~ Nationality: United States ~
Jaguar: poems by Ryan W. Bradley and David Tomaloff
Swoon notes,
Jaguar is a journey through a city. Underground and in the open air.
Imminent danger, a city full of people, unaware.
The poems are read by the authors. They include, in order of presentation, “You Are Jaguar,” by David Tomaloff; “Surfacing,” by Ryan W. Bradley; “You are the sound of sleepwalk waking,” by Tomaloff; and “You Are Jaguar” by Bradley. The poems are found in a recent book from Artistically Declined Press, You Are Jaguar.
Swoon blogged a bit about the film. He quotes Tomaloff on the making of the chapbook:
We wrote the poems 2 lines at a time without exception and very little discussion on where it was going. Then we edited all of the work separately, putting our own personal touches to work that was not wholly our own. Then we set the book up something like a bi-lingual book (side to side), signifying that each poem (left and right) are, in very real ways, translations of each other. In the end, I feel the reader makes the two manuscripts one. It’s one of those collaborations where NONE of it would have happened without two people; I know I couldn’t have written it myself!
Twenty Second Filmpoem: 20 poets, 20 seconds each
Alastair Cook‘s 22nd filmpoem is both playful and profound, a lovely demonstration of the magic that can happen when poets write ekphrastically in response to film clips.
Twenty Second Filmpoem (the 22nd Filmpoem) is twenty 20 second Filmpoems; it was conceived when I was asked to do a pecha-kucha.org night. An interesting concept, you present 20 slides for 20 seconds; I thought I’d do something a little different, actually create some work for the event. I commissioned 20 writers, all listed below, to write flash fiction against some 1960s found footage I’d edited. It’s ambitious and inevitably some bits work much better than others, but for me it is imperative to push this a little, to leave my comfort zone. And invariable, all the writing is superb, and for that I am thankful.
I also took the opportunity of using Vladimir Kryutchev’s binaural field recordings, for which I thank him. His amazing binaural map of Sergiyev Posad in Russia is here: oontz.ru/en
See the rest of the description on Vimeo to read all 20 short poems. The poets are: Andrew McCallum Crawford, Mary McDonough Clark, Al Innes, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, Elspeth Murray, Janette Ayachi, Jane McCance, Donna Campbell, Ewan Morrison, Angela Readman, Gérard Rudolf, Zoe Venditozzi, Jo Bell, Sally Evans, Pippa Little, Tony Williams, Robert Peake, Stevie Ronnie, Sheree Mack and Emily Dodd. Dodd blogged about her part in the production. A couple of excerpts:
I received a link with a password for my film, it was number twenty (password twenty). The film was 1960s found footage and it was beautiful. Alastair had edited it to tell a 1 minute story.
I watched a woman in a white dress on her wedding day. She kept looking at the Best Man. I wrote my initial thoughts down and came back to watch it again, two days later.
My brief was to respond with a piece of flash fiction that could be read aloud within 10 seconds. Alastair wanted it to be short, two or three lines maximum, he said just a haiku in length.
[…]
When I was first commissioned I’d thought along the same lines as the bride… is this really me?
- What if I watch the film and have no emotional response?
- What if I can’t do flash fiction?
- What if my piece ruins the whole presentation?
And all of this ran through my head while waiting for a response from Alastair.
Thankfully, I had this reply within a couple of minutes:
No it’s bloody perfect x Baci x
the third person seemed exhausted by Isaac Sullivan
One of a series of videos by Dustin Luke Nelson for poems in the cassette anthology 21 Love Poems from Hell Yes Press. Like the others in the series, it uses archival footage from the Prelinger Archives: in this case, an old Lucky Strike commercial.
Office of Desire and Helicopter Opera by Jeff Crouch
http://vimeo.com/39867909
This is SOS, an experimental video by Cecelia Chapman, who has previously been featured here with videos for a couple of her own texts. Jeff Crouch, who also supplied the soundtrack, frequently collaborates with Chapman. And this time they had a third collaborator: Steve Johnson, who supplied the cellphone video.
The Cloudy Vase by Jane Hirshfield
The Motionpoem for July is short and sweet, the work of Scott Olson and Jeff Saunders. Visit the post at Motionpoems.com for some interesting viewer reactions (and to leave your own). And as usual, the monthly email sent out to subscribers included statements from both the poet and one of the filmmakers. Hirshfield said, in part:
“The Cloudy Vase” is very short–the whole video takes perhaps 20 seconds. Yet somehow, falling into the glass of the vase in the film is also infinite and outside of time. That mirrors perfectly what I myself find so paradoxical and thrilling about very short poems–the collision of brief and large. And the brutality of having to throw out a beloved’s gift of flowers is in there too.
And Olson:
I visualized the poem existing in its own space and time, stripped of any unnecessary visual connotations, distractions, or references, where any and every viewer/listener could step directly into the experience and be totally present for a few brief moments, hear the words, and be taken in.
Sonnet by Bill Knott
Found via a Bill Knott feature issue at Salamander Cove. I’m not crazy about the piano here (“Meditation Impromptu 1” by Kevin MacLeod), but otherwise it’s a well-done video, and I love the poem. The teenaged videographer goes by the handle MusicalMarionette on YouTube. For more on Bill Knott, see HTML Giant, and check out his Collected Poems on Lulu.
Compromise by Steve Connell
http://vimeo.com/15206643
Gabriel Sunday directed. The description on Vimeo reads,
Steve Connell is a world-famous Spoken Word poet and performer. Faye Reagan is a world famous Porn Star.
Accept the truth of our times… embrace the Compromise.
That’s right: according to the Wikipedia, the actress usually known as Faye Reagan has performed in 174 adult films and one videopoem. For more on Connell, the Wikipedia also appears to be the best source.
Gerald Stern: Still Burning
A very well-done documentary portrait from PoetryMattersNow.org, directed, produced and edited by Norbert Lempert. Here’s the description at the Poetry Foundation website:
Produced by Norbert Lempert of REMproductions in association with the Poetry Foundation. Gerald Stern is as much the poet warrior now as when he stunned the poetry world thirty years ago with his book Lucky Life. In that book he first staked out a place for himself and readers that he has continued to make, a place that in his words is “overlooked or ignored or disdained, a place no one else wanted.” This short documentary film, illustrated with materials from Stern’s own archive, features some of Stern’s best known poems. It also includes commentary by poets Ross Gay, Edward Hirsch, Anne Marie Macari, Heather McHugh, and Thomas Lux, each with a unique perspective on Stern as artist and friend.
I thought this would be a good pick for the U.S. Independence Day holiday, especially given the way Stern, Hirsch and Macardi discuss the climate for poetry in the U.S. starting around 2:30 in Part 1. There’s also this from Stern in Part 2, beginning at 2:58:
We remember the famous words: After the Holocaust, after Shoah, there can be no poetry. And the alternative is: After the Shoah, there can be ONLY poetry. “How about no parades, no cannons, no atom bombs? How about no concentration camps, the way the United States runs concentration camps now?” is another way of thinking about it.
I also like Hirsch’s description of Stern in Part 3, starting at 0:38:
He’s really a poet of the egotistical sublime. The I stands in for the natural world, and for the whole world. And he’s experiencing everything himself.
For more on Gerald Stern, and to read samples of his work, see the Poetry Foundation’s page, which includes 32 poems in text form and 12 audio files.
The Art of Drowning
This film by Diego Maclean is currently one of the most popular poetry videos on Vimeo, with 3,294 likes and 97 laudatory comments. Though the rotoscopy succeeds in mimicking the effect of a graphic novel, assuming that was the intent, I personally find it less interesting as a video interpretation of the poem than the student film by Lindsey Butler which I shared two years ago.
According to Jason Sondhi at Short of the Week, this too was a student production:
Maclean created this short film as his graduation film from the Emily Carr Institute in 2009, and it has wrapped up an impressive festival run, playing at Sundance, Annecy and SXSW among others.
Three poems by Donna Vorreyer
http://vimeo.com/44211606
Escape (a triptych) is Swoon’s first videopoem for a text written in response to his own video prompt. Regular visitors to the Moving Poems forum (or subscribers to our weekly emails) may remember his call for submissions posted on April 24:
I am looking for a writer who is willing to let these three films inspire him/her to write three poems for them…
Look and listen…absorb…look and listen some more…and write…
I’m looking for three new poems (please use the titles of the films) written for these three videos:
Disturbance in the maze
Wailing Wall Crumbs
Ghostless Blues (The story of Vladimir K.)
A number of poets responded to the challenge, and Swoon chose the submission from Chicago-based poet Donna Vorreyer. Personally, I wasn’t surprised by the selection, having recently read Vorreyer’s chapbook Ordering the Hours — it’s terrific.
Swoon blogged a bit about the experiment:
I wanted to turn my working method around. See what came out of it.
Very aware I was, of the fact that these three films were experimental, for the fact the titles could have been a guide for some an obstacle for others. It was an experiment.I received a lot of questions about what I was looking for in particular, a few questions about timing, a fair amount of poems that were written earlier, not for the three films (though some of them might have worked). […]
I knew Donna from the Propolis Project last year.
Her three poems did exactly what I was hoping for when I put out the call.
She was the first one whose poems gave me the feel that they somehow belonged to the images.
I really had the sense that she reacted to the films and gave them content and a story.Her poems give these three films a less experimental character, and that was exactly what I was hoping for.
She recorded them for me, so I could start the editing process.Her words made it fairly easy; I only added a few images or made additional cuts according to the reading of the poem. I did put in some new footage in all three as a leitmotiv, a storyline.
Read the rest (including the texts of the poems). Incidentally, Swoon’s personal website has just been thoroughly revamped to foreground his videopoetry and soundscapes. Check it out.
