~ Nationality: United States ~

Sunday Services by Lisa J. Cihlar

This comprises the third panel of Propolis, the videopoem triptych produced by Swoon Bildos, Whale Sound (Nic S.) and Cello Dreams (Kathy McTavish). Here’s their contributor’s note about Lisa Cihlar:

Lisa J. Cihlar‘s poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Green Mountains Review, In Posse Review, Bluestem, and The Prose-Poem Project. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in rural Southern Wisconsin.

Visit Propolis to read the text of the poem.

Matters by Hannah Stephenson

Starting back in March, blogger-poet Hannah Stephenson has been cutting back on her previous pattern of a new poem every weekday to share a multimedia presentation on Fridays (which is actually, I’m sure, more work — I don’t mean to imply she’s been slacking!). Last Friday, she posted this video, which incorporates the text of a previously blogged poem.

“Wild nights…” by Emily Dickinson

Thanks to CreatureCast for licensing this wonderful undersea footage under a Creative Commons license, permitting this repurposing. I blogged about the making of it at Via Negativa. Due to the format of the original film, I was forced to learn how to make a widescreen (16:9) video, which turned out not be difficult at all (thought the standardized dimensions of videos here at Moving Poems give it an extra-wide top and bottom border).

For a very different audio interpretation of the poem, listen to videopoet Brenda Clews‘ reading on the Woodrat Podcast, Episode 31: Emily Dickinson at 180. Brenda’s reading starts just past the four-minute mark.

Tom Kessler, Stockton Island, 1887 by Kenneth Pobo

A videopoem made to double as a video trailer for the winner of qarrtsiluni magazine’s 2011 chapbook contest: Ice and Gaywings, by Kenneth Pobo, forthcoming from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. See our post about the video at the magazine for more. (I was responsible for commissioning this film from Swoon in my capacity as qarrtsiluni co-Managing Editor, and helped shape the content a little, but the main ideas and final decisions were Swoon’s.)

Reprieve by Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa Igloria has been writing daily poems for my blog, Via Negativa since last November, but I didn’t get around to envideoing any of her poems until her 50th birthday last week — shameful, I know! Luisa is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and eight other books, and grew up in Baguio City, the Philippines. I blogged about the making of the video here, and Luisa’s poem first appeared on the blog in text form here.

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.”

Challenge Me Vista by R.W. Perkins

http://vimeo.com/13102380

This is the first in a projected series of poetry videos by R.W. Perkins, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based video producer. The YouTube version of the video has garnered an impressive 10,595 views since it was uploaded a little over a year ago. I especially enjoyed the light-hearted tone and the great soundtrack.

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.

Highway Coda by Matt Mullins

This piece began life as “a multi-faceted, collaborative project consisting of a prose poem, an experimental film, a musical composition, and an interactive interface” — see the lit-digital site for more. Matt Mullins specializes in what he calls script poems, and this semester will be teaching a creative writing course on “Book Trailers and Visual Adaptations of Literature” at Ball State University.