~ 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.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Janet Lees)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Janet Lees is a lens-based artist and poet. Her films have been selected for many festivals and screenings, including the Aesthetica Art Prize, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and Festival Fotogenia. In 2021 she won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition. Her art photography has been exhibited around the world and her poetry is widely published and anthologised. She has had two books published: House of Water, a collection of her poems and art photographs, and A bag of sky, the winning collection in the Frosted Fire Firsts prize hosted by the UK’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
Director’s statement: I use the camera as a storytelling machine rather than a documenting device. I think film, photography and poetry are among the most important means of creative expression in the Anthropocene. Joseph Aversano’s intriguing haibun ‘The Gone Missing’ seems to me to encapsulate so much of the nature of humanness and life in these times; a sense of living on a knife edge of destructive compulsions. As a photographer and filmmaker I am drawn to damaged, dangerous places, so this piece absolutely struck a chord.
Judges’ statement: We loved the framing, the camera angle, the flickering filtered sunlight and the soundtrack, and admired the build-up to the closing shot, which somehow fully expresses Aversano’s enigmatic haiku.
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Pete Johnston)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
A Super 8-style film by Pete Johnston, one of two films by him that we selected for the festival. Pete Johnston teaches and makes film at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. He co-founded the FILMETRY online festival of poetry and film with Cindy Hunter Morgan.
He told us: “Aversano’s piece, the shortest of the bunch, obviously evokes a lot for so many people, hence why it was adapted so many times! I was no different and got to use some old footage and create some new footage to go with it. I’m fascinated to get to see all the versions and it highlights what makes cinepoetry or filmetry a favorite mode of mine, the way cinema can interpret and reinterpret poetry in unique ways artist to artist.”
Judges’ statement: “We liked the balance between playful fun and melancholy that the two scenes create. It all worked together to create a lovely sense of real people that we could actually know and their journeys away from each other. We also appreciated the treatment of the text on screen, which really helped us make sense of the haibun.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Marilyn McCabe)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Marilyn McCabe’s second full-length collection of poems, Glass Factory, was published by The Word Works in 2016, and her second chapbook, Being Many Seeds, was published in 2020 by Grayson Books. She’s based in upstate New York.
She included this note: “The haiku portion of the haibun form often sounds to me like a whisper. Mr. Aversano’s piece felt so intimate to me that a soft delivery of the prose portion and a silent haiku felt appropriate for the video, and fit perfectly with the video footage of moving mist I captured in the Adirondacks one day.”
Judges’ statement: “Beautiful footage in black and white, the soft floating mist and soft clouds contrasting with the spiky lines of the tree in the foreground, creating an unnerving and strong sense of cataract and uncertainty.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
Torch by Aoife Lyall
A paean to the power of the imagination from Scottish poet Aoife Lyall and her publisher Bloodaxe Books, directed by Irish poet and filmmaker Luke Morgan, with music by his brother Jake Morgan. The poem evidently appears in an upcoming collection called The Day Before:
Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.
Act of Creation by Najm al-Din Razi
Act of Creation translates the words of 13th century Sufi poet Najm al-Din Razi into music video. The film-maker is Montreal-based Tanya Evanson, who also gives voice to the piece. The soundtrack comes from her music album Zenship. Evanson is also an award-winning poet and has produced four studio albums with musicians of African, Caribbean, European, Middle Eastern and South American descent.
Acknowledgements by Louise Wallace
On a sweltering day at the pools, monotony conspires to take us on an ethereal journey. A bored front desk attendant reads the acknowledgments of a paperback and while observing the swimmers she drifts into a daydream.
—director’s webpage
New Zealand poet Louise Wallace as interpreted by Auckland-based director Arvind Eriksson and voice actor Elizabeth McRae. This 2021 film is included in a new article by poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen at a general-interest news site, How to film a poem — a wonderful survey of poetry filmmaking in New Zealand in preparation for the first Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival in November (submissions open).
Acknowledgements was a recommendation to Charles by another New Zealand director, Alfio Leotta, who called it “a beautiful, intelligent and funny film that inspired my decision to start experimenting with poetry film.”
Watershed by Tania Haberland
Watershed is a fusion of abstract music video and poetic text. Its maker, Carine Iriarte, calls this electropoetry. As with ambient electronic music, the piece is minimal, with mantric repetition of a fragment of a poem by Tania Haberland, whose spoken voice within the music is lush and lulling to the ear. The images meet the sound in fluid digital layers. The hypnotic experience of the video is like a trance meditation.
The Torrid Zone is another video from these artists featured before at Moving Poems, in that instance from a complete poem by Haberland.
Music and film are credited to Poetics of Reverie, a collaborative project of Iriarte.
Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat
An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.
Сезонът на печалните кентаври / The Season of the Sorrowful Centaurs by Marion Koleva
A poem in the voice of Clio/Kleio, the muse of history, by Bulgarian journalist and poet Marion Koleva in a 2021 film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3, supported by funding from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The poem appears in Koleva’s 2014 collection, Спомен за тропик (Memory of Tropic).
Like Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva, which I shared two weeks ago, this film is part of Mihaylov’s project 10 Short Films of Videopoetry.
Childhood’s End by Howie Good
I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.
The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.
