~ Poet: Gabriel Rosenstock ~
Ramblings by Gabriel Rosenstock
Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock has been collaborating with filmmakers for years, often on adaptations of his Gaelic haiku. This film finds him working with Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain on a brief anthology of four free-verse videopoems, “The Poet as Untouchable,” “Broken Bangle,” “The Dismantling of the Taj Mahal” and “White Flags.”
Ramblings is a suite of short video-poems by bilingual poet Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland), an Indophile who has been dazzled by his contact with the literary and spiritual legacy of India, her people and landscapes, but is not blind to the darker side of India, such as the caste system, Hindutva, the violence and injustices, and so on. In previous short films with his artistic collaborator, artist and auteur Masood Hussain with whom he created the book Walk with Gandhi, he has focussed on the shabby treatment of dissident poet Varavara Rao. Ramblings ends with an anarchist poem which contains a key to universal peace.
“Seeing life in a different way”: Gabriel Rosenstock on haiku
A great feature on Irish haikujin Gabriel Rosenstock from the arts and culture TV program Imeall, produced by Red Shoe Productions. The English translations of the interview and haiku are excellent, which is no surprise: Rosenstock is a prolific translator and author, and his poetry blog is gloriously multilingual.
7 Painters: haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock
“7 Painters is a film composition I made for 7 ekphrastic haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock,” writes Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon, noting that it’s his second collaboration with the poet after Farrera earlier this year. Click through for texts (including the original Irish), stills, audio, and additional process notes.
Making poetry films and videopoems with texts originally sparked by other works of art presents the filmmaker with a bit of a conundrum: whether to suggest or include those art works, and if so, how? Here, Swoon seems to be responding purely to the words. But this works, I think, because the link between text and footage remains oblique enough that we might be watching what the painter, too, saw before taking up the brush.
Farerra by Gabriel Rosenstock
Farerra is a selection from a rensaku (“a sequence of haiku or tanka in which the individual stanzas do not function independently,” says AHA) by the prominent Irish poet and haikujin Gabriel Rosenstock. This videopoem version by Swoon (Marc Neys) uses the first eight haiku of the sequence, and combines Rosensack’s reading in Irish Gaelic from Lyrikline with an English translation on the screen. Marc writes:
For the visuals I decided to use stills by Pyanek, who made some brilliant macro photos. He is a photographer who uses the reverse-lense technique to delve deeper into the tiny worlds that make up the world we can see with our naked eye. I thought these images expressed exactly what I was looking for to combine with Gabriel’s observations of the nature around the Catalonian Pyrenees. They both dive into our natural world and surroundings to dig underneath the surface, somehow…
I applied the same visual haiku technique (5/7/5 seconds for each image) as I did earlier and placed the English version as (sober) text on screen with each last image. The only movement is a gentle zooming in and out.
Incidentally, Marc has just launched a low-key crowd-funding campaign to support his work as a filmmaker and composer. His main editing computer just died, and he can’t afford to buy a new one without our help. If you enjoy his videopoems, please consider making a donation. As someone who often has trouble asking for help and believes in open content and open source, I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment:
I strongly believe in art being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread all over the world (real and virtual).
But I also believe that in order for artists to create and produce, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.
I’m basically stretching my comfort zone by getting out of my comfortable hermit existence to connect with you people and hold my hand out, be it virtually.
