~ Author-made videopoems ~
Oscura (Dark) by Eduardo Yagüe
It’s always interesting to see a long-time poetry filmmaker like Eduardo Yagüe, used to working with poems from the canon, stepping into the poet role himself. There’s no English translation, but the text is so straightforward as to hardly need one. In any case, Google Translate’s rendition is more than adequate:
The persistent darkness.
The porous darkness.
The uncertain darkness.
The crushing darkness.
Darkness is a wild animal.
Darkness is a closed door.
The darkness of the flesh.
The whispering darkness.
The succulent scar.
The luminous darkness.
The music is sourced from a one-man band based in France, Hinterheim.
Solo duet by Janet Lees
The latest film poem from Manx artist and poet Janet Lees seems fitting for this week of scorching temperatures in so many places. I’m sure she won’t mind if we paste in the full text of her Vimeo description, because it’s interesting to see what she excerpted from her original page-poem, “Retreat,” to make the film poem:
Poem & video by Janet Lees
Music by Tonic Walter & Nina Nst
The full poem, originally published in Earthlines magazine:Retreat
1
I have hung out my clothes
on the washing line at the edge of the world.
Silhouetted arms and legs
give dumbstruck kicks and jerks,
stiff with salt and too much mending
by hands that have lost
the scent of naked,
eyes that can’t see
to thread a needle.2
Viewed through glass: peat,
pelt. Imagined song
of blood and stone
fattening my tongue until
it fills my mouth, stops
my throat.
Between inside
and outside,
the flame roar of the wind,
cauterising open sores
where men have dug out earth from me
to burn to warm their hands.3
My blood
runs cold and clear
My bones are made
of the world’s dried tears
There is wreckage
and resurgence in my heart
At dusk I drink the sun
and then dead stars
live again in my skin
which breaks
and is
unbroken
The Long Slow Effect of Gravity by Ian Gibbins
A 2020 poetry film by the Australian multimedia poet, musician and scientist Ian Gibbins, with
Footage taken around Adelaide CBD, Belair, Blackwood, Sturt River, Mount Compass and Middleton, all in South Australia, and Athens, Greece.
The soundtrack is in polyrhythmic 6/4 time and contains audio samples of bird calls, rain and various falling objects recorded in Belair, South Australia.
3D models of shark, roses and dog skeleton obtained and used under license from sketchfab.com. They were animated within Motion 5.
午與夜的十四行 / A Sonnet of Noon and Night by 綠蒂 Lui Di
Taiwanese performance artist Yin-Sheng Liu aka Craphone Liu directed and composed the music for this poetry film with its beautiful, calligraphic fonts. Not being fluent in Chinese, I wasn’t able to find anything meaningful about the author in a web search.
Crush by Janet Lees
This recent film by Manx videopoet (and Moving Poems regular) Janet Lees was featured along with two others in the newly re-launched Issue One/Spring 2022 issue of Atticus Review.
CRUSH: Artist’s Statement: The poem at the heart of this videopoem is a reflection on the less lovely, more violent realities of ‘young love.’ Like many young people, I was subject to all-consuming crushes as a teenager. Infatuation can make you do anything; rejection can make you feel as though you’ve been turned inside-out and left for dead. Like many women, I have also experienced sexual oppression and violence. I found the doll in a bucket in a junk shop. She appears in the film exactly how I found her, without skirt or trousers. Her exposed and seemingly vulnerable state spoke powerfully to me. As we were driving back from the junk shop I put her on the dashboard and it just looked right, recalling dreams of being in a driverless car, with no control over my fate. The poem was originally published in my collection ‘A bag of sky,’ from Frosted Fire Press.
A great example of how serendipity and something like ekphrasis can produce works of extraordinary power when the poet is also the filmmaker.
Peacedemic or Wargasm? by Finn Harvor
The lovers of all life are not choosy,
but they know what aliveness means.
Seoul-based American videopoet Finn Harvor’s films are regularly featured on the poetry film circuit, but through sheer oversight this is the first one we’ve shared on Moving Poems. It really showcases Harvor’s unpretentious, collage-like approach: a poet moving through the world and recording his responses in text, audio and video is the basic vibe. His YouTube channel is
devoted mainly to two ideas: the first is the idea of the screenplay module novel; that is, a work of literary fiction that can be either a text-only, belletristic work of literature, or a hybrid graphic novel.
The second idea follows from the first. It is that of the authorial movie: a movie in which everything, including script-writing, narration, music composition and direction, are done by one creator … one authorial sensibility.
This one is literally a collage, as the description makes clear:
This poetry film is a collection of earlier pieces that have been edited and updated. The theme is what direction humanity will go in — peace or war? — and also a reflection on how human life is experienced differently on the level of the individual (for example, an individual couple) and institutionally (for example, as the head of a military superpower).
If I may editorialize for a moment, I think it’s especially important for poets to address questions of war and peace in this political moment, when ruling liberal elites in the West seem to have accepted what had originally been, in the U.S. at least, a conservative idea: that they can make people believe almost anything with the help of an ideologically conformist, captive press. Propaganda techniques rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic have been repurposed to suppress most questioning of the dominant narrative about Russia and Ukraine through unprecedented levels of government cooperation with and control over online content moderators and social media algorithms, all under the guise of fighting disinformation. This should be alarming to anyone who cares about freedom of expression. In such an environment, I would argue that poets have an obligation to create as much wrongthink as possible, though hopefully not in a didactic or preachy way. Harvor’s playful touch here strikes me as a good model. Younger poets, for whom Beat-influenced sarcasm may not resonate in quite the same way, can explore other ways of expressing their dissent against the war machine. Or as Harvor labels it here, “the machinery of modern pleasure.”
Space by Kate Sweeney
Space is the most recent video by UK artist Kate Sweeney. It is a touchingly simple piece reflecting on an in-between place where she found solace during lockdown. The brief animation that closes the video was painted using inks and dyes made from materials in this environment.
Some of Kate’s fine work as a film-maker collaborating with other poets has been previously shared here at Moving Poems, but this is the first time we have published her work as both poet and film-maker. Space is part of her ongoing project, To Be Two, in which she creates work drawn from her intimate surroundings.
Modicum by Pablo Saborío
An author-made videopoem by Pablo Saborío, who describes himself as a “Costa Rican-born poet, visual artist, mystic wonderer. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark.” His poetry is philosophical with a strong mystical bent. I chose Modicum because I’m a sucker for clever, single-shot videopoems. The description reads:
Video Poetics (Visual Metaphors)
(2021)
Music created with Beepbox.co
Voice generated with readloud.net
Visit Saborío’s artist website or Vimeo page to see more of his unique work.
america (i wanted to…) by Matt Mullins
This recent, author-made videopoem by Matt Mullins could be considered an extreme translation—’Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” revisited for the 21st Century’ as he described it on Vimeo.
One Step Away by Caroline Rumley
One Step Away is a touching, personal piece by Caroline Rumley, an outstanding writer and film-maker whose work has been awarded and screened widely at international festivals and events over the past several years.
Written from a dream, the video has an understated quality focusing on simple details, a light touch that is evident in much of her work. The choices in found footage and the rhythmic editing are deft and assured. Caroline’s writing seems to arise only to be entwined with media, and the filmic elements are just as poetic as her words. Artist statements describe an interest in the “thin-sliced instance, the brief flash that tells you all you need to know.”
Moving Poems has previously published another three of her videopoems. One Step Away is not recently produced but Caroline’s films are so beautiful they seem never too late to share.
Suspiro by Matilde César
An author-made poetry film by Portuguese photographer Matilde César. If there’s one thing poetry- and music-lovers know about Portugal, it’s the importance of saudade, “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for something or someone that one cares for and/or loves.” This minimalist film, with its actors like dancers trying to remember the dance, is drenched in that emotion, as the Vimeo description suggests:
Suspiro is a film born from the longing to return home. After being 10 months away from Portugal, the desire of creating something that would connect me with my homeland was big so I resorted to my language and to nature to try to find this connection. This was the result.
Director: Matilde César
Sound: Flora Nolan
Participation of: Aneesa Julmice and Flora Nolan
Poem “Suspiro”: Written and recited by Matilde César
Location: Coney Island, NYC
“Final project for my Multimedia class at NYU Tisch,” it says on her website,
On a personal note, I have been weathering a form of saudade myself for many months, thinking of my former partner in London and wondering whether I’ll ever see any of my friends there again. And I’ve been on the verge of shutting down Moving Poems more than once. But what made me want to continue with the site was remembering how much delight I’ve always gotten from finding new-to-me poets and filmmakers on the internet. I ran across Suspiro earlier this week as the result of a random search on Vimeo, and despite—or perhaps because of—the melancholic content, I did a little happy dance next to my desk. I’m back.
Tango Two & The Singer’s Hands by Gary Barwin
*
It’s fascinating to see what an imaginative experimental poet can do with a given text. The contrast in visuals here couldn’t be more striking, but the text beginning with “life is long” is identical (though The Singer’s Hand does begin with a separate text as well). Gary Barwin explains what he was up to with the latter in a blog post:
Of course, Ukraine has been on my mind lately, like it has been on everyone’s mind. Yesterday, someone on my Facebook feed posted a field recording of an old Ukrainian woman singing. I was very struck by the song and her haunting voice as well as by her powerful presence. However, the thing that struck me the most was her hands: strong, thick and always moving as she sang. They were very expressive: a life, emotions, age, strength. So, I made this video using two of my poems which I feel relate to loss, strength, war, grief and love; I feel like they connect to a sense of what is happening now.
I used a close-up of this singer’s hands in this video as well as introducing other visual elements. The music is a remix that I did (adding various clarinets and saxophones plus a bunch of electronics) to a recording of a rehearsal which my sister-in-law Pam Campbell sent me of her singing with her group Tupan.
The post goes on to share both poems as plain text, “Blue Train” and the untitled one from “Tango Two.”
For more on Gary Barwin (including links to his books), visit his website.
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