~ Poet: Rachel Eliza Griffiths ~

S by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Another author-made videopoem recently published by Voluble, this time from the enormously talented poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Click through to listen to her artist’s statement, where she explains that “‘S’ is the first piece in a trilogy of videos that engage Audre Lorde’s poem The Black Unicorn.” Her discussion of the relationship between audio and video, hearing and seeing in her creation of the video is absolutely fascinating.

This concludes this week’s focus on videopoems or poetry films made solely by the poet her- or himself. Over the years I’ve shared many such videos, and Matt Mullins put together an annotated gallery of Ten Notable Single-Author Videopoems to showcase some of the best. There are many more examples of films that emerge from active collaborations between the poet and the filmmaker. I hadn’t planned this as a promotion for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, which alone among poetry film and videopoetry festivals requires the poet to have been directly involved in making the video, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that their deadline for submissions is coming up on July 1. (Which happens also to to be the deadline for the 2016 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.)

Mule & Pear: two videopoems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths has made poetry book trailer-style videopoems for a couple of other poets, but this one from 2011 was for her own collection, and Roxane Gay, writing at HTML Giant, was impressed:

Mule & Pear is a new book of poetry by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and has a book trailer I really love which is saying something because I do not care for book trailers.

This Dust Road: Self Portrait is an excerpt from the final poem in Mule & Pear. According to the publisher’s description,

These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison—voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.

Woman Without Umbrella: poetry by Victoria Redel

This is a fascinating experiment: a poetry book trailer of sorts that’s also a collage videopoem by another poet, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

A visual poem based upon the poetry collection of the same title, “Woman Without Umbrella”, by Victoria Redel. Published by Four Way Books, 2012. The visual poem incorporates various spoken lines gathered from the poet’s collection and employs associative thematic imagery inspired by Redel’s work.

Directed/Edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Associate Producer: Joseph A.W. Quintela
Make-Up Artist: Cassi Renee
Narrator: Gabriel Don

Visit
rachelelizagriffiths.com
victoriaredel.com
fourwaybooks.com

Kudos to Redel and Four Way Books for giving permission for such an innovative remix.