~ Videopoems ~

Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.

An Elm We Lost by Marvin Bell

I’m not sure why I haven’t shared this MotionPoem before: a charming, very short poem by Marvin Bell, read by Todd Boss, with animation and music by Antonio Cicarelli.

This will be our last post of 2010. Happy New Year!

Del vacío de la voz (Of the Emptiness of the Voice) by vanvelvet

Vanvelvet is an Argentinian filmmaker currently living in Barcelona. For this videopoem, she had assistance from Federico Rasenberg and Florencia Peitrapertosa. The English translation is O.K.; the only egregious error is “whom” for “womb” (vientre), the final word of the poem.

Ode to Typography by Pablo Neruda

Directed by Julian Harriman-Dickinson at HarrimanSteel. Unfortunately, it’s kind of low-resolution, but the soundtrack helps carry it.

The Space Between Burned Out Suns by Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg

Zachary Schomburg’s film for a poem from Something Should Happen at Night Outside, a collaboration with Emily Kendal Frey.

Ghost Haiku by Susan Cormier

Susan Cormier A.K.A. queen of crows is both author and director. In the notes at YouTube, she says:

The guys in the foreground seemed kinda creeped-out by me and my camera — obviously, they couldn’t see what I was actually watching. If anyone knows who they are, please send them a link. I generally don’t use people’s images without their permission, but this shot was too precious to discard.

Nicholas Was… by Neil Gaiman

A prose-poem from Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors animated by the Beijing motion graphics studio 39 Degrees North to serve as a video Christmas card. Gaiman himself was enthusiastic, and encouraged people to make and post more video adaptations of the poem to be featured on his blog on Christmas day.

All This Day Is Good For by Tom Konyves

A spam lit videopoem! Tom writes,

In this ode to the simultaneous, true and false perceptions collide in a 360-degree panoramic sweep of a moment in time, rendering life and art in equal measure.

The text in this videopoem was assembled from hundreds of spam/scam e-mails I have been collecting over the years, representing the lies we are confronted with every day; yet the random phrases extracted from these passion-laden letters cannot help but also contain unintentional glimpses of truth. In between mundane and altered reality lies that precious essence of life I see as poetry.

Alex Konyves assisted with — well, almost everything, it seems. And Robin Pittman helped with the motion graphics.

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

A wonderfully dystopian interpretation by student animator Aleksandra Korecka.

There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot The Same by Ellyn Maybe

Veronika Bauer directs, and the music is by Harlan Steinberger and Tommy Jordan. The audio track as a whole was created for the album Rodeo for the Sheepish from Hen House Studios. Ellen Maybe was named one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium by Writer’s Digest, and Henry Rollins has described her as “an irresistible force.”

Jupiter by Diana Syder

Sally Fryer animates a poem by Diana Syder for the Version Film Festival in Manchester. The poem is from the recent Comma Press title Planet Box, a collaboration between Syder and artist Laura Daly.

The White Room by Charles Simic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOF7hUJ29vY

An exceptionally interesting videopoem: “1 min photocopimation based on a poem by Charles Simic called The White Room. By Noush Anand, 2007,” says the note at YouTube. This is Anand’s only upload to YouTube. It’s been viewed all of 63 times — a travesty.

The video animates just the first two stanzas of Simic’s ten-stanza poem; read it in full at Poets.org.

Soxy by Sadie Fisher

A collaboration between Glenn-emlyn Richards and Sadie Fisher for the Comma Press Poetry Film Festival 2010. Fisher describes herself as

a writer of short fictions;

an actress of clear convictions;

an image maker & photoshop breaker;

a producer of films & inconstant lover of sox.