~ Nationality: United States ~
The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds by Helen Vitoria
A film called Flight, showcasing the collaborative efforts of Swoon (video editing, production, etc.), Nic S. of Whale Sound (voice), and Kathy McTavish of Cello Dreams (music). This was the dry run for their new collaborative videopoem project announced in a call for submissions last week (which was soon answered).
Pennsylvania poet Helen Vitoria is the editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal. The text of “The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds” is available as a PDF from Gold Mark Press.
The video features footage of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by Ira Mowen. Swoon states in the description at Vimeo that it is “dedicated to Vladek & Anja Spiegelman, the main characters in Maus by Art Spiegelman.”
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier
Portland, Oregon-based poet Dale Favier has been blogging at mole since 2003. His first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out this month just out from Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. A subsequent sighting of a mole in the yard resulted in this video. (See Via Negativa for a more detailed description of the process.)
In Extremis by Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans reads another poem from The Throne of Psyche, out earlier this year from Mercer University Press. Film and music once again are by Paul Digby. In her description at YouTube, Marly writes:
This poem is about a visionary experience that flooded in during a harrowing passage in my life. The timing was a bit difficult; I had given birth to a third child and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Not long after we arrived, our eldest, a little boy of 8, was struck with meningitis. The short blank verse poem begins at a point where he had been immobile for a week: still and unresponsive, and was about to be moved from St. Francis Children’s Hospital to a larger hospital with an Infectious Diseases specialist.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way, by Sherry O’Keefe
A film called “Nightvision” by Swoon Bildos, which he blogged about (in Dutch) here. Fortunately for us English speakers, though — and for everyone who’s been following Swoon’s work — the poet, Sherry O’Keefe, blogged a conversation with him about the process of making this video, how he got into videopoetry and more.
The poem originally appeared in PANK, and was recorded by Nic S. for Whale Sound. The video includes some camera work by Kristoffer Jansson and Keith Marcel.
The Universe by Neil Ellman
Swoon Bildos’s latest videopoem credits
McDonsco, Double Jack Black, Citizen Exeptional for their images.
Respect for the people of Sandy River Lolo Pass, St. George and all the other places that get flooded these times.
The reading by Nic S. was produced for Whale Sound, and the poem may be read at its original site of online publication, Bolts of Silk. According to the bio at Whale Sound,
Neil Ellman is a retired educator living and writing in New Jersey. His poetry appears in numerous national and international print and online journals, in addition to four ekphrastic chapbooks.
Swoon blogged (in Dutch) about the making of this video here. Originally, he said, he thought of using imagery of the northern lights over snow and ice, but slowly shifted to the idea of a storm moving through trees. I’m pleased he went with his second thought and not the first, which would’ve been much too obvious a match with the poem, I think. It takes a lot of guts to try to envideo a poem called “The Universe.” I thought the closing image was especially effective.
Black Iris by Sheila Packa
Composer, musician and artist Kathy McTavish has invented a compelling marriage of music and video art, here accompanied by the words of her regular poet-collaborator, Sheila Packa.
we were ten by Nic S.
A new Moving Poems production, once again using not just the voice but also the poetry of Nic S.. This is the opening poem of her nanopress collection Forever Will End On Thursday. Nic was kind enough to record a new audio version of the poem especially for this video, since I took an opposite tack from my usual approach and tried to reproduce something of the feel of the text on the page, going line by line and using a different shot for each stanza, with a repeating shot for the spaces in between. I blogged about the process at Via Negativa, as usual.
