~ Nationality: United States ~
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.”
Uncle Harry’s Tombstone by John P. Tuschen
Jordan T. Caylor writes in the video description,
I recorded my dad reciting his poem “Uncle Harry’s Tombstone” at the end of his stint as the poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin- this is my visual interpretation of his words.
Moth by Katie Frank
http://vimeo.com/39317127
Film by Jessica Bass; poem and performance by Katie Frank.
may i feel said he by e.e. cummings
This is You and Me by Karsten Krause, which uses footage of her taken by Hans Krause. As the description at Vimeo puts it: “A woman is walking towards her husband’s camera for four decades. A love story on small gauge film.”
See here for the text of the poem.
Precious Are The Feet of Those… by Kwame Dawes
Another in the Voices from Haiti series produced by the Pulitzer Center, exploring life after the earthquake and focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS, with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by photographer Andre Lambertson, editing by Robin Bell and music by Kevin Simmonds. See YouTube for the text.
just midnight by Robert Lax
An interesting solution to the problem of how to envideo a poem whose typographical arrangement was very important to its author. Susanne Wiegner notes at Vimeo,
“just midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax that describes a temporal and spacial situation by very minimal means. For Robert Lax the composition of the letters and words on the paper was very important. And so he created one of his vertical typefaces, that was transferred for the film. The letters become spaces and actors, crossed and circled by the camera. Step by step a three-dimensional formation of words is generated and disappears again in a sheet of paper.
The film has been very widely screened — click through for a full list of festivals and awards.
Advertising Lullaby by George Carlin
Found text has played a central role in the development of videopoetry, so this montage of advertising tropes by the late comedian George Carlin becomes a full-fledged poem merely by adaptation to the kinetic-text medium. An inspired choice and execution by Jenny Lien.
