~ Nationality: United States ~
Subway Services by Philip Dacey
A neon animation by Jack Feldstein based on a poem by Philip Dacey.
The Last Days of the Suicide Kid by Charles Bukowski
An award-winning film by Dutch filmmaker and artist RJ (Jetze Roel van Assen).
The Lockless Door by Robert Frost
The graphics exist to support the soundtrack here, but I still thought it was an effective videopoem. Ryerson University film student Adin Dell advises, “Put on some headphones or turn up the volume to really hear the ‘soundscape.'”
from The Mysterious Human Heart by Matthew Dickman
Mexican filmmaker Patricia Nieto’s brief but effective envideoing of a fragment from Matthew Dickman. The poem originally appeared in The American Poetry Review, and is reproduced in its entirety at a blog called The Poetry Place.
Exit Strategies by David Tomaloff
Videopoem chapbooks are a rarity yet, and I don’t know of any others that are six videos long. Swoon Bildos completed this sequence a month ago, adapting each of the six sections of David Tomaloff‘s e-chapbook from Gold Wake Press. He added a one-word title drawn from the text to each video, and modified the over-all title just a little. Without further ado, here’s
Exit Strategies (A bloodletting)
Atticus Review also posted Exit Strategies (No. I-III), which is worth checking out for Swoon’s and Tomaloff’s notes on the chapbook. Swoon wrote, for example:
The overall ‘storyline’ I put in these videos is a personal one, but others might see or pick up different meanings. I just hope they evoke something. It doesn’t matter if it’s not what David or I intend, but that’s the fun of poetry and videopoetry.
Tomaloff describes his intention with the poems generally, and adds:
My part in the presentation was simply the recording of the poems themselves, in which I sought to unify the voices by reimagining the pieces as field notes read into a recorder by an observer who is becoming increasingly embroiled in what is being observed.
I also did a close “reading” of the videos for my personal blog, Via Negativa, as part of a month-long challenge I’ve set myself to read and blog about a different collection of poems every day. Here’s what I had to say.
Yes Yes by Charles Bukowski
An interesting stop-motion piece by Nicole Schmitt and Lukas Fiala.
The Poem of the Spanish Poet by Mark Strand
The latest release from Motionpoems, and the first of theirs, I think, to mix in some live footage of the poet alongside the animation (which is by Juan Delcan, who was responsible for the most popular of the Billy Collins animations, “The Dead.”). The text appears in Mark Strand’s latest book, Almost Invisible, which is a collection of prose pieces; the poem part of this video is the only lyric poem in the book.
By the way, if you join the Motionpoems free monthly email list, you get additional content which is not included on the website for some reason. This month’s installment expanded on the making of the video, and included some thoughts by Delcan and Strand:
For this motionpoem, filmmaker Juan Delcan shot live video of Mark Strand in his New York City apartment. He combined that video with drawings inspired by those of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. “I shot [Mark Strand] in 30 minutes and animated the piece in one afternoon,” Delcan told us. “Sometimes not having time to over-think it is the best.”
Delcan also spent time thinking about the purpose of the relatively new genre of poetry films. “I know there are a lot of purists that think that animating poetry is redundant and stops the reader from picturing its words in their own minds, and that the poem should be left alone. And in a lot of cases they may very well be right. But in the particular case of the poems I’ve worked on I feel they retrofeed each other, bringing it to a different genre.”
In response to the motionpoem, poet Mark Strand told us, “I liked the film’s simplicity, which is very much in keeping with the poem, or so it seems to me.”
