~ Nationality: United States ~
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.
I Met a Genius by Charles Bukowski
“A poem by Charles Bukowski meets the Icelandic Ocean.” Video by the Berlin-based multimedia artist Clemens Wilhelm.
Young David by Yehuda Amichai (with discussion by Edward Hirsch)
http://vimeo.com/24221256
Avi Dabach’s marvelous film interpretation of Amichai’s “Young David” (translated by Abraham Birman) is wrapped within a video introduction and post-film discussion by Bob Holman and Edward Hirsh at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Hirsch describes his own, elliptical approach to politics in poetry, and says that Amichai was his major influence and model in this regard.
Welcome to Hard Times by Howie Good
http://www.vimeo.com/27002489
“Between the waves and the fog, we haven’t got a clue of what might be ahead of us,” Swoon writes about his latest film based on a poem from Howie Good’s Whale Sound audio chapbook, Threatening Weather. He credits Matthew Augustus for some of the images, and of course Nic S. for the reading.
Cloth by Kate Greenstreet
This video essay on poetics by Kate Greenstreet is itself very poetic in its use of metaphors, intuitive leaps and interesting visual juxtapositions. It features Carrie Lincourt, and credits Max Greenstreet for “second camera and second opinion.” “Cloth” was produced for Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics (Issue 8: August 2011).
“They dropped like Flakes” by Emily Dickinson
An adaptation of an Emily Dickinson poem. Created as a filmmaking challenge with some friends, this was made in under 20 hours, and served as a testing ground for a new camera and lenses.
Poem read by Nori Barber, music by Osmodius Bell
Cuba and Coltrane by Nicelle Davis
A new Moving Poems production in support of the Whale Sound audio chapbook Studies in Monogamy: Poems by Nicelle Davis. For more about Nicelle, see her bio on the site. The reading is by Nic S., and the music is a cover of John Coltrane’s “Naima” by The VIG Quartet, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license and uploaded to SoundCloud. I blogged about the making of the video at Via Negativa.
