~ Author-made videopoems ~
Welcome to the edge of your seat by Janet Lees
For David Ballantyne
Photography & animation by Janet Lees
Music by Henyao
Simple but brilliant. Reminds me of the minimalism that drew me to Janet’s filmpoems from the very beginning. The contrast between the music and the text really adds to the unsettling quality of the piece.
Needleminer by Gary Barwin
Mooneyes mimic shiner for this, trifathead checkerspot for that. We call it opera. Or disease.
This videopoem by writer, composer, and “melted media” artist Gary Barwin reverses the usual balance between text and video in which the latter adds complexity to a relatively straightforward text. Here, the text—sections 5 and 3 from Barwin’s long poem “Needleminer” in No TV for Woodpeckers—is rather thicket-like, full of obscure words, neologisms, and unexpected turns of phrase in the best tradition of avant-garde ecopoetry. So the images are kept relatively simple and consistent throughout, while still reversing our ordinary perspective of nature as something outside. The soundtrack includes Barwin’s adaptation of Nisi Dominus by Vivaldi.
This joins three other videos made from texts in No TV for Woodpeckers; watch them all (and browse reviews) on Barwin’s website.
Fous de la bête (Crazy About the Beast) by Corrin Evans
An author-made filmpoem (or filmmaker-written poetry film) by Los Angeles-based actor and director Corrin Evans. Cedric Goddard is credited with translation (I’m assuming into French from an English original?) and the voiceover performance is by Keveen Baudouin.
Corrin was co-creator of an unreleased TV mini-series called Sex Parties, so I’m guessing this might be a spin-off from that.
Raaga by Roseanne Walt
A Shetlandic filmpoem by poet, filmmaker and musician Roseanne Walt, one of a series of four filmpoems featuring masked beings and texts from Dr. Walt’s award-winning, bilingual collection Moder Dy (Mother Wave). Stoal // Raaga is
A series of filmpoems exploring themes of modern myth, memory and landscape. Exhibited at The Booth, Scalloway and Broadway Gallery, Letchworth in 2019. Made with the Kishie Wife Collective. Commissioned by Shetland Arts.
According to the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, raaga refers to wreckage or driftwood, and figuratively “anything useless or spoilt, rubbish, a poor broken-down person or animal.” A raaga-tree is “a tree or branch washed up as driftwood.”
swallow #8 by Kristy Bowen
Kristy Bowen‘s most recent video is the eighth and possibly final installment in a collection called swallow. In a brief blog post debuting the series back on August 26, she wrote,
Over the course of the next month, I’ll be making a series of video poems of my swallow series. Think of it like a chapbook, but in video form! Enjoy!
In fact it took closer to two months, but that’s still damn impressive, given how many things Bowen seems to be working on at any given time, and the fact that she only starting learning how to make videopoems a few months ago. She’s organized all the swallow videos into a YouTube playlist, matter-of-factly described as “a video poem chapbook.”
Live from the Mothership by Bianca X
Calling anyone who was ever left
behind as a casualty to proverb—
to rot on the sidelines or dangle
by a hangnail over the edge of a cliff.
This one’s for you in all your awkward glory.
Why is so much poetry—and by extension poetry film—so serious? This film by poet Bianca Lynne Spriggs AKA Bianca X and filmmaker Angel Clark suggests that there’s more than one way to be transported. It’s based on a poem of the same title from Bianca’s 2016 collection from Argos Books, The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor.
Poets by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
This author-made cinepoem/videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas uses text from her 2013 collection Professional Poetry. I encountered it a couple of weeks ago via a post on Lina’s blog, which is worth quoting in full:
In 2013, I set out to write a poetry book that raged against the poetry MFA machine within the corporate-modeled university system. At that time, it was clear that, over the decade previous, universities, which employed most of the poets and writers whom I knew, were looking to level any sense of artistic freedom and turn colleges—places of education—into lucrative assembly lines—created to “churn out” ready-made writer-bots modeled after their “mentors”—and most importantly, to rob them of a fair living wage and and benefits.
I created a series of poems that were each dedicated to a profession—from working class to white collar jobs. The poems were also for those whom I knew at the time who were struggling to balance work “by day” and write/create art “by night”. At the time, I worked as a writer and editor for a major university in their advancement division, so I saw first-hand the emphasis the school placed upon making millions of dollars from donors to puff endowments and funnel $ to high-ranking administrators’ salaries—versus ensuring that part-time and adjunct faculty received fair, living wages and health benefits.
The entire collection, called “Professional Poetry” was meant to pay homage to a wide variety of different professions and/also to mock the commodification/capitalist push within arts organizations and universities to homogenize poetry and relegate anything “experimental” or “controversial” to unseen corners. The flattening of creativity—dictated by rich, white, old men, specifically bankers and/or “executives” who were beholden to pharma mega-corporations—forcefully swept into funding decisions for the arts. If a poet didn’t fit their dictated/defined “category”, or if a poet didn’t subserviently oblige and change their work to suit their framework, then it was deemed unclassifiable and therefore “not fundable”, “not publishable” or “un-useful” to the professional world of poetry that they dominated.
Descent by Janet Lees
Just as the third Thursday in November is American Thanksgiving, the first Thursday in October is British National Poetry Day (albeit with less carb-loading, and poetry readings instead of American football). Given that live events have been severely curtailed by the pandemic, I thought we’d better help out by sharing something from one of our favorite British videopoets, Janet Lees. (Janet is Manx, so British but not UK. I checked, and yes, they do celebrate National Poetry Day there.)
Janet uploaded this film back in July, noting:
Poem, photography and animation by Janet Lees. Poem made from perfume brand names.
Music by Scott Buckley scottbuckley.com.au
Wonderful stuff. So many advertisements have appropriated poetry in recent years, it’s fascinating to see how successfully Janet has turned that around and re-purposed consumerist language for a found poem. It feels as if, in a small but significant way, poetry and truth-telling are reasserting their primacy. Decontextualized desires and impulses shape a Neverland of mutable landscapes, unreliable weather and continually shifting baselines. (Which is one way to characterize the entire Anthropocene.)
Among other things, this really demonstrates the importance of poets learning to make their own films. It’s hard to see how a videopoem like this would be made otherwise.
[ The Ferrovores ] by Ian Gibbins
Ian Gibbins‘ work is generally the first I mention when making the case for videopoetry as a genre in which “difficult” poems can become highly entertaining, even gripping. In Ian’s case, this has a lot to do with composing a groovy soundtrack. But his filming, text animation, and editing are all top-notch too. My only complaint here is that I wanted more ostrich emu.
Anyway, this one’s pretty high-concept, so I’d better reproduce the description on Vimeo:
“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … ”
Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same.
Filmed mostly in the Southern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, in the midst of a multi-year drought.
A remix (2020) of the original version published in the Atticus Review (July, 2020).
Here’s that older version at Atticus Review. And Ian shared the complete text in a blog post.
The Pier by Pat Boran
Strange to think we might be safe
in the harbour’s strong embrace
but still unable to embrace our friends,
our arms when we meet stiff
by our sides, a new unease
in our movements, our stillness, in our very breath.
This author-made poetry film, by Irish poet Pat Boran, really hit the spot this morning. Which is surprising, because it contains two things that are usually a red flag for me: sentimental soundtracks with piano and strings, and a number of quite literal matches of shot to text. But these are offset, for me, by Boran’s imaginative variety of shots overall, his deft touch with editing, and the quietly powerful effect of the poem/film (his term) as a whole. And it does feel like an organic whole, as if the poem emerged from or together with the filming. All he says about his process is that it was “shot on East Pier, Howth, Co. Dublin, August 2020.” (He made a blog post for it, but go to YouTube for the text.)
We’ve always had a soft spot for author-made videopoems and poetry films here, and it’s great to see a poet of Boran’s stature take the medium so seriously, and recognize poetry film as its own genre. His current author bio concludes like this:
Since 2015, and the publication of Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku, in which the poems are accompanied by the author’s own black and white photographs, he has been increasingly drawn to the possibilities presented by matching photographs and various other graphic forms with text, not only producing an ongoing series of PoemCards, but more recently exploring short poem-films.
sex & violence #2 | honey machine by Kristy Bowen
It’s always great to see a poet making her own book trailers — I mean, it’s even better to see poetry presses doing that for their poets, but for most, that’s not part of the deal, I guess. What’s cool about Kristy Bowen is that she’s also a publisher, running the chapbook press Dancing Girl Press, and skills she’s honed there as an artist and graphic designer stand her in very good stead on her first foray into videopoetry production. Let me just paste in the YouTube description:
sex & violence
by Kristy Bowen
(Black Lawrence Press, 2020)
https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/A writer and book artist working in both text and image, Kristy Bowen is the author of a number of chapbook, zine, and artists book projects, as well as several full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent salvage (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015) and girl show (Black Lawrence, 2014). She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio
This is the second of three videos so far that Kristy has made based on excerpts from sex & violence; you can watch them all on her YouTube channel. As she noted in her blog, for honey machine, “I’ve been playing a bit more with public domain footage and my own words..this time, a little more text oriented and without the distraction of my own voice.”
Wild Whispers: New Mexico by Sabina England and Chaucer Cameron
Last week we shared a film from the series of 12 that were created for the Wild Whispers project. Each video was made in response to a poem by Chaucer Cameron in the UK. The poem went through a number of ‘blind translations’ in a film-making chain across the world, each video uniquely expressing the poem’s transformation through languages.
This film in the series is by Sabina England, whose brilliant Deaf Brown Gurl appeared on Moving Poems back in 2015. She says this about her Wild Whispers film:
When I first read the poem, it made me think of Native Americans and how much their ancestors had greatly suffered through history. As a Deaf Bihari/South Asian American, I wanted to highlight the themes of suffering and refuge of the poem by showcasing Native American culture(s) and show that despite centuries of cultural genocide, settler colonialism and violence, Native people and their cultures still thrive and resist to this day. I also wanted to draw a parallel between the sufferings of Native Americans with refugees from all over, including Syria, Myanmar, Central African Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. As an immigrant in the USA, I wanted to honour Native Americans by showcasing the beauty of the Navajo language and Pueblo cultures in New Mexico.
Lastly, Plains Indian (Native American) Sign Language was a major influence on American Sign Language, which I used to perform the poem with Navajo voice over.
Wild Whispers: New Mexico
Country and place of production: New Mexico, USA.
Languages: Navajo, American Sign Language and English.
Filmmaker and editor: Sabina England.
Translators: Meryl Van Der Bergh (Dutch to English translation), World Translation Center (Navajo), Sabina England (American Sign Language and improved English prose).
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