~ Author-made videopoems ~
Escribimos/We Write by Juan Bullón et. al.
An exemplary anthology videopoem from Seville-based poetry filmmaker Juan Bullón’s creative writing workshop. Be sure to click the CC (closed captioning) icon if you need the English translation (which is very good). As Juan told me in an email last November:
This year, with some of the students from my Creative Writing workshop, we decided to create a single piece, and although the stories that each one recites are more or less different, I think it can be seen as a single work made up of a few very personal poems and stories. Besides, all the authors are in the video, we all act. Another bet we made was to use as few verses or words as possible of what each one had written on the image, trying not to be so graphic so that the image and text could walk in parallel instead of chained.
The poems and authors in order: DICEN/THEY SAY by Juan Bullón; ESFINGE NEGRA/BLACK SPHINX by Carmen R. Hiraldo; DE CÓMO UN GRAMÁTICO APENADO SE QUEJA DESATENTO/HOW A SAD GRAMMARIAN COMPLAINS DISTRACTED (COOL) by Carmen Galeto; MAULLIDOS Y ESPANTOS/MEOWS AND HORRORS by Manuel Rodríguez de los Santos; SABER/KNOWING by Pedro García Ordiales; and ÚLTIMO DESPACHO/LAST DISPATCH by Juan Bullón. To read the original texts, go here, and for the translations, go here.
You Still Have Something of The Ghost About You by JinJin Xu
For International Women’s Day, here’s a cento videopoem by JinJin Xu 徐今今, a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai. Here’s the Vimeo description:
The cento-film “You Still Have Something of the Ghost About You” was shot in the hauntingly empty casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in Macau, China after I left mandatory government quarantine and realized I’d stumbled into the underworld. The polyvocal collage slips the viewer into an otherworldly, post-COVID globalized hypnosis: interweaving strangely prescient texts from Chinese and Western epics such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Beastiary, Dante’s Inferno, and contemporary texts such as John Cage’s X, and Gu Cheng’s Ying’er, to journey into the afterlife of forgetfulness.
As a former comparative literature major, I love this blend! And I’m always excited to see up-and-coming poets integrating filmmaking into their practice. Xu’s bio notes that after getting her BA at Amherst College, she “traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated across nine countries.” She’s currently in the MFA program at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife just came out in November, after winning the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize from Radix Media. Be sure to follow her on Vimeo.
To The End Of Things, Part 5: Mountains by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey
An excerpt from a unique collaboration between poet-filmmakers Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey, celebrating and evoking the spirits of place — or as they put it, “deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.”
In September 2019, writer and composer Martin Heslop and poet Helen Tookey spent a two-week residency in Great Village, Nova Scotia, in the house where Elizabeth Bishop lived as a child. They wrote poems and prose pieces, fragments, notes. And they collected field recordings and sounds: waterfalls, rivers, cave-drips; crickets under pylons, in blueberry fields, by the shafts of old mines; the creaking and cracking of a wooden church during a hurricane; the harmonium and all the bells in the house; the turning mechanism of a lighthouse beam, abandoned radio-sets. They were recording the present and searching for possible futures, but also looking to summon the buried histories of the place.
Back home they made films, visiting and revisiting the Durham and Northumberland coast, Parys Mountain on Anglesey, South Gare on Teesside – places similarly scarred by the presence and now the loss of industry. Over the past year, they have been weaving these sounds into the films, creating new conversations, across the Atlantic Ocean.
Using sound and film, their poems and their voices, entwined with early recordings of Nova Scotian Gaelic songs gathered from the archives of the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University, Helen and Martin are creating a series of audio-visual poems – a narrative sequence – weaving together the experiences of a woman trying to navigate an uncertain and unfamiliar landscape, and the voice of a man who is of this place, but of a different time. This man is the draegerman of the mines, the rescuer, and he tells of the underground world he remembers, recalls voices of those he rescued and those he could not. They are both deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.
Parts one to five were released in November 2020, with the second half of the story to follow in the New Year.
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.
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