~ Nationality: United States ~
Second Firing by Keary Rosen
This entertaining piece by Keary Rosen (text and voice) and Kelly Oliver (filming and editing) is featured in TriQuarterly, one of three videos that kick off the latest issue. The magazine’s mishandling of submissions recently sparked a kerfuffle in the American writing community, suggesting that they may be having growing pains, and they remain out-of-step with web publishing norms in preventing their own videos from being shared on blogs and social media sites (or even viewed on Vimeo) — strong evidence that they have yet to fully transition from the scarcity mentality of print publishing to the abundance mentality of the web. But I continue to be encouraged by their foregrounding of multimedia work, and I wish more web journals would follow their lead in that respect.
UPDATE (24 July 2014): I’m pleased to report that all TriQuarterly films are now embeddable.
on a prophet by Kathleen Roberts
she says that she
is learning to be immortal
although it has not
been easy
she’s trying to learn
to stop eating she says
nourishment
distracts the body
from its truth…
Indiana-based graphic designer and poet Dave Richardson, best known in the videopoetry world for his 2012 piece “The Mantis Shrimp,” combines forces with poet Kathleen Roberts to make this affecting and effective videopoem “for the upcoming show With Sirens Blaring at the Prøve Collective in Duluth, Minnesota, August 8-23, 2014.” I usually find it distracting to have a poem appear both in the soundtrack and in words on the screen simultaneously, but somehow Richardson makes it work. He gives a bit more detail about the exhibition on his blog:
Prøve Collective, in Duluth, Minnesota, will display a body of work linking poetry to visual, film, and sound art. Pursuant to a grant from the McKnight Foundation, award-winning Duluth poet Kathleen Roberts is creating an assembly of films and artwork by local and regional artists based on her words. These works will be displayed permanently on her website and in Prøve’s August exhibition, “With Sirens Blaring,” August 8-23, 2014.
Prøve Gallery is “a contemporary and experimental art gallery located in downtown Duluth.” Kathleen Roberts is the literary director.
Some small room for surprise by Jen Karetnick
https://vimeo.com/100030112
Nic S.’s latest video remix incorporating a text from the Poetry Storehouse uses a soundtrack by Elan Hickler. The poet, Jen Karetnick, blogs at A Body at Rest. See her full collection of poems at the Storehouse for a bio.
All American by David Hernandez
If the films released so far on their website are any indication, Motionpoems‘ 2014 season is their most stylistically diverse collection of poetry films to date. This film, released just before Independence Day in the U.S., builds on the poem’s challenge to any easy assumptions about American identity. (It’s also slightly NSFW, with glimpses of female nudity.) Here’s the description from the website:
Filmed near Lake Geneva Switzerland (and at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern), British filmmaker Richard Johnson and dancer Jasmine Morand present this francoperspective on California poet David Hernandez’s all-inclusive poem, “All American.”
Click through and scroll down for the text.
For more on Richard Johnson, see his pages on Cinely and IMDb. For more on the poet, visit DavidHernandez.com.
Hij morrelt aan je ziel / He fumbles at your Soul by Emily Dickinson
https://vimeo.com/93230216
This is Dickinson’s poem F477 (1862)/J315, translated into Dutch by J. Eijkelboom and into film by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, who says he began with an old reading he had made of the poem, building an experimental soundtrack around it.
The track was (except for the electronic ‘drumthumbs’ in the back) completely constructed out of (altered) sounds I made with my mouth. A fun experiment. For some reason the track worked quite well with that old recording. Maybe there was a short video in it too?
Keeping a similar kind of restriction as I did with the sounds, I wanted only one short piece of footage in the video; leaves.
The whole thing was created in one afternoon (and it probably shows), but I had fun doing so. Keeping it simple and fresh.
A fun inbetweenie stuffed between longer videos and ongoing projects.
Aphorism by Eric Burke
A brief Eric Burke poem at the Poetry Storehouse made into a film by Jutta Pryor with music by Masonik. The poem originally appeared in A cappella Zoo before its second life in the Poetry Storehouse, and frequent Storehouse contributor Othniel Smith has also envideoed it.
Strawberry Moon by Erica Goss
My fingers find the grit
of your chin
like the seed-crowded
tips of strawberries
we stole and ate
in darkness…
This is the 6th installment in the 12 Moons videopoetry series presented by Atticus Review each month in 2014, featuring Erica Goss (text), Nic S. (voiceover), Kathy McTavish (music) and Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon (concept, music and direction). Neys shared some process notes on his blog:
A lush short poem that I wanted to give an extra dark layer by adding a bit of ‘danger’.
I went back to the public domain feature Dementia 13 for the footage.
A nightly rendez-vous with a lot of staring between the two characters.
Leaving the story open and full of questions…I started to work with certain parts of that footage.
Once I had a basic montage, I awaited Nic’s reading to work on a soundscape with musical blocks provided by Kathy.
White Fur by Mark Wunderlich
Motionpoems‘ latest production was directed by Georgia Tribuiani, an adaptation of a poem by Mark Wunderlich. The Motionpoems website includes bonus materials for the video: interviews with the filmmaker and poet by Jeannie E. Roberts, who writes:
As I watched Georgia Tribuiani’s motionpoem, “White Fur,” I was instantly drawn into her world of light, color, and contrast. Tribuiani sets the scene beautifully and powerfully within Switzer Falls, a wooded area in the San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles County. The albino deer, depicted as an African-American albino man, runs barefoot through the woods, where he follows the banks of a stream, eventually stopping to look at his reflection within a pool of water. Tribuiani imagines a story that is, in her own words, suggested: She envisions the albino deer as Narcissus: a young man, mesmerized by his own reflection, who falls in love with it and eventually drowns. Though not necessarily the intent of Mark Wunderlich’s poem, Tribuiani creates a stunning metaphor, a poem within a poem. All great poetry has layers, and this director has found another layer with thought-provoking elegance and creativity.
Mostly about a color by Jenene Ravesloot
This film by Jutta Pryor is especially interesting for what it does with the soundtrack, a psychedelic interweaving of the reading by Nic S. and a track called “The Ritual and the Delusion Part 1,” by the musicians’ collective Masonik. The poem, by Chicago-based poet Jenene Ravesloot and first published in CC&D Magazine, is from the Poetry Storehouse.
