~ Nationality: United States ~

Night, Primal by Erin Miller

http://vimeo.com/64002183

This is a “hypothetical commercial for A Room of Her Own Foundation,” according to the description at Vimeo. Poem and recitation by Erin Miller; film by Courtney Miller.

Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes by R.W. Perkins

http://vimeo.com/57708721

R.W. Perkins‘ latest videopoem was recently featured at Atticus Review:

A woman contemplates how her life’s ambitions have seemed to mature as she sits alone on her back porch.

Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes could easily be described as poetic leftovers. The poem crafted from scraps, nearly discarded verse edited from a longer wordier poem, while the film itself is a remix project taken from black and white public domain T.V. commercials, assumed to be produced in the 60s and early 70s.

On May 4th 2013 Morning Sex will make its big screen debut at The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival to take place at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, Colorado. The event, hosted and directed by Perkins, will be Colorado’s first poetry film festival and will feature poets and filmmakers from all over the world.

You can read about all the selections for the film festival on their website.

Journey up the amazon by Martha McCollough

Martha McCollough says of her latest videopoem: “It’s about shopping. And death.”

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams

http://vimeo.com/62503304

Nic S. blogged some process notes about the making of this video:

The reading had been up at Pizzicati of Hosanna for a while and is only 20 seconds long, so I knew I was looking for something very short in terms of video. There are still some wonderful Equiloud clips I haven’t used yet and it took me just a second of flipping through those to know that his gorgeous 28-second door-opening loop was exactly the kind of image/metaphor I was looking for, once I slowed the clip speed down by about half.

Animatopoeia by Khara Cloutier

Graphic artist Khara Cloutier calls this “a tongue-in-cheek look at semiotics, animal behavior and mimicry. Starring Atticus as ‘The Bird’.” I call it a videopoem.

At Freeman’s Farm by Marilyn McCabe

An author-made videopoem by Marilyn McCabe which incorporates voices of war veterans and videography by Peter Verardi. There’s a long and fascinating essay on McCabe’s website about the making of this videopoem, her first. Here’s a more succinct description from an email she sent me:

I gave my poem to some local vets then interviewed them about whether it made them think of anything particular in their experience, and asked particularly about the landscapes of the wars they’d experienced. I then wove some of their words into the stanzas of my poem, and set them to images from the Saratoga National Battlefield park, and the French art song, which is about men who are leaving for the far horizon feeling held back by the souls in the cradles they leave behind.

And here’s a brief excerpt from her essay:

I think the most important thing I learned as an artist from this project is to let go and just wait and see, to try things out without fear. So I tried things and took one step at a time and things began to come together.

I began to learn that images too have rhythm, have silence; that speech – with its rhythms and stutters – is rich and complicated and that voices are a kind of text; landscape is a kind of text and has movement and emotion. That I could create a kind of lineation and space by manipulating the movement of sound and picture. In the end, the whole thing felt more like a creating dance than anything else.

One of the ways I dealt with time was in the movement from image to image. I felt a kind of rise in energy in the third stanza where they’re talking about ordnance and the mechanisms of war, so I used faster flashes, and used the rise of the music here.

Read the rest.

The Rose Thief (excerpt) by Michael Bagwell

A very professional, author-made poetry book trailer in the form of a videopoem. Bagwell is a graphic designer as well as a poet, and it shows. Here’s the description at Vimeo:

Constellations is an excerpt from the poem The Rose Thief, which is a part of the collaborative book Or Else They Are Trees with poetry by Michael Bagwell and artwork by Rebecca Miller. The book is new from El Aleph Press and is available for purchase at elalephpress.com.

114 & Lenox, 4AM by Molly Murphy

A Vimeo find. I don’t know anything more than this:

Director of Photography Jordan Chlapecka
Performed & Read by Molly Murphy

Shadows by Langston Hughes

I suppose this is technically a music video rather than a videopoem, but it strikes me as much closer to the latter genre to the former — save for the fact that the poem takes the form of a very beautiful art song.

Composed by Lior Rosner
Soprano: Janai Brugger
Directed and After Effects by Tal Rosner
DoP: Adam Woodhall
Dancers: Cameron McMillan, Fiona Merz

About the project:
One of America’s greatest poets, Langston Hughes was a social activist and early innovator of jazz poetry. Hughes distilled the experience of his generation of African Americans into poems that sang in his clear and unapologetic voice. In “In Time of Silver Rain: Seven Poems by Langston Hughes,” composer Lior Rosner uses his music to liberate Hughes’ words from the boundaries of historical context. Rosner’s modern settings challenge us to consider the contemporary relevance of Hughes’ frank and often searing meditations on the universal themes of oppression, loss, frustration and love. While the emotions captured in these songs are indeed timeless, beneath the undeniable modernity of Rosner’s music, there are subtle harmonic nods to the jazz that provided the sonic backdrop for the Harlem Renaissance.

Pets by Vickie Vertiz

A mash-up of public-domain footage from the Internet Archive by Kenji Liu.

Poet Vickie Vertiz reads the poem “Pets” from her book Swallows (Finishing Line Press, 2013), available at tinyurl.com/swallowsbook

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

This is O wild goose da muller by Carmen PG Granxeiro:

Videoarte. Tres formas de escoitar. Tres formas de entender.
Videoart. Three ways to listen. Three ways to understand.
Videoarte. Tres formas de escuchar. Tres formas de entender.

Oliver’s most famous poem has been made into numerous videos for the web, most of them dreck. But I shared one other that I liked, a film by Justin DeWaard, back in 2010.

Ode to My Body by Scott Parson’s 12th Grade Class

This collaboratively written poem comes from Scott Parson’s 12th Grade Class at the Maplewood Career Center in Ravenna, Ohio. It was animated by Adam Rechtenwald from a design by Eric Stearns, and is part of the 2009-2010 edition — Peace Stanzas — of the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas program.