by Jacqui Malins
Featuring a text that alternates between poetry and essay, Wash/Backwash is an intriguing piece by Australian artist Jacqui Malins. The bio on her website describes her as a “cross-disciplinary artist, whose practice incorporates ceramics, poetry and spoken word, performance, video, drawing and photography”. She was also curator of a videopoetry program for the 2021 Poetic City event in Canberra.
Two voices speak the text in a call and answer manner, one giving the poetry and the other conveying theories about perception and feeling. Malins speaks one part and the other is spoken by Abhishek Gupta. The density of the narration led me to watch the video a few times over for better comprehension.
Dissolving shadow images create the sense of just one single image throughout the video. I find the visual concept to be eloquent and touching, suggesting both the singularity and the continual motion of human experience. The screen is in a portrait ratio that works well in focusing our view on the shadow figure. The visual simplicity provides welcome space for the words to take centre stage.
From the video’s summary at Vimeo:
Waves wash across a shadow. The figure softens, sharpens, nearly disappears, snaps back into focus. Is this how emotion feels?
Up-to-date news on Malins’ work in various media can be found here.
Thru Hell by S’phongo
Thru Hell is a video I found among the finalist films from the 2022 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition. It is by S’phongo, an artist born in Zimbabwe and now living in Sierra Leone.
A village boy with a dream, S’phongo is a published author and spoken word artist from south-east Zimbabwe. With two slam champion titles three years into his career as an artist, S’phongo has appeared on stages in Zambia, Sierra Leone, Italy, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. One of his poems has been published on poetrypotion.com (South Africa). He currently works as the Operations Director for VAfrica, a youth media organisation in Sierra Leone and as the senior Technical Officer at LitFest Harare. (source)
S’phongo writes about his poem:
In my life, things weren’t easy, and I believed they weren’t until I adopted a new set of eyes. At that moment, I realized that if my life hadn’t turned out the way it did, I wouldn’t have been able to experience that moment.
Looking around me, I saw birth, growth, and death. Every year we chain the oxen to a plow, take baskets of grains, chasing behind the oxen, dropping them into freshly plowed earth. A week later, life shoots off the ground in hundreds of tiny microgreens. These include growth hindering weeds that will be killed only a few weeks into their lives. Death.
Life continues for the grains while some fade into nutrients for the living. Three months down the line, we witness another birth. The only difference now is it’s in abundance. One grain has become a hundred, then it withers.
This pattern of birth, life, and death can be seen even in man-made objects. It is what it is. We give birth to habits; they live through us and we can kill them at will. I killed some and gave life to some, this being one of the living at the moment. (source)
His synopsis for the video:
Thru Hell explores how all human interaction has the potential of being hell when it is not nurtured from a place of love. It is a reminder that we are all similar, and that hurtful intentions, no matter what their source is, can hurt the same. Most importantly, they can be survived. (source)
More videos from S’phongo can be found here.
HairBrush by Kate Sweeney
A gentle and personal piece reflecting on motherhood, HairBrush is a hand-drawn animation from UK artist, film-maker and writer Kate Sweeney, whose work has featured a number of times before here at Moving Poems. From the synopsis at Vimeo:
After adopting our son during lockdown… I wanted to explore my journey towards becoming a mother.
HairBrush is a meditative reflection upon an everyday activity – a haircut. It documents the laboured process of making a paintbrush out of a golden curl from my son’s head. The brush then being used to paint each frame of the film.
Watercolour, instead of blood or DNA, becomes the metaphor and material for describing how we imagine and manifest our selves through each other.
The film was one of a series of microproject commissions at Star and Shadow Cinema, a co-operative in the north east of the UK.
I’ll Write About It Later by Jessie Jing
I’ll Write About It Later is an author-made piece by Jessie Jing, a Malaysian dance artist, choreographer and writer based in London.
I stumbled upon this interesting and affecting video in one of those happy, random moments of web discovery. Surprisingly, I noticed in drafting this post that it’s the first time a Malaysian artist has featured here at Moving Poems.
The video is personal and intimate, incorporating Jing’s own voice floating above expressive, animated doodles and text. The visual style is strongly influenced by concrete poetry.
The subject of the video seems also to relate to Jing’s mental health advocacy. This includes her debut poetry collection Manuscripts of the Mind, described as “…a series of poetry and prose dedicated to, and inspired by, the fantastical world of the bipolar mind and how one encounters and experiences metamorphosis to their state of being.” The collection is published under the name Jessie J’ng.
Verkeerd Verbonden / Wrong Number by Marc Neys
Verkeerd Verbonden / Wrong Number is an hypnotic, author-made videopoem from renowned Belgian artist, Marc Neys. In slow, hushed tones he narrates his poem in Dutch. The English is given as text-on-screen and visually designed around a divided trio of screen-compartments. These also contain abstract images in flickering motion, with transient glimpses of recognisable people and objects, the whole rendered in unusual and shifting colours.
Marc is a marvelous experimental film-maker and composer. The graphic rhythms of the English text on the screen, and the way they interact with the sound of the voice in Dutch – both contribute to the deep mood, as does his sophisticated ambient sound design. The language of the poem is pared back, with a mysterious allegorical quality. The dramatic simplicity of word and image is strangely moving.
and they whisper softly
stories that are not meant for me
This is a new film from Marc Neys, uploaded only two weeks ago. Moving Poems has featured well over 100 videopoems from him since 2011.
sex & violence #4 : what’s inside a girl? by Kristy Bowen
I’ve featured a few of Chicago-based poet and publisher Kristy Bowen’s video poetry book trailers, but not this one yet, which was made in support of her 2020 collection with Black Lawrence Press, sex & violence. It might be my favorite of hers to date. Nobody knows better that the poet herself what kind of mood she was trying to create, and if she happens to have the graphic design skills and technical know-how to bring that to life in video form, as Bowen does, the results can be wonderful (even if, as here, also super creepy). She resurfaced the video recently on her blog as part of an annual #31daysofhalloween series.
As always, visit her YouTube channel for more. The latest trailers are in support of a collection due out on Halloween called Automagic.
Remnants by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
A few weeks ago I shared a trilogy of videopoems from Canadian film-makers Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, made during their time as artists in residence at the historic Deering Estate in Florida. This video, Remnants, is another of several made during their time at the Estate.
From a film-making view, I particularly like in Remnants the simple effectiveness of writing the poem on the spine of books. There is as well a quiet, contemplative quality that often arises in videopoems without voice, just text on screen and sound design from natural ambiences. The twin-screen of this film then calls for attention to two panels of adjacent text, the poem on one side and old book titles on the other.
Most if not all of the videopoems I have seen from Valerie and Daniel are author-made films arising from their long-time collaboration as artists. More from their Deering Estate residency are here.
La Caracola / The Conch by María Papi
This film by Argentinian María Papi had its premiere at the 2015 Berlin Feminist Film Week. The description on Vimeo notes that it
explores the movement of intrinsic relations between two presences that give rise to life: Water and Vulva. By exposing what is hidden, the harmony of femininity is restored.
It is powerful, as well as vulnerable and touching, to see genitalia on screen without pornographic intent. That said, this is probably not content suitable for classroom use in public school.
Papi’s approach seems personal and subjective most of all, with secondary thoughts about female gender and sexuality in general. We particularly liked the starkness of the text, just singular words. Marie felt that this underscores the film’s focus: more on body than intellect. The soundtrack is interesting as well, crafting different textures from the sound of water. These seem to speak to the visuals when they become purely abstract and textural themselves. The rhythm is slow, almost contemplative, possibly reflecting the pleasant feelings experienced while filming herself naked in a river, as described in an interview with Papi about the making of the film in CinéWomen, where it was the International Selection for 2015-2016. (We’d excerpt it, but Scribd doesn’t permit copy-and-paste, so you’ll just have to click through — or, if you read Spanish, check out the translation of the interview on Papi’s blog.)
See Vimeo for the full credits list.
Don’t miss a post
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy