~ Nationality: Canada ~
Water for Canaries by Doyali Islam
the last singing descendants of a burning world
the first heirs of a new
So often, the poems most effective at making a political statement are not overtly political at all. Here’s a 2019 animation by Suzie Hanna, an Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts whose “current personal focus in research and practice is poetry animation made in collaboration,” according to her website. I found a good micro-review on the Palestine Cinema website:
How can we witness a world in which the moon and the drone hang in the same sky? What can the evolution of dinosaur into bird tell us about human survival? In âwater for canariesâ, award-winning Toronto poet Doyali Islam contemplates an Associated Press photograph taken during a ceasefire within the July 2014 bombing of Beit Hanoun. Islamâs poem acts as solemn witness but also achieves a moment of lift-off in which Palestinians reveal their extraordinary courage, resilience, and mercy. UK animator Suzie Hanna has collaborated to create a short poetry film using hand-cut stencils and paint to emphasize the chaotic atmosphere and to celebrate the fragility of life amid destruction. doyali-islam.com & suziehanna.com
The poem âwater for canariesâ is from Doyali Islamâs 2019 poetry book, heft, published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada.
Here’s the link to heft. Doyali Islam’s website seems to be offline, but here’s a good bio. “Water for Canaries” wasn’t the only poem from heft to get adapted into a poetry film; “Letter” had three different adaptations for the online Visible Poetry Project in 2019, including one by Moving Poems’ own Jane Glennie: see here. And we’ve shared a number of Suzie Hanna’s animations over the years.
Body Electric by Mike Hoolboom
Uploaded just three weeks ago, Body Electric is from renowned Canadian experimental film-maker Mike Hoolboom, whose work we have featured several times before. This film has a hypnotic mood of quiet unease, with a familiar hint of black humour. It takes an experimental approach to text, as well as image and sound. From the notes:
A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song⊠A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. (source)
The delivery of text in Body Electric alternates between the whispery machine-voice of the wall socket, and written lines on the screen. I transcribed the words on the screen. They describe a vision of AI consciousness:
It was filled with secrets
deceptions that made it whole.When it listened
it was not just attentive but acquisitive.It used others feelings to clarify its own
internalizing them so completely
it believed it was their author.
The wall socket speaks in a first person monotone. Its repetitions feel vaguely delirious, adding to the hypnotic qualities of the film.
Iâve mentioned before that authorship of the films Mike produces is purposely ambiguous. Artist attribution for this film rests on a bare list of names in a single end credit, and the fact that Mike has uploaded it. The credited people are likely collaborators or creators of the original media that Mike remixed: Emidio Buchinho, Claudia Dey, Filipa Hora, JoĂŁo Hora, Vitor Joaquim and James Salter.
Caterpillar Suit by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
A 2020 videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, not shared here till now due to an almost criminal oversight, considering how good it is. In 2021 it was a finalist at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Greece and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival in Canada. Vitkauskas notes that it was
Inspired by Latvian artist, Elina Krima + sculpture artist Walter Oltmann.
First cinepoem of 2020 explores what it means to wear the suits of natural instinct, moving through familial separations (especially in light of children being cruelly separated from parents in US). This is perhaps the tip of fear we collectively recycle for the coming decade.
Weâve shared some of her other work over the years, but do explore Vitkausasâs Vimeo page for much more.
Un/Write by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Vancouver-based poet and poetry filmmaker Fiona Tinwei Lam collaborated with animation students Lara Renaud and Quinn Kelly back in February on this videopoem âabout revision, redaction, and renewal.â Lam told me in an email that
It originated in a published shaped or visual poem on the page about the editing and revising process. I quickly created and brainstormed a text block from which the poem would be carved out on screen.
But I realized there were other poems within the poem while utilizing further compression and fragmentation. Then I noticed there were a few interesting phrases in the discarded text from the text block Iâd created for the initial poem, that could form the basis of a new poem about reclamation. So these âcut outâ phrases could return on screen in a new way.
She added that she thought it could form the basis of a fun lesson plan for schools and community writing workshops, and I agree. One of the great things about erasure poetry is the way it reminds us that no creation is truly ex nihilo; thereâs always an element of discovery. And often with such serendipity comes joy, flowering of its own accord, as the animation suggests. A wonderful start to Poetry Month. (And imagine my surprise just now, bringing up the Canadian National Poetry Month page, to find that this yearâs theme is in fact joy!)
Landschop by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
From the Canadian duo of Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, Landschop is one in a series of videopoems titled Around Osprey. The artistsâ words about the overall project:
Around Osprey is a series of short videopoems based on our 2018 residency at the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast Preserve in South Florida. These poems have been derived from our exploration of the lands and waters of the Myakka River, the Manatee River, Sarasota Bay, and Charlotte Harbour. While looking for the crossovers between nature and culture, we were also looking for threads of human histories within protected natural spaces. (source)
Whispered voices combine with cleverly designed on-screen text to convey the single words and short phrases that form the poetic piece of writing. The background of the soundtrack is comprised of subtle sounds of nature, randomly punctuated by sounds of gunshot. The latter are a mysterious aural presence through the video and only connect to the text in the final moments.
I appreciate the gentle, open-ended qualities of this video, consistent with much of the other work from these artists. Itâs as though each of their videopoems is just one moment in a long and steady stream of contemplations.
Their daily blog entries for the Around Osprey residency can be found here.
Letter to Fred by Mike Hoolboom & Alfred Vander
At one level, Letter to Fred is a film about the creative obsession of film-making. At another itâs about life and death beyond that frame. Itâs the fifth film Iâve shared here at Moving Poems by Canadian experimental film-maker, Mike Hoolboom, so highly esteemed in the field since the 1980s.
At the filmâs heart is a letter from Mikeâs long-time friend, Alfred Vander aka Fred Pelon, a former film-maker. The simple words of the letter are given on screen simply as subtitles, while the sublime images, sounds and filmic rhythms invite a subtle poetic trance, a mindset of clarity in which the authenticity of what is said can better be felt and heard.
The film itself seems like Mikeâs âletter to Fredâ, as if in answer to the words received. The film-makerâs synopsis:
A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only the next stage in a life dedicated to reinvention. In this brief post, he describes his new normal, no longer living in a boat but a monastery, working as a caregiver, a gardener, a bridge keeper. As the pandemic waxes on, and my relationships to fringe movie practices and places that used to be central feel increasingly abstract, as if part of some faraway dream, these spare lines offer new hope, and the ongoing consolation of friendship.
The drawn-out opening shot startles immediately to the edge of the seat, the knifes-edge presence of death a stark reference point for what follows. The film is highly personal to the two friends and yet covers far wider ground.
Citizen Poetry by Lisa Robertson and Mike Hoolboom
The edited stream of âfoundâ moving images writes its own wordless poem in Mike Hoolboomâs Citizen Poetry. Meticulous sound design brings another rich texture of poetry to this film. Text-on-screen offers reading of words without voice, the content adapted from Lisa Robertsonâs collection of poetic-prose essays, Nilling.
There is a a difficulty in crediting Mikeâs films for cataloguing purposes. For some years they have shown conscious effort to subvert authorship. Citizen Poetryâs final credit gives only a stark list of names, with Mike somewhere around the middle:
Samuel Boudier
Murasaki Encho
Jeanette Groenendaal
Mike Hoolboom
Lucia Martinez
Olivier Provily
Susanne Ohmann
Jean Perret
Liz Straitman
Leslie Supnet
Ana Taran
And yet this piece bears the indelible mark of his film-making style over the decades of a prolific and esteemed artistic life. Thereâs a breathtaking, dynamic and moving quality to the choice and editing of images from multiple sources, a subtle euphoria, dark and light, deftly woven through all elements of this film.
It could well be that the other names in the credits are artists who created the disparate fragments of âfoundâ media in Citizen Poetry. I wonder if Mike directly knows any of his listed collaborators or contributors. As a fellow maker of films that assemble âfoundâ media, I relate to indirect and virtual creative connections.
However Lisa Robertson is given her own solo credit as the source of Mikeâs radically condensed text for the film. As its own piece of writing, Citizen Poetry could be loosely described as prose poetry. From the filmâs synopsis:
This retake on belonging and boundaries imagines poetry as a capitalist salve.
The first half of the film sets context and describes mechanisms of how life is objectified in capitalism, people and all. The second half speaks beautifully about the âcitizen poetryâ that brings hope and liberating connections below the radar.
Borders inspire crossings.
Poetry is the speech of citizenship. It keeps escaping and follows language towards an ear that could belong to anyone.
The final line â I wonât spoil it â brings inspired closure.
Vimeo shows the title of the film as Citizen Poet but I have chosen to adhere to Citizen Poetry, as it appears on the screen.
Moving Poems has before featured three other films from Mike Hoolboom.
Dream 1, 2 & 3 (video series) by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
A trilogy of videopoems by long-time collaborators Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas in Canada, the Dream series was realised as part of an artist residency at the historic Deering Estate in Miami, USA. From the synopsis for Dream 1:
In September 1925, on board the steamship SS City of Paris, en route back to the United States, James Deering suffered a heart attack and died. After the deaths of both James Deering and his brother Charles, their houses became museums bequeathed for public enjoyment.
In this fictional account of three imagined dreams, Charles Deering addresses the death of his younger brother James.
The synopsis for Dream 2:
Charles awakes from a premonitory dream in which many strangers visit their homes but neither he nor James lives there. The letter is almost a question to his brother about his health.
Each of the videos makes use of a split screen, bringing two different image streams into play with each other, and with repeated visual elements across the trilogy. The layered images are haunting and poetic in conveying the fictional dreams, an interesting concept. I find the mood across all three videos somehow reminiscent of La Jetée by Chris Marker.
Valerie LeBlanc narrates the imagined letters from Charles to his brother.
The Dream 3 synopsis:
Charles has a dream within a dream in which he is overcome by a great sadness. He is relieved that the visions dissipate in his waking reality.
Aside from this Dream trilogy, the artistsâ time at The Deering Estate gave rise to a number of other videopoems, photographs, audioworks and installations. All together they make up a larger, overall residency project called Oasis. The artistsâ wrote a journal of their experiences and creativity during the residency at the project website.
