~ Nationality: United States ~

The Clapping Tree by Matt Dennison

Australian filmmaker Jutta Pryor‘s atmospheric, pitch-perfect response to a text by American poet Matt Dennison, with whom she regularly collaborates. Actress Rebecca Page serves as a stand-in for the female narrator of the poem—presented as text-on-screen up until the final, spoken line. Click through to Vimeo for the full text. Here’s the description:

The Clapping Tree is a poetry film tribute to mark International Women’s Day, celebrating the strength, vulnerability and spirit of a woman surviving the rigors of life in a remote, male dominated, pioneering settlement. A film collaboration between poet Matt Dennison (Columbus, Mississippi, US), sound artist Mario Lino Stancati (Italy) and filmmaker Jutta Pryor (Melbourne, Australia). Filmed at the Tyrconnell Historic Goldmine in outback north Queensland, where several original buildings and machines remain testament to a goldrush that took place 120 years ago.

Dennison has also made films with Marc Neys (aka Swoon), Marie Craven, and Michael Dickes. We’ve shared a few of them here.

I’ve noticed that current academic discourse in the U.S. has cooled toward prosopopoeia, in reaction to all-too-common instances of poets from traditional oppressor groups presuming to speak in the voices of the oppressed without a whole lot of awareness or cultural sensitivity. But I think it’s an over-reaction to completely proscribe this kind of writing, because even when the imaginative effort falls short it’s still essential for everyone to try to put themselves in others’ shoes, or why live in a society at all? I don’t want to speak for Matt, whom I don’t know, but speaking for myself as a cis-het white male who has written a lot of poems in the voices of women over the years, and has also been known to write from the point-of-view of trees: the openness and vulnerability involved is perhaps an end in itself. To then entrust one’s words to others—women artists, in this case—represents a logical next step toward some kind of genuine synthesis of compassion and understanding. The potential rewards of such an imaginative project may be gauged by the high aesthetic and emotional quality of this film. If the ending doesn’t make you mutter “Holy shit!” I don’t know what to tell you.

Requiem for a spoken word by Marc Zegans

In Requiem for a spoken word, a short poem by Marc Zegans comes into play with experimental computer animation by Jim Hall. Both artists approach their work with a jazzy, improvisational openness that makes for a quirky videopoem about a single word.

A number of Marc’s collaborations with different film-makers have been shared before here at Moving Poems, as well as an interview with him by Dave Bonta.

This video came to my attention while scrolling the list of finalists at the 2021 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland. It is also published on the website of +Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, which runs the video poetry festival there each year.

Peacedemic or Wargasm? by Finn Harvor

The lovers of all life are not choosy,
but they know what aliveness means.

Seoul-based American videopoet Finn Harvor’s films are regularly featured on the poetry film circuit, but through sheer oversight this is the first one we’ve shared on Moving Poems. It really showcases Harvor’s unpretentious, collage-like approach: a poet moving through the world and recording his responses in text, audio and video is the basic vibe. His YouTube channel is

devoted mainly to two ideas: the first is the idea of the screenplay module novel; that is, a work of literary fiction that can be either a text-only, belletristic work of literature, or a hybrid graphic novel.

The second idea follows from the first. It is that of the authorial movie: a movie in which everything, including script-writing, narration, music composition and direction, are done by one creator … one authorial sensibility.

This one is literally a collage, as the description makes clear:

This poetry film is a collection of earlier pieces that have been edited and updated. The theme is what direction humanity will go in — peace or war? — and also a reflection on how human life is experienced differently on the level of the individual (for example, an individual couple) and institutionally (for example, as the head of a military superpower).

If I may editorialize for a moment, I think it’s especially important for poets to address questions of war and peace in this political moment, when ruling liberal elites in the West seem to have accepted what had originally been, in the U.S. at least, a conservative idea: that they can make people believe almost anything with the help of an ideologically conformist, captive press. Propaganda techniques rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic have been repurposed to suppress most questioning of the dominant narrative about Russia and Ukraine through unprecedented levels of government cooperation with and control over online content moderators and social media algorithms, all under the guise of fighting disinformation. This should be alarming to anyone who cares about freedom of expression. In such an environment, I would argue that poets have an obligation to create as much wrongthink as possible, though hopefully not in a didactic or preachy way. Harvor’s playful touch here strikes me as a good model. Younger poets, for whom Beat-influenced sarcasm may not resonate in quite the same way, can explore other ways of expressing their dissent against the war machine. Or as Harvor labels it here, “the machinery of modern pleasure.”

Keeping Up with the Huidobros by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

I fear we have not been keeping up with the always-original videopoetry of Lina Ramona Vitkauskas. This one from last year has a pretty intriguing origin story:

It began with Chilean poet, Vincente Huidobro. The opening / preface of his poetic masterpiece, Altazor, launches into a metaphysical cascade of imagery. This was exciting to a young poet like me—at age 29 with some Spanish knowledge and seeking a manifesto to climb (the name “altazor” is a combination of the noun “altura” / “altitude” and the adjective “azorado” / “bewildered” or “taken aback”).

I’d been experimenting with layered or looking-glass ekphrasis (a term that I’ve coined for this process). As I create cinepoems, a visual language in of itself, I found this poem in particular to be different: it was fueled by a homophonic translation (three languages fused: English, Spanish, and the visual). From this, a separate Lithuanian poem sprung, inspired by the overlapped sounds of street noise, a looped harpsichord, and selected juxtapositions of the poet’s translated phrases and/or words. Now four languages.

Note: It was also a synchronous discovery to find that the first issue of Huidobro’s international art magazine, Creación, featured Lithuanian-born, Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz.

Click through for an English translation of the Lithuanian poem as well as the full text of the homophonic translation included as voiceover.

June 2020 by Shabnam Piryaei

An author-made videopoem by the accomplished U.S. poet and filmmaker Shabnam Piryaei, whose work we’ve featured here in the past, but have gotten a bit behind on — see the mediapoems page on her website for more examples. She evidently prefers to let the films speak for themselves, presenting only credits. Here’s the description for June 2020:

filming:
Taymoor Akinmusire
Shabnam Piryaei

poem:
Shabnam Piryaei

voiceover:
Taymoor Akinmusire

I love the fact that she collaborated with a child on the filming. Such a hope-inspiring, life-affirming piece! And as a typical, language-obsessed poet I couldn’t help but be struck by Piryaei’s choice of someone to whom reading is new for the voiceover, and how for a videopoem that can help satisfy Pound’s famous directive, make it new.

america (i wanted to…) by Matt Mullins

This recent, author-made videopoem by Matt Mullins could be considered an extreme translation—’Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” revisited for the 21st Century’ as he described it on Vimeo.

Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Amanda Palmer reads Edna St. Vincent Millay in this animation by the award-winning children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall, with music by Tom McRae. It’s last month’s installment for the wonderful Universe in Verse series, which we’ve been kind of sleeping on here. Maria Popova notes in her introduction to the series on her website that

The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on science and the natural world in an atmosphere of “alternative facts” and vanishing ecological protections) and part persistence (in sustaining the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.)

For four seasons (below, in reverse chronology), it remained a live gathering — thousands of embodied universes of thought and feeling, huddled together in a finite space built in a faraway time when Whitman’s living atoms walked the streets outside.

In this interlude between gatherings, as we face the biological and ecological realities of life with widened eyes, I have entwined visions with my friends at On Being to reimagine the spirit of The Universe in Verse in a different incarnation, a year in the making: a season of stories about epoch-making events, discoveries, and unsung heroes from the history of science — this common record of our search for truth and the native beauty of reality — each illustrated in poetry’s lovely abstract language, with an animated poem.

Be sure to read the rest and check out all the films. We’ll share more of them here as time permits. I also strongly recommend Popova’s essay introducing “Dirge Without Music,” which for its “unsung hero” presents an engaging account of mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935). A stanza from Millay’s poem was read at her funeral.

One Step Away by Caroline Rumley

One Step Away is a touching, personal piece by Caroline Rumley, an outstanding writer and film-maker whose work has been awarded and screened widely at international festivals and events over the past several years.

Written from a dream, the video has an understated quality focusing on simple details, a light touch that is evident in much of her work. The choices in found footage and the rhythmic editing are deft and assured. Caroline’s writing seems to arise only to be entwined with media, and the filmic elements are just as poetic as her words. Artist statements describe an interest in the “thin-sliced instance, the brief flash that tells you all you need to know.”

Moving Poems has previously published another three of her videopoems. One Step Away is not recently produced but Caroline’s films are so beautiful they seem never too late to share.

waxing gibbous 97% illuminated by Yolanda Movsessian

This film by Mitchell Collins, with poetry and recitation by Houston-based poet Yolanda Movsessian, won the Judge’s Prize at REELpoetry Houston 2022.

Bullets by Brayden

For World Poetry Day, here’s an Ohio preschooler’s poem animated by Ukrainian artist Stas Santimov. It’s from a project called Preschool Poets:

Old snakes, loose teeth, hot tubs, and ugly people in your face.
This is the world when you are four.

For nearly a decade, resident artist Nancy Kangas led a poetry program for preschool-aged children at Columbus Early Learning Centers on the near east side of Columbus. She was struck with how clearly her kids wrote about what they loved and feared. They want bullets to relax, lions to roar, and kids to climb up to the sun.

Nancy and documentary filmmaker Josh Kun asked award-winning international artists to animate these poems, and the resulting hand-crafted animations show a depth and complexity of expression we don’t expect from four-year olds. The films are fueled by the children’s untethered imaginations, but they open a portal to the real world of growing up in the inner city.

Thanks to Maria Popova for highlighting this. You can read the text of the poem there, or at the project site.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

The On Being Project — a 15-year-old American Public Media radio show/podcast that’s spawned a whole web empire — has recently started producing poetry films, each an animation with a different director. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s by the London-based animator Jocie Juritz, with sound by Galina Juritz. The YouTube description notes that “This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Elizabeth Alexander, Words That Shimmer,” which aired on January 6, 2011.

Juritz posted some process notes on her website:

I was struck by the line “emptying the proverbial pocketbook” which sparked imagery of my own creative process – scribbling into sketchbooks, accumulating paper and mementos. As a sort of homage to the pen and paper (and reference to the ideas making process) I decided to animate the frames of this film directly into the pages of Elizabeth Alexander’s book ‘Crave Radiance’ which contains “I Believe”. Kindly, she gave me the go ahead to do whatever I liked with the book!

I animated each frame in Photoshop first, to make sure I had a perfect reference to trace. Those frames were then printed out. Using a lightbox I hand painted each frame in gouache paint, directly onto the pages of the book. Once they were all coloured I scanned each page, then placed each frame in position in After Effects.

People may remember Alexander as President Obama’s first inaugural poet, but she’s much more than that. Here’s her page at the Poetry Foundation.

Fous de la bête (Crazy About the Beast) by Corrin Evans

An author-made filmpoem (or filmmaker-written poetry film) by Los Angeles-based actor and director Corrin Evans. Cedric Goddard is credited with translation (I’m assuming into French from an English original?) and the voiceover performance is by Keveen Baudouin.

Corrin was co-creator of an unreleased TV mini-series called Sex Parties, so I’m guessing this might be a spin-off from that.