~ Nationality: United States ~

Mortal Ghazal by Luisa A. Igloria

Filipina American poet Luisa A. Igloria took an active role in collaborating with Swoon (Marc Neys) on this film in support of her new collection, The Saints of Streets, as Marc describes in a blog post. Much of the footage comes from a film Luisa found on YouTube,

part of a collection of motion picture films that John Van Antwerp MacMurray shot during the time he served as American Minister to China (1925-1929).
The 16mm silent movie was shot during a trip to the Philippines in October 1926, where MacMurray and his wife spent a few days at Camp John Hay, Baguio.

In the same post, Luisa has this to say about the poem and Marc’s film:

The poem’s recurrent rhyme is the word “everlasting” — it had started out as a meditation of sorts on a flower indigenous to Baguio, the mountain city where I grew up in the Philippines. The locals refer to them as “everlasting” flowers, but they are strawflowers or Helichrysum bracteatum (family Asteraceae). Locals wind them into leis and sell them to tourists. One of my dearest friends from childhood recently returned from a trip to Baguio, and brought a lei back for me.

Around ten years ago, this friend lost her only son, who grew up with my daughters in Baguio; and she has never really recovered from that grief; she has also just had surgery, and thinking about her and about our lives in that small mountain city so long ago, before we became what we are now, led me to writing this poem which is also a meditation on time/temporality, passage, absence and presence.

When I write poems, I am often guided first by images and their interior “sound” or texture, even before I can bring them to bear upon each other in some totally explicable way… What draws me in the first place to poetry is the sense it offers of mystery, of how not everything in language can be completely grasped, so that we can continue to think of possibility.

Therefore I love so much how Marc has been able to intuit the poem’s themes of recurrence and memory and render them in such a way that both sound and imagery, artifact and dream, loop one into the other in the video poem.

The Horse Plough by Marcarthur Baralla

A professional filmmaker‘s first venture into videopoetry. Baralla tells me he lives in Brooklyn, and shot the footage for this film in Maine.

History of a future by Renee Reynolds

This was the grand prize winner of the 2012 Shanghai Tunnels Project International Video Festival. According to the festival page on the Unshod Quills website,

Renee Reynolds is a freelance writer from Chicago living and working in Shanghai since 2007. Olivier Wyart is a freelance designer from Paris living and working in Shanghai since 2009. The poem was compiled over the course of five years in China by an American expatriate scribbling in the subways of Shanghai. The video ventures to visually straddle the mishmash of East, West, history and future colliding in the text.

The Pioneer Wife Speaks in Tongues by Donna Vorreyer

Swoon‘s latest film features Donna Vorreyer reading a poem from her new collection The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife. The footage is from a public-domain documentary. As Swoon says in a blog post:

Sometimes I collect images, keep them with me until the right poem comes along.
The same with certain tracks I create.
‘And So They Live’ (John Ferno, Julian Roffman, 1940) is a piece of archive showing poorly educated “mountain peoples” living in poverty and stricken with disease, it’s a public-domain documentary about life in the Appalachian mountains with some great looking shots but a typical and very patronizing narration.
I used some parts before more than a year ago in ‘Odds and Ends’. The images stayed on my ‘shelf’ since then…

In came Donna Vorreyer. We worked together before and I think she’s a very fine poet.
Donna has got a new collection out: ‘The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife’ (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013)
Almost every poem in that collection could have been used for this videopoem. Not because they’re all the same. Because they’re all so good!

[…]

There was one sequence in the film I really loved. Can’t explain why, but the feet in the snow worked on a whole other level. When I placed that sequence on the basis, the rest came naturally.

Why by Richard Siken

Long poems don’t always translate well into the film medium, but American poet Richard Siken seems to have hit upon a winning formula in his very first go at filmmaking, collaborating with the French-born singer Marianne Dissard, three of whose songs are heard in succession while the text of the poem appears on the screen. The description on Vimeo quotes her reaction:

I am deeply honored that Richard would use my music to accompany his stunning poem “Why”. Richard is by far my favorite American poet. This is his first film and, as a filmmaker myself, I am awed not only by this short work’s striking imagery but also by its rare ability to get to the essence of these three songs. As a lyricist, to no other writer than Richard would I trust my work to take a back seat but in doing so, I get gently but confidently pointed to its essence. I am beyond grateful to Richard for that rare poetic gift.

It’s always encouraging to see poets of Sikens’ stature taking up videopoetry, especially when the results are this ambitious.

Roadtrip by Joshua Stewart

http://vimeo.com/67852968

A Vimeo find. The description reads:

Poem by Joshua Stewart.
Video by Fraser Jones.
Scenic views by The United States of America.

Jonah and the Shark by Annie Ferguson

http://vimeo.com/64472403

Another in the collaborative series of videopoems by two Evergreen College students, this one by written and directed by Annie Ferguson. All five films by Ferguson and Catherine Michaelis have also been rolled into a single video. Watch it at The Fluid Raven.

Come The Apocalypse by Catherine Alice Michaelis

A great environmental/social justice videopoem by Evergreen College student Catherine Alice Michaelis, part of a collaborative series with Annie Ferguson that grew out of “a 10 week immersive experiment with cinépoetry,” according to The Fluid Raven. Deserving of special mention here, I think, is the eerie and effective whistling by Bill Moody on the soundtrack.

Grassy Grayson by Grayson Cahal

Grayson Cahal was in the 3rd grade (in Chatham Elementary School, Lodi, Ohio), so 8 or 9 years old, when he wrote this astonishing poem. Ruth Turner did the animation, and the accompanying poster was designed by Ryan Sprowl.

This video is one in a series – part of the second Healing Edition of the Traveling Stanzas project which is a collaborative effort between the Wick Poetry Center‘s outreach program and the Glyphix design studio at Kent State University.

Learning the Letters by Robert Peake

“A film-poem by Valerie Kampmeier and Robert Peake, incorporating footage of children in Britton, South Dakota filmed by Ivan Bessie in 1939.” For the text, see Peake’s blog.

Shame by Richard Wilbur

http://vimeo.com/66795826

This film is called drawing, and its maker, Paul Mounsey, notes only that it was shot on 16mm film. The text may be found online here. The Poetry Foundation has a very good page on Richard Wilbur, along with a generous selection of his poems.

Righteous Utopian by Michael Spering

An author-made, stop-motion videopoem.