~ Nationality: United States ~

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Belgian artist Marc Neys adapts Sylvia Plath’s Mirror for this videopoem from mid-2022. He narrates the poem from a Dutch translation by Lucienne Stassaert, giving the video the bilingual title Spiegel/Mirror. As with most of his other films, he composed the ambient music as well.

Regular readers of Moving Poems will know the work of Marc Neys very well from the large number of posts of his work over the past decade. This video from Plath’s poem appears in some ways to be an updated version of one he made in 2014.

Plath’s writing has been adapted for film by other artists here.

Gray-Headed Schoolchildren by Charles Simic

Charles Simic has died. Word broke on Twitter a few hours ago, and I’ve been thinking about Simic’s impact as a poet and as a translator—I wouldn’t know Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic or even the great Novica Tadic had Simic not introduced them to the Anglophone world.

I’m not sure that Simic’s interest in translation extended to videopoetry, however; I don’t believe he ever collaborated with a filmmaker. I found a few unofficial videos back in the early years of this site, and another search today turned up a couple more good ones. Gray-Headed Schoolchildren is a 2011 film by Tess Masero Brioso with voiceover by Victor Feldman, who also stars (along with Zach Donnelly). I’m torn about the soundtrack: Adagio for Strings is kind of a cliché at this point, but it’s also not a bad fit. Regardless, as someone getting on years myself, the poem and film hit me right in the feels.

Prodigal Daughters by Vasiliki Katsarou

A film by New Jersey-based poet Vasiliki Katsarou, using text from William Gass’s translation of Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and images by Andrew David King. There wasn’t any description on Vimeo, so I contacted Katsarou to ask if she might have an artist’s statement. Here’s what she shared:

Prodigal Daughters is a collage video poem I made with Andrew David King. I’m a poet, teaching artist and publisher who holds an MFA in filmmaking, and who made a 35mm film back in the 20th century. My collaborator Andrew, whose footage this is, is a journalist, poet and book artist based in San Francisco. Our mission was to make two (one minute) cellphone films combining image and text. Prodigal Daughters was put together in serendipitous fashion, when I came across a striking passage (that I read in voiceover) from William Gass’ introduction to Rilke’s classic novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Gass is writing about Rilke, who’s writing about young women standing in awe before hanging tapestries in a medieval museum. For me, something about this film poem seems to vault generations and art forms. It answers a question I had about how a film poem can exist independently of my own poetry and celluloid film work. It has the potential to serve as a dream instance, where meaning lies not solely in visual image nor words, but in their spontaneous combustion.

Prodigal Daughters was made during a workshop led by experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs for the Flowchart Foundation. For more on my current work at Solitude Hill Press, please see solitudehill.com.

“Hunger” and “What I Did” from The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett

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From filmmaker Sherng-Lee Huang and actress Veronika Nowag-Jones, whom Huang calls “a stalwart of German cinema and stage,” these two trailers for The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett each feature a complete, short poem from the collection. US independent literary publisher Milkweed Editions has been producing video trailers off and on for the better part of a decade. As anecdotal evidence for their effectiveness, I ordered a copy of The Echo Chamber before I even finished posting this! Here’s the publisher’s page for it.

Hat-tip: Sean Thomas Dougherty on Twitter.

sex & violence #4 : what’s inside a girl? by Kristy Bowen

I’ve featured a few of Chicago-based poet and publisher Kristy Bowen’s video poetry book trailers, but not this one yet, which was made in support of her 2020 collection with Black Lawrence Press, sex & violence. It might be my favorite of hers to date. Nobody knows better that the poet herself what kind of mood she was trying to create, and if she happens to have the graphic design skills and technical know-how to bring that to life in video form, as Bowen does, the results can be wonderful (even if, as here, also super creepy). She resurfaced the video recently on her blog as part of an annual #31daysofhalloween series.

As always, visit her YouTube channel for more. The latest trailers are in support of a collection due out on Halloween called Automagic.

3 Erasures at War by Matt Mullins

An author-made videopoem from earlier this year by Matt Mullins, who probably needs no introduction here. As someone who’s dabbled in erasure poetry myself, I was impressed by how well he handled that. There’s quite a lot of free footage of the 1934 New York World’s Fair at the Prelinger Archives, which I’m guessing might be what gave Matt the idea for the videopoem in the first place, but regardless, I think he made good use of it, taking a kinestatic approach for a pleasing contrast with the longer screen-times of the text elements. The soundtrack glues it all together, incorporating Hendrix’s rendition of the US national anthem from Woodstock.

six feet by Danielle Legros Georges

A poem by Danielle Legros Georges from the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Eilenn Cleary and Christine Jones, eds., Lily Poetry Review, 2012), adapted by Michigan State University-based filmmaker Pete Johnston for last year’s Filmetry festival.

This is My Letter to the World by Emily Dickinson

This film by Shanghai-based director Luu Anh Laporte brings Dickinson’s famous words into the 21st century, hitting a bit differently in a hyper-modern context where isolation and alienation have become the norm.

Dear David by Elaine Equi and Joanna Fuhrman

Two of my favorite artists, poet Elaine Equi and composer Alban Berg, in one videopoem! This 2019 film directed by Joanna Fuhrman, who co-wrote the poem with Equi, has a wonderful, scrapbook-like feel thanks to collages by David Shapiro, the poet to whom the videopoem is dedicated, as Fuhrman explained in an essay at Fence. Here’s the conclusion:

In the era of #MeToo, when more and more women are sharing their horror stories of male mentors, I am increasingly grateful (and aware of how rare it is) to have found a male mentor who was always generous, respectful, loving and never inappropriate. I remember David complaining about the sexism of his generation and how often after dinner the male poets would sit in one room while the wives, some of whom were poets themselves, would go off to the kitchen to clean up. He would often ask if I thought a line of his was sexist or objectifying, and I felt comfortable enough to say if I did. He was always supportive of me as a poet and a person. We spent hours on the phone talking, because, as David said, “Gossip is a form of protection.” His friendship gave me permission to be a poet even when devoting my life to poetry felt like a completely crazy thing to do.

Elaine Equi is also a close friend of David’s, so we thought it would be meaningful to write a collaboration as a tribute to him and his most recent collection. David is well known for the beautiful collages he makes out of postcards and stickers. If you visit my Brooklyn apartment, you’ll see them all over the walls. For our poem, Elaine and I emailed each other photographs of the collages we owned and found other images of them online. We picked images we felt inspired by and wrote lines (or two or three) for each one. As we worked, we emailed lines to each other, and each riffed on what the other had written. We were inspired by David’s own poetry as much as by the images. At the end, I pieced the lines together of our poem “Dear David” and made a video out of it. I wanted to use a piece of music by the Viennese composer Alban Berg, because the title of David’s most recent book is a reference to the composer’s Violin Concerto. David would probably find it funny that I wanted to pay tribute to Berg, because I kept telling him that I liked his manuscript’s original title, Cardboard and Gold, better than the title he ultimately chose. David says Cardboard and Gold sounds “too New York School,” but as a devotee of the New York School and a music novice, I love it.

I was honored to be able to work with one of my other poetry heroes, Elaine Equi, on this project. I hope that our poem will be seen as a tribute to David’s work as a poet and collage artist, as well as a great person and friend.

Everything Is Radiant between the Hates by Rich Ferguson

I remember seeing this on social media when it came out in 2020, but forgot to share it here—better late than never, I guess! L.A.-based Beat poet Rich Ferguson is also an accomplished videopoet, resulting in an interesting hybrid between a spoken-word-style video and a regular videopoem. It took 3rd Place in the 2020 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest from Slippery Elm magazine. The camera work is by Ferguson, Christianne Ray, and Butch Norton, who’s also the drummer.

Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale by Willa Carroll

Eco-ritual and apocalyptic pilgrimage, “Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale” follows an array of wayfarers through endangered landscapes. Scored by a dystopian poem cycle and an ambient sound collage, kinetic explorers don yellow hazmat suits as protective membranes and second skins.
(official description)

One of the most impressive author-made videopoems I’ve ever seen, Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale debuted in TriQuarterly in January 2021, and went on to win Best Poetry Film at the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival.

Willa Carroll is an up-and-coming, NYC-based poet whose 2018 collection, Nerve Chorus, was a small press bestseller. “Her poetry video and multimedia work has been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. […] Carroll has collaborated with numerous artists, performers, and filmmakers,” including cinematographer Andreas von Scheele and choreographer Susannah Keebler.

Here’s how Sarah Minor described Project Hazmatic at Triquarterly, in her typically lucid prose:

Combining poetry, performance art, and moving image, “Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale” reveals the yellow hazmat suit to be a sheath, a container, a figure, and an effigy that can move in surprising ways across landscapes. While two suits blow empty across a beach, inflating with wind to make ghost shapes, a voice recites: “Skin, a bridge, a porous equation, overworked for centuries, unhinge the jaws, swallow all, a black air.” This project features a long sound poem in eleven sections with titles like “Score for Body as Thirst Suit,” “Score for Body as Durational Performance,” and “Score for Body as Wild Processional.” Its images and language think together about the purported lines among human, animal, and landscape that are often delineated by porous skins, and about the environmental degradation across the strata of many beings: “We play a game with no score, down on all fours, call all ill animals to the yard, sweeten the debris you feed them, jump the electric fence, a species link.” Part object lesson, part evolutionary retelling (“Flowers precede the bees, whales flunk back into the oceans”), “Project Hazmatic” also demonstrates the shared goals of texts that stretch the possibilities of language and video performances that pose and re-pose questions through repeated shapes, colors, and horizon lines.

To see more of Carroll’s videos, browse the Multimedia page on her website. We’ll be following her work with keen interest.

The Greatest Poem by Philippa Hughes

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
– Walt Whitman

The Greatest Poem is a project involving many collaborators. At the heart of it is a spirited and uplifting poem by Philippa Hughes. The film-making is a composite of many short animated pieces by different artists, brought together into a consistent whole by Elyse Kelly. A statement about the film:

“The Greatest Poem” is inspired by the words of Walt Whitman who believed that the power of poetry and democracy are derived from their capacity to make a unified whole from diverse and sometimes contradictory parts. In this spirit of diversity and unity, the film was made into a beautiful whole by a team of 20+ artists, from around the U.S. and world, posed around the question “What does it mean to be American?” – source

FULL CREDITS:
Writer: Philippa Hughes
Director: Elyse Kelly
Voice: Raechel Wong
Music & sound design: Cathead Noise & The Lunar Year
Sequence Directors (in order of appearance): Rohan McDonald, Nazli Cem, Zoë Soriano, Eric Larson, Catalina Matamoros, Cynthia Chu, Yoon Su Lee, Nijah Brown, Sofia Diaz, Mithra Krishnan, Jackson Ammenheuser, Megan Jedrysiak, Matea Losenegger, Angela Hsieh, Ana Mouyis, Sara Spink, Selina Donahue, Dena Springer, Dorca Musseb.
Additional design: Darren Enterline

The project was commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington D.C.