~ Author-made videopoems ~
What Do Women Want? by Kim Addonizio
Some videos are so bad they’re good; this is one of them. To say that it’s amateurishly done would be a vast understatement, and yet it still manages to be charming and eminently watchable, in part because she messes up toward the end. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Of course, it helps that Addonizio recites the poem really well, and that she has a cute cat.
The text and audio of the poem are available at Poets.org. Be sure to visit Addonizio’s new website, too.
My Pirate Neighbor by Oceana Setaysha
There’s a fine line between flash fiction and prose poetry, but I think this story crosses it. It was created by Australian writer Oceana Setayasha for the summer film competition at the 6S Social Network, which is associated with the popular online magazine Six Sentences [both defunct as of 6/5/2014]. And yes, it’s just six sentences long.
Hypnosis at the Bird Factory by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYxhMAFK-e0
An enjoyable “adventure in vibration studies” from Forkergirl, who includes it in a webpage devoted to her limited fork theory. I’m not sure if this is a serious theory or a gentle parody of Thylias Moss’s academic colleagues, but it doesn’t matter. The video’s description at YouTube is delightful and worth reproducing in full:
STATUS REPORT OF A SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE WITHIN FORKING AND FORKED UNIVERSES, EMPHASIZING THOSE OUTSIDE OF SETI DOMAINS
SUBMITTED BY FORKERGIRL
So many vibrations, so many patterns of movement on so many scales in so many bifurcating systems, but at last a (temporary) match to the pattern of movement (and its associated audible and inaudible, on human scales, music) of a search for signs of intelligent life.
This status report describes the finding of a feather in a forking universe system in which the feather led to hypnosis at a bird factory presumed to be the source of the feather as no other intelligent-life constructions were observed though their unavailability for observation does not preclude the existence of other intelligent life constructions in this particular universe system. The feather itself was alive with possibilities, but as forkergirl had prior knowledge of birds, vibrations of that knowledge imposed limiting factors on those possibilities, resulting in a bounded infinity, as infinite as any other, though of a different size.
An inability to find other intelligent life constructions doesn’t mean they aren’t there and indeed could indicate that parameters of the search itself do not support finding evidence that forks so far from the parameters, the parameters cannot detect or measure presences outside detectable thresholds.
It is difficult at best to report on a reality based on hypnotic evolutions when such behaviors in many western depictions of Earth realities tend both to lack and to be unable to acquire scientific credence despite the existence of terminology for the mystical and supernatural, terms that refer to something, including, though not limited to, the substance of various forms of delusion, the mind being able to generate and sustain realities that do not require confirmation of existence from outside the mind’s imagined authority, real within the imaginary realm that (at this time) is difficult to measure though its roots are tethered to an organic and electrical human body nervous system relied upon by both objectivity and subjectivity, the empirical and the aesthetic.
The full status report is available as a PDF.
God Bless Johnny Cash by James Brush
Poet and blogger James Brush’s very first go at the videopoem genre.
I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.
Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic app, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.
The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.
The post also includes the text of the poem. James’ film expertise really shows here, I think: the mix of sound and images is just right, and there’s just enough movement going on for this to qualify in my mind as a “moving poem,” even though, as he says, he was inspired in part by a recent, high-quality slideshow-video from Christine Swint. I love seeing poetry-blogger friends experiment with multimedia, and I’m proud of whatever small role I might have played in helping to make that happen.
Children by Mike Finley
Mike Finley is a journalist and business writer who also writes poetry and, starting last year, has been making a lot of videos. This is one of my favorites of his so far.
Verde: the greening of electrons by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hia2ks5DhCE
I’ve been seriously remiss in not posting some of the 57 poetry videos uploaded by Forkergirl at YouTube, A.K.A. Thylias Moss, a major contemporary American poet. This one caught my fancy because it riffs on the first lines of a favorite poem of mine, Federico García Lorca’s “Romance Sonámbulo.” Moss includes the text of her piece in the notes below the video on YouTube. Made for Valentine’s Day 2007, it’s been played more than 3,900 times.
One Hand Clapping by Brenda Clews
Toronto-based painter and poet Brenda Clews has recently begun to explore videopoetry, with some very interesting results. Concrete or visual poetry often strikes me as more art than poem, but I like what this one says about rain — and about poetry. The words are right at hand, but remain out of reach. (If you have the bandwidth for it, this is available in HD, as well — click through to view it on YouTube.)
Another exciting thing about this production is the double-blind collaborative way it came about, alluded to in the title and explained in the credits at the end:
Brenda created a short film
for unheard musicGabriel created music
for an unseen film
Gabriel is the avant garde musician Gabriel G, a.k.a. Alphacore.
See Brenda’s lengthy description and analysis of the piece at her blog, Rubies in Crystal.
Green Grass by Michelle Firment Reid
Artist Michelle Firment Reid is both the poet and producer here; Austin Tollin handled the cinematography and editing. (via The City Breath Project blog)
I Don’t Fear Death by Sandra Beasley
Sandra Beasley is both poet and filmmaker here. This is one of three videos she made for poems from her prize-winning collection I Was the Jukebox. (She also blogs.)
My Story is Not My Own by Steven McCabe
The most ambitious film by a poet for his own poem I’ve yet seen. It even has its own website; go there for the complete credits. Here’s McCabe’s description of the poem and the project:
At the moment of the fatal shots Jacqueline Kennedy was seen fleeing into prehistory, dancing ritualistically, time-traveling to the wild-west and documenting landscape. The film’s running time of 11:22 mirrors the date of the events precipitating the film’s thematic concerns.
‘My Story is Not My Own’ intertwines art forms; featuring four performers (including two dancers), narrators reciting poetry, one singer chanting Javanese-inspired incantations, electronic-ambient music and ‘found’ Super 8 footage from Kashmir in the 1960s.
The film blends scenes of journey, intimations of ritual, emotionality and American political history within an overarching sense of earth’s mystery. Personal and national grief juxtapose with archival footage of distant landscapes evoking a sense of loss.
Archetypal images of grief pervade the film’s imagery via the symbols of starfish, stones and veils. A mythological texture envelops the various manifestations of the ‘widow.’
Wearing her pink outfit, from that tragic day in 1963, she bursts through a saloon’s swinging wooden doors followed by the swelling ocean crashing wildly in faded footage. Linked to nature her story is truly not only her own.
‘One string snaps, this is the sound of what was new, and the oldest vibration of all, following its twin.’
‘My Story is Not My Own’ is a first film from a poet remembering the ‘feeling’ of November, 1963. Watching black & white TV with his mother nearby tending to small children. The film makes an unspoken connection between chemical attacks on the jungles of Vietnam which soon followed and the spirituality of disappeared Neolithic culture.
Yellow Leather by Naufus Ramirez Figueroa
A meditation on the banana by Guatemalan interdisciplinary artist Naufus Ramirez Figueroa. I like his artist statement:
Though my creative process is committed to experimentation and research, and my subject matter often deals with things such as the Guatemalan Civil War, the results are often absurd and humorous. I have found that refugees and survivors of war are often that way; nothing in life is ever so dire as to be unworthy of a joke or two.
I Am by Steven Nichols Smith
An experiment in found poetry with a distinctly populist flavor. As the filmmaker describes it:
I Am is not only a film but a social experiment that took strangers in Philadelphia and asked them to finish this sentence. “I am ___.” Through these responses, the film-maker was able to create a montage of answers and then delve deeper into a select few and allow them to explore their answers even further, creating not only written poems but a visual metaphor of these responses. (Premiered at iLLReality’s STEW event on March 21, 2010). Be sure to check out illreality.com
The three poems embedded on the piece were written by Smith, based on the stories told him by Kelly Turner (“I Am Constantly at War with My Body”), Sanja Blazevic (“I Am Proud of My Parent’s Resilience”), and Jared Martin (“I Am an Actor, Once Upon a Time”).
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