To Learn From Each Thing by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/28658512
This is “Vine Moon” from John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons series, directed and supervised by Walter Santucci. For this one, Raul Torres and Britt Wallstrom are credited with the animation and concept.
Better Days by Kevin Cadwallender
I’ve been reading interviews collected around the U.S. during the Great Depression by the Federal Writer’s Project, and this poem perfectly captures my reaction to that heritage of hard times and lives cut short by poverty and dangerous work. This is Alastair Cook‘s 19th filmpoem, with a sound composition by Mark Walters.
Bells of Atlantis by Anaïs Nin
I just discovered that someone had uploaded a copy of this landmark film from 1952. Anaïs Nin’s husband Ian Hugo directed, with text from Nin’s novella House of Incest recited by the author over an electronic score by Louise and Bebe Barron. While the text may not be poetry per se, the form and style of the film anticipates modern filmpoetry/videopoetry by decades.
The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins
One of the 11 Billy Collins animations produced by New York TV station JWT in 2007. This one was directed by Will Hyde with animation by David Vaio.
Baggage Claim by Regis McKenna
This jazzy “video poem of New York City” by Jarrett Robertson, with music by Gaeland McKenna, has racked up more than 19,000 views on YouTube and close to 14,000 views on Dailymotion. I’m guessing that the Regis McKenna credited with the text is not the same as the Silicon Valley marketing expert.
“So Heddan So Hoddan” (Like Here Like There): the Sufi poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
The trailer for what sounds like a fascinating film about the survival of the poetry and music of the Sindhi Sufi Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (or Bhitai), directed by Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar. The trailer includes one of Bhittai’s poems. Let me just copy the description from Vimeo:
Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, a medieval Sufi poet, is an iconic figure in the cultural history of Sindh. Bhitai’s Shah Ji Risalo is a remarkable collection of poems which are sung by many communities in Kachchh and across the border in Sindh (now in Pakistan). Many of the poems draw on the eternal love stories of Umar-Marui and Sasui-Punhu, among others. These songs speak of the pain of parting, of the inevitability of loss and of deep grief that takes one to unknown and mysterious terrains.
Umar Haji Suleiman of Abdasa, in Kachchh, Gujarat, is a self taught Sufi scholar; once a cattle herder, now a farmer, he lives his life through the poetry of Bhitai. Umar’s cousin, Mustafa Jatt sings the Bheths of Bhitai. He is accompanied on the Surando, by his cousin Usman Jatt. Usman is a truck driver, who owns and plays one of the last surviving Surandos in the region. The Surando is a peacock shaped, five-stringed instrument from Sindh. The film explores the life worlds of the three cousins, their families and the Fakirani Jat community to which they belong.
Before the Partition the Maldhari (pastoralist) Jatts moved freely across the Rann, between Sindh (now in Pakistan) and Kutch. As pastoral ways of living have given way to settlement, borders and industrialisation, the older generation struggles to keep alive the rich syncretic legacy of Shah Bhitai, that celebrates diversity and non-difference, suffering and transcendence, transience and survival. These marginal visions of negotiating difference in creative ways resist cultural politics based on tight notions of nation-state and national culture; they open up the windows of our national imaginary.
For more on the film and its directors, including some reviews, visit its website.
Cephalo by Leah Silvieus
A live-reading-with-video – videopoem hybrid, part of an interesting (and sadly under-watched) series on YouTube by Homestead MediaJive TV called “Poets of the Unreeled,” featuring poets from the Miami area. Leah Silvieus is an MFA candidate at the University of Miami.
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Swoon‘s very abstract take on the Frost poem, with a reading by Nic S. from Pizzicati of Hosanna.
As you might imagine, there are more than a few videos for this poem on the internet, most of them depressingly void of originality. So often, it seems, this is the fate of the most popular poems — to be badly read. Apparently it takes a filmmaker for whom English is a second language to hear the poem with a more open mind. Of course, Nic S.’s reading may have had something to do with that, too.
Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin by Jane McKie
Alastair Cook’s 18th filmpoem incorporates a text by Scottish poet Jane McKie which “won the inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition in 2011 and was praised by the judges as ‘spare, musical and wonderfully imagined,'” Alastair tells us. Luca Nasciuti was the composer.
