~ Nationality: U.K. ~
Driving through the city towards whatever is beautiful by Warsan Shire
A commissioned poem by Warsan Shire in her capacity as Young Poet Laureate for London in a film from VisitLondon.com. (I wasn’t able to discover who actually filmed and edited it.) It’s an excellent poem that almost redeems the banal advertisement for London in which it is incorporated. Here’s the YouTube blurb:
How do you capture the way a city makes you feel? The anticipation of getting out into the city while driving over Westminster Bridge, the calm that being close to the River Thames induces, or the sense of time standing still as you relax in the park. Watch and share as Warsan Shire opens her heart and pens an intimate love letter to the capital. In her personal London Story, the latest of her commissions as part of her role as Young Poet Laureate for London, she uses the city as the backdrop for an exploration of her feelings of falling in love.
Arctica: three poems by Stevie Ronnie
https://vimeo.com/146147123
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https://vimeo.com/146160092
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https://vimeo.com/146166630
To make up for my prolonged absence (I’ve been relocating to the UK for the winter), here’s a whole triptych of filmpoems from Filmpoem itself: the crack team of filmmaker Alastair Cook and composer Luca Nasciuti, working in commission for a fascinating project from Northumberland-based poet Stevie Ronnie.
In July 2013 writer and multidisciplinary artist Stevie Ronnie visited the High Arctic as part of the Arctic Circle international residency programme. Arctica is a year-long series of interlinked artworks on the subject of climate change that Stevie has made in response to that experience.
These works are interdisciplinary in nature encompassing literature, performance, photography, artist’s books, film and a public art installation.
That’s from the Arctica website. A dedicated page on the Filmpoem website includes descriptions of each film:
[…] The films also feature Arctic footage shot by US-based artist Michael Eckblad alongside found footage from Alastair’s collection.
‘What I Should Have Said’ is the first Filmpoem of the Arctica triptych. It takes us into the air as we settle in to listen – then brings us back to ground in the Arctic. This is a love poem to the family that Stevie left behind, originally composed shortly before he set off on his Arctic journey. ‘What I Should Have Said’ appears in Stevie’s collection of poetry ‘Manifestations’ (Red Squirrel Press).
‘Time and the Two Year Old’s Hands’ is the is the second Filmpoem of the Arctica triptych. It reaches the midway point of the triptych and turns back on itself, the hourglass turning over, injecting an urgency into this plaintive call for the survival of our children. The poem ‘Time and the Two Year Old’s Hands’ was composed as a creative response to the IPCC report on Climate Change that was commissioned by Tipping Point, the Free Word Centre and Spread the Word for the publication ‘Weatherfronts: Climate Change and the Stories We Tell’.
‘From Arctica’ is the is the third Filmpoem of the Arctica triptych. It brings us back from the Arctic to Northumberland and was originally composed in response to the tragic and unexpected death of a child in Stevie’s local community. This difficult and moving ending to the tryptich is about the about the acceptance of the unspeakable, the unthinkable and those things that are around us that we choose not to see. ‘From Arctica’ is an extract from a yet to be published poetic narrative that explores climate change, light, dark and our relationship with death against the backdrop of the Arctic landscape.
Watching them back to back, there’s a definite gestalt effect for me. Also, these filmpoems certainly put my own difficulties adjusting to a more northern latitude (London! Yowza) in perspective.
Home by Warsan Shire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p50wrd2JiX4
This is Home is the barrel of the gun by Dutch filmmaker Paultje Piraat. The music is by Renato Folgado, with the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire reading her poem “Home” in the soundtrack.
With the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, the poem has received a great deal of attention online and in the press. An article in The Guardian provided some background:
“No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.” This evocative stanza from poet Warsan Shire’s Home hit a nerve online recently as the European public finally woke up to the reality of the refugee crisis. Explaining, in short verses, the unthinkable choices refugees must take, Shire writes: “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.”
The young Nairobi-born, London-raised writer first drafted another poem about the refugee experience, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), in 2009 after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. The group gave a “warm” welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.”
Shire was something of a phenomenon well before this poem became famous, though. The New Yorker wrote about her last month: “The Writing Life of a Young, Prolific Poet.”
Her poetry evokes longing for home, a place to call home, and is often nostalgic for memories not her own, but for those of her parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, people who forged her idea of her ancestral homeland through their own stories. With fifty thousand Twitter followers and a similar number of Tumblr readers, Shire, more than most today, demonstrates the writing life of a young, prolific poet whose poetry or poem-like offhand thoughts will surface in one of your social media feeds and often be exactly what you needed to read, or what you didn’t know that you needed to read, at that moment.
And sure enough, I first encountered her work this past weekend, when a stanza from a poem she wrote in 2011 was being passed around in image-meme form in reaction to the Da’esh attacks in Paris. I shared it to my Facebook feed, where it quickly racked up more likes and shares than anything I’ve posted all year.
The Litany of the Saints by Lucy English
A film by Helen Dewbury for poet and poetry-film expert Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project, a “contemporary digital re-imagining of a Book of Hours,” according to English’s (non-public) postings on Facebook. Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon has also made films for the project, and apparently other filmmakers have pledged to contribute as well. Eventually all the films are to be featured on a dedicated website. I’ll be sure to link to it when it goes live.
To be a Ghost by Rosemary Norman
With Halloween and Day of the Dead looming, here’s a film from the long-time videopoetry collaborators Stuart Pound (images) and Rosemary Norman (words). The synopsis from Vimeo:
A ghost actor haunts his screen life, and is haunted by it, to the clicking of a projector. What you see is scraps of film under a microscope, with its sprocket holes, oily colour, and accumulated fluff and dust.
Millionaire by Mab Jones
This animation by Lauren Orme and Jordan Brookes is described by the poet, Mab Jones, as
A poem about love, in the form of a list.
Dedicated to (about) the poet Johnny Giles.
The film has just taken top honors at the 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, winning for Best Animation, Best Valentine, and Best Overall Production. It was also shortlisted in the Southbank Centre’s Shot Through The Heart poetry film competition in 2014.
Seeing the Pope on TV by Maria Jastrzȩbska
This four-year-old video by Kevin Simmonds for a Maria Jastrzȩbska poem about Pope John Paul II seems, sadly, as relevant as ever. The description at Vimeo:
A poem by Maria Jastrzȩbska from Syrena (Redbeck Press, 2004) that appears in Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, from Sibling Rivalry Press and edited by Kevin Simmonds.
That anthology has its own website, including a videos page where you can watch this and 28 other videopoems! Kudos to Simmonds. It’s rare for a poetry editor to take video seriously at all, let alone make the videos himself.
Dolphins (excerpt) by Inua Ellams
Inua Ellams‘ contribution to Refugee Tales, a project dedicated to “walking and sharing Tales until indefinite immigration detention ends in the UK.” The film was made by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, shot and edited by Shanshan Chen with additional camera work by Amelia Wong and original music by Paul Mottram. I found this via a post in the excellent online magazine Aeon:
‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’
Occasionally, stories of refugees fleeing desperate circumstances in their home countries make the mainstream news cycle – usually following the horrifying discovery of dozens found dead in transit on land or at sea. But much more frequently, the trying and terrifying journeys of migrants to find a safer place to live go all but ignored.
Having escaped the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, Nigerian-British writer Inua Ellams knows something of the migrant experience, but he says that the nightmarish journeys of refugees is still something he can hardly fathom. Nevertheless, in Inua’s Dolphins, Ellams adds insight and artfulness to the migrant experience by transforming the stories of children who have fled their homelands into poetry, imbuing the horror with a humanity that is compassionate but clear-eyed.
Map of the Underground by Ifor ap Glyn
A terrific animated film from 2005 directed by Hywel Griffith of Griffilms Animation Studio, featuring a poem by Ifor ap Glyn, two-time winner of the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Music and dub are by Meilyr Tomos.
Inside and Out by Anna-May Laugher
A new film by Helen Dewbery using a text by the French-British poet Anna-May Laugher, with music by Kevin MacLeod. According to the credits, it was “created as part of a elephantsfootprint workshop led by Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron with thanks to Hilda Sheehan for inviting us to be part of Poetry Swindon”. For more on Elephant’s Footprint, see their website and Vimeo page.
The Spotted Leaves of Some Marsh Orchids by Steve Griffiths
If you haven’t been keeping up with the Late Love Poems film project (30 films featuring the poetry of Steve Griffiths in 30 weeks), you’re in for a particular treat this week, with the debut of Film 7. Griffiths comments:
This is an important poem for me, about an extraordinary moment of realisation when you fully see the individuality of the person you love. I read it at our wedding for that reason. What’s been done to it in this film is something else. It was the first poem I worked on really hard after unhappy trials in front of the camera, and I rediscovered levels, nuances, turns of rhythm and pace that I’d forgotten since I wrote it. Then there’s Eamon Bourke’s film work, and the first substantial, astonishingly sensitive, musical input from Ivan “Ogmios” Owen, of battlerap fame on YouTube, who I’ve known since he was two. The way it falls together feels special.
