Latest video reviews
The Night My Creampuffs Fell by Kirsty Elliot
Canadian poet Kirsty Elliot describes this on Vimeo as
A little movie about the spring my dude went treeplanting and left me in a plastic shack with our 2 babies. I took my tweets and turned them into a chapbook which I then made into a movie.
I like the fact that this is more than just a video trailer for a book; it is the book — in a different form.
Antique Store by Chloe Zola
This is not, strictly speaking, a videopoem, but it’s something awfully close: a videomemoir by Chloe Zola, part of a series of videos she edited and directed in support of her book Beside My Doorstep.
A Woman by Jillian Brall
Jillian Brall is responsible for the still images of street art as well as the text and reading in this experimental video by VIV G. It’s interesting to contrast this with the way Pablo Lópes Jordán used graffiti in “I-poem 6.”
Edge by Sylvia Plath
UPDATE (3 October 2019): According to a comment (see below) from the maker of the video,
The Poem is from Sylvia Plath and the video making is from Lina Gaitán. The video was made for a film screening in Cali, Colombia, of the movie “Sylvia” by Christine Jeffs.
ORIGINAL POST: According to the description at Vimeo, this videopoem was the opening clip to a 2003 film by New Zealand director Christine Jeffs called Sylvia. Lina Gaitán supplied both the reading in English and the Spanish translation for the subtitles. The introductory text in Spanish points out that this was Plath’s last poem, written four days before her suicide (though other sources claim it was written six days earlier, on the same day as another poem, “Balloons”).
On the stars outside by Dena Rash Guzman
Dena Rash Guzman supplies the words and voice for a Swoon video that includes footage from a 1915 version of Alice in Wonderland by W.W. Young. Guzman “wrote the poem inspired by raw footage and sounds send to her by Swoon,” according to the description on Vimeo, following which he re-edited the footage and added the silent film images.
It’s always interesting to see the results of such close collaborations between filmmaker and poet. Swoon goes into much more detail in a post at his blog. At one point in the process, he emailed Guzman:
I chose ‘Alice in Wonderland’ footage to layer with the ‘dirt-video’ you knew.
The images do not glide or work together, they seem to ‘interfere’
(Wikipedia: “The phenomenon of retroactive interference is highly significant in the study of memory as it has sparked a historical and ongoing debate in regards to whether the process of forgetting is due to the interference of other competing stimuli, or rather the unlearning of the forgotten material.”)Your poem is full of warm memories on one side (though nobody loves to have lice, I guess) but I wanted to use some kind of ‘luring danger’ (the rabit) as a kind of visual ‘counterpoint’ with the darker music as guide to the unknown that is outside…
Swoon also quotes Guzman’s summary of the experience:
I love writing from prompts and so when you sent me the video and sound samples I sat down to ingest them like a glass of wine. I kind of meditated on the titles of the samples and the content itself and began firing off poem after poem. Dirt was the inspiration for the poem you selected. Dirt makes me think of earth, soil, dust, decay. It’s not dirty, though it can impose itself to make things so. For me, dirt is a host for the living, and that brought me to a childhood experience: I got lice at school when I was 8.
It was exciting to take your work, give you mine, and get your work back. I’m a fan of Poem films and yours in particular and it was a great experience.
