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Videopoem Mixtape Vol. 1 by Patricia Killelea

I was struck by how well these six author-made videopoems work together as a collection, and thought they’d also serve as a good introduction to the videopoetry practice of the latest addition to our editorial team, Patricia Killelea, whose work I’ve featured here in the past, but none since 2018. The embedded YouTube player should work, but let me append links to the six films, in order, with the YouTube descriptions for each, excluding the repetitive but vital detail that each features Patricia’s own words, voice, and video:

The Middle of Nowhere
“The Middle of Nowhere” received an Honorable Mention @ The Midwest Video Poetry Fest, Madison, WI 2023
This poetryfilm is a meditation on what it means to live in the rural Midwest— the phrase, “middle of nowhere,” itself is a misnomer.

In the Summer of 2020, We Picked Berries
“In the Summer of 2020, We Picked Berries” was Award-Nominated and an Official Selection for the REELpoetry International Poetry Film Festival – Houston, TX 2024
Poetryfilm reflecting on the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic and historic protests in U.S. urban centers in 2020. There was a stark contrast between life in the cities and life in rural America during this time. But that was only on the surface.

A Rusted Bird Cage in an Otherwise Empty Field
“A Rusted Birdcage in an Otherwise Empty Field” was an Online Feature @ FENCE, 2021
A poetryfilm addressing the shadow self.

Greetings from Lake Superior
“Postcard: Greetings from Lake Superior” was an Official Selection @ Det Poetiske Fonoteque: Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival, Copenhagen 2022
A poetryfilm exploring ecological crisis in the Great Lakes region: mercury poisoning, PFAS (forever chemicals), and toxic stamp sands from mining waste.
Poem originally published in Sky Island Journal.

A New History/Una Nueva Historia
“A New History/Una Nueva Historia” was a Finalist and Official Selection for Frame to Frames II @ FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival, Mexico City 2023
Spanish translation by Camilo Bosso. With special thanks to poet Lisandra Perez, MFA, for PK’s original Spanish translation assistance.
An ekphrastic poetryfilm inspired by Ana Segovia’s painting Huapengo Torero, “A New History” celebrating the act of crossing over into a new way of life— one that challenges stereotypical conceptions of gender, animal-human relationships, and desire.
Published in Poem Film Imprints Vol. 1, Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow II/Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen II (ekphrastic poetry + films/cine + poesía ecfrástica), Anthology, Bilingual Edition, Poem in Print & QR Code linking to Videopoem, Liberated Words, Bath, UK, 2024 available here.

How it Starts
“How it Starts” was Shortlisted and an Official Selection at the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition, Cork, Ireland 2017 Also screened @ POETRY FILM LIVE ​
A poetryfilm addressing violence, internet culture, and history.
Poem appeared in Counterglow (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2018)

I asked Patricia why “mixtape” (rather than, say, “chapbook” or “anthology”), and what led her to this grouping, and her response is worth quoting in full:

It felt like my poetryfilms didn’t have a home. They were scattered across the internet— some streaming on lit journal or videopoem sites, while others were screened at festivals but otherwise not made public. I’m a private person, but what are these poetryfilms for if they’re not out there in the world moving around? The concept of the mixtape came to mind, a curated playlist that would be free and accessible to anyone online. When I pick up a poetry collection, I can read from the opening page all the way to end, or I can skip around from poem to poem. And when I listen to an album, I can move between tracks or hear it all the way through in a continuous experience. Why couldn’t I do the same with my videopoems?

As someone born in the early 80’s, I remember the joy and excitement of the mixtape. I made a tape for a high school crush, traded carefully pirated masterpieces with other goth-industrial, punk and metalhead friends. It took time and care and I had to think about the impact of the mixtape taken as a whole. What messages would it send? How would it make the listener feel? Would I finally be understood? With this Videopoem Mixtape Vol. 1, I am bringing together selections from my recent poetryfilm work as a kind of retrospective exercise and an offering to the videopoem community to encourage more open sharing and collaboration. Finally, this mixtape was an experiment for myself so I could see how these pieces fit together across time, talking to and echoing one another since I tend to carry out my personal obsessions in poetics, both on and off the page. These obsessions are namely the natural world and environmental justice issues, history, and a general fascination with language itself as a medium through which and by which we live and exist.

Because my poetryfilms are largely voice-driven, I chose to refer to this curation as a Videopoem Mixtape instead of a Videopoem Chapbook. More people outside of the literary world know what a mixtape is compared to a chapbook, and I wanted the collection to be immediately discernible to folks outside of the poetryfilm practice.

My hope is that more and more poetryfilm artists will release their own Videopoem Mixtapes online. Let’s trade these Videopoem Mixtapes back and forth with one another like we used to trade cassette mixtapes back in the day. Give your scattered videopoems a home so we can all stop by for a visit.

Patricia Killelea is a writer and poetry filmmaker living in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her poetry films have been officially selected and screened at REELpoetry International Film Festival, Det Poetiske Fonoteque: Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival, the Ó’Béal International Poetry-Film Competition, and Frame to Frames II: Your Eyes Follow for the FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival. Her other poetry films have received Honorable Mention at the Midwest Video Poetry Fest and longlisted for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Patricia’s poetry films and essays on videopoetry craft have been featured at FENCE, Poetry Film Live, and Atticus Review. Her most recent poetry collection, Counterglow, was published by Urban Farmhouse Press (2019), and her poems have appeared in literary journals cream city review, Seneca Review, Quarterly West, The Common, Trampoline, Barzakh, Waxwing and elsewhere. She was Poetry Editor at Passages North from 2015-2022 and has been a Poetry Editor at FENCE since 2022. She is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Michigan University.

I haven’t told my garden yet by Emily Dickinson

A new upload from South African visual artist and animator Diek Grobler, “Animated on a Alexandre Noyer pinscreen. Music by Anne Vanschothorst,” according to the Vimeo description. Here’s the text.

As a lover of both Emily Dickinson and forests, the imagery really spoke to me. With the closing image in particular, Grobler seems perfectly attuned to the poet’s “Hint … within the Riddle,” and maintains a light touch throughout, avoiding the pitfall of over-interpretation that ruins so many poetry animations for me.

Immigrant Sea by Forrest Gander

A friend lent me a copy of Forrest Gander’s 2021 collection Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies, and in a moment of pure serendipity last Wednesday, skimming the acknowledgements, I see a mention of poetry films, so I go to Vimeo and find this video at the top of my feed, uploaded just a few hours earlier! I’ve been following Gander’s videopoetry for years, during which time his reputation as a page poet has skyrocketed, to the point where I think it’s fair to say he’s the most prominent American poet regularly making his own poetry films. And his videopoems have grown stronger as well (though you may have to take my word for this, as his earlier films have gone missing). His choice of images used to feel a bit arbitrary at times, but I don’t get that feeling from any of his recent films, which now feel as necessary and urgent as the texts on their own.

You can read the text of the poem in Harper’s (if you haven’t already hit their paywalled limit).

Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz by Marsha de la O

The latest videopoem by Matt Mullins, who writes:

Here’s Janet Leigh; she’s afraid of jazz in reverse as an overlay to diagrammatical stereographic explanations. The knife-blade shrieks are Doppler warps to a molasses of strips teased. Unimaginable synchronicities abound. The drain eye has an arm and spins water into sound. It’s all very pointed in its touching.

poem: Marsha de la O

concept/direction/audio-visual composition: Matt Mullins

Vimeo description

Via the Filmetry Archive. The poem by Marsha de la O was one of the texts supplied to filmmakers for their 2024 contest; this film placed second. I was especially impressed by how Mullins handled the challenge of including and suggesting jazz elements in the soundtrack without simply deploying a jazz track, giving the film an allusive depth and working to counter-balance what might have otherwise seemed too cerebral an approach to the imagery. And given the long history of jazz at poetry readings, Mullins’ Beat-style vocal delivery seemed just right to my ear.

The Bride Goes Wild by Amy Gerstler

This recent film by Janet Lees, who needs no introduction here, took top honors at this year’s Filmetry festival, part of the ten-day Capital City Film Festival (CCFF) in Lansing, Michigan. Its propulsive energy and light-hearted approach, while a bit of a departure from some of the slower, more meditative work that Lees is best known for, demonstrates a mastery of textured layering, and overall makes a great fit with the poem by Amy Gerstler — one of a selection of texts provided by the organizers:

This year’s theme was POETICS OF CINEMA. Pre-selected poems all engaged the concept of cinema in some way, and filmmakers were encouraged to create new work from them. The only rule is that filmmakers must include the text of the poem in full.

CCFF website

As for the poet,

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art criticism, journalism and other stuff. She has published thirteen books of poems, a children’s book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. Index of Women, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.

author website

Be sure to browse the archive at Filmetry, which has been updated to include all of this year’s films—a great resource.

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

war movie by Martha McCollough

This 11-year-old videopoem by Martha McCollough—one of the few of hers we’ve never featured here—seems more relevant than ever. It’s been six years since she last uploaded a new video to her Vimeo page, but her unique voice and vision remain unsurpassed in an increasingly crowded field of American videopoets.

Malecón/Miami by Leslie Sainz

Cuban-American poet Leslie Sainz performs her poem in this 2023 film from The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, “Directed by Eric Felipe-Barkin and shot in Coconut Grove and Biscayne Island, Miami.” It’s one of ten films in a series called Read By Miami, produced in cooperation with O, Miami Poetry Festival, which runs throughout the month of April each year.

I Am Here by Porsche Veu

Porsche Veu writes, directs and performs in I Am Here, an inspiring dance and music video on personal empowerment.

Porsche Veu aka The Poetic Activist is an unapologetic author, spoken word poet, speaker, educator, and artist of many talents from Oakland. (source)

Porsche uses her art to fight social injustice, empower women, youth, & the Black community, and advocate for mental & emotional health. (source)

The film was winner of the multimedia category in the Button Poetry Video Contest in 2022. The poem can be read on the page here.

Moment by Matt Dennison

A new film by Marc Neys, with music of his own composition, for the poem ‘Moment’ by Matt Dennison. Marc used the U.S. Army’s footage of an atomic bomb test, leaning into the distressed quality of the film stock digitized by the Prelinger Archive.

If You Feel Terrible by Rebecca Wadlinger

With a pitch-black sense of humour, If You Feel Terrible is the first poem from the book Terror, Terrible, Terrific by US poet Rebecca Wadlinger. A bio:

Rebecca Wadlinger was born in Pennsylvania, where she attended the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, and her doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her poetry has appeared in publications like The Best New Poets anthology, Tin House, Ploughshares, and Mid-American Review, among others. (source)

This film of the poem is directed, illustrated, and animated by Nick Stokes.

I found the film in Judy Elfferich‘s outstanding Poetry in Motion section of the Dutch website ooteoote, where she has been publishing videopoetry since 2015.

Subtleties of Shanghai by Angela Kong

A lovingly crafted, gentle and touching film set during lockdown, Subtleties of Shanghai is by Chinese-American writer and artist Angela Kong. It was a finalist in the 2023 Spoken Word Competition at The Artists Forum in New York, and winner of the international category in the 2022 Button Video Contest.

Angela Kong is a Chinese American writer and activist committed to social change and awareness through photography, videography, and spoken word addressing issues such as experiences of racism, injustice, and privilege. A 2017 graduate of Colorado College, Kong currently works and lives in Shanghai. (source)