~ Filmmaker: Mike Gioia ~
The Self as Product by Tom Disch
A 2020 upload from Blank Verse Films, one of the channels added to our freshly updated links page. Director Mike Gioia told me in an email that he ‘borrowed the concept of the Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” and applied it to the poetry. I made the poet a physical character in the scene but one who is distinctly apart from it.’ It works brilliantly, in part because the guy playing the poet, Brendan Constantine, is a very good performance poet in his own right.
The YouTube description notes that ‘The music is “Tango Cool” by Ted Gioia, copyright Time Records.’ Here’s what it has about the poet:
Tom Disch (1958-2008) was a gifted, witty, and biting writer. Disch wrote poetry under the name Tom Disch and wrote science-fiction and fantasy under the name Thomas Disch, including the children-adventure series The Brave Little Toaster, which was later adapted into a Disney movie. Disch’s dark yet hilarious take on the world is beautifully condensed in this poem “The Self as Product”, which was originally published in his 1991 collection Dark Verses & Light.
You can find out more about Tom Disch on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch
You can read more of Tom Disch’s poetry here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tom-disch
Turbulence by Dave Harris
Poet, playwright, and essayist Dave Harris is featured in this latest installment in the monthly series “A Poet’s Space” from Rattle magazine and director Mike Gioia’s Blank Verse Films. For the text of the poem (which won the 2018 Rattle Poetry Prize) and some additional remarks by Harris, see the post on Rattle‘s website.
I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand by Francesca Bell
Rattle is one of the most widely circulated print literary journals in the U.S., and I’ve always admired its website as well. So I was very interested to see it venture into poetry film production last month, partnering with Mike Gioia and Blank Verse Films to make a film out of Francesca Bell‘s popular, sardonic poem from Rattle‘s Summer 2013 issue. Featuring the poet as an actor seems like a nearly inevitable choice for this poem, but it really works well.
The YouTube description suggests that this will be a monthly thing: “Rattle magazine presents episode one of their new video series ‘A Poet’s Space’. This month…” So that’s really good news.
The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine
This film of Brendan Constantine‘s brilliant anti-gun poem (click through for the text) kicked off a promising new YouTube channel called Blank Verse Films, the work of L.A.-based filmmaker Mike Gioia. He described his modus operandi in an email: “I travel around filming poets, and then edit the recitations into little films.” He added,
Making the videos is much more challenging and exciting than I originally anticipated. I’m trying lots of different approaches but still don’t feel like I’ve “cracked the code” of how to film poetry. Later this month I’m going to try some experiments with dramatic reenactments of poems that will use actors who speak the lines of poetry.
Do consider subscribing to his channel and (of course) watching the other films. There’s also a Facebook page.
