Lights Out by Edward Thomas

On 30 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is Home to the Hangers, a 2017 film adaptation of Edward Thomas’ “Lights Out” by A D Cooper, newly released for free online after a highly successful tour of the festival circuit. “A traumatised soldier runs away from the World War 1 trenches and finds healing in his old haunts,” reads the description. I asked Cooper how it came to be made, and she told me,

The film was created on the theme of ‘anniversary’ for the Directors UK Alexa Challenge. Since the makers of the Alexa camera (ARRI) were celebrating their centenary, I looked for another centenary from 1917 as my entry into the competition, and found Edward Thomas’ death. It was more practical than the Russian Revolution or the French Army mutiny. It’s been interesting to find that people make entirely different interpretations of the film – all of them valid.

See its project page on the Hurcheon Films website for a full list of honors and awards. They include the reaction of Edward Thomas’ great granddaughter, Julia Maxted of the Edward Thomas Fellowship:

It is strikingly beautiful and Alex Bartram portrays and reads him wonderfully. A refreshingly hopeful reading of ‘Lights Out’ too, and I loved the attention to the small, intimate parts of his life and landscape together with the spaciousness of the vistas – both very much part of his symbolic topographies.

This is a wonderful example of an unarguably appropriate use of narrative filmmaking in a lyric poetry film. Although “Lights Out” doesn’t mention war, Thomas’ brief but amazingly productive writing career, cut short by his death on the battlefield, is notable for the intensity of his vision and the way in which his nature poetry transcends the merely pastoral. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better introduction to his life and work, in the classroom or out of it, than Home to the Hangers.

My English Victorian Dating Troubles by Analicia Sotelo

On 29 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This Motionpoems film by Maeyen Bassey expands Analicia Sotelo‘s poem into a sci-fi fable about beauty standards and high-tech body modification in a society where racism and sexism are as strong as ever. Narrative-style poetry films always risk sacrificing the poem to the director’s vision, but this feels like a logical outgrowth of the text. Sotelo wrote about what she was trying to do with the poem, and the collection in which it appears—Virgin—in a post for the Poetry Society of America:

As I was writing the collection that became Virgin, I became obsessed with how female identity is represented in Victorian England. Particularly, how female “innocence” is seen through the eyes of male figures—and how that has or has not changed in the last few centuries. Even Dorothea from Eliot’s Middlemarch entered the poem, bringing her moralistic intelligence and misguided taste in men. In these lines, the male gaze is an orbiting problem—it keeps returning. At the same time, I was thinking about what it means to be a Latinx woman with an English Literature degree – about the volume and weight of the Western canon. In the poem, I conflate timelines and histories, wondering if the power dynamics of gender and culture are all-consuming energies that influence us even in the smallest of moments.

Even as I write this, English rhetoric is present in these sentences. It reminds me of how high school and undergraduate students who do not identify as English often use the word “therefore” to transition the paragraphs of their essays. As a Mexican-American student, it never felt natural to use the word “therefore,” but I’m sure I used it in those first essays, hoping it would bolster the arguments I didn’t yet know how to make. How do we succeed in the language of a conqueror? How do we make the best and finest of arguments? And how do we find our voice in that conflict? Therefore, this poem. A poem for any person who doesn’t identify as this or that, but exists in the in-between, and must be heard.

Live from the Mothership by Bianca X

On 28 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Calling anyone who was ever left
behind as a casualty to proverb—
to rot on the sidelines or dangle
by a hangnail over the edge of a cliff.
This one’s for you in all your awkward glory.

Why is so much poetry—and by extension poetry film—so serious? This film by poet Bianca Lynne Spriggs AKA Bianca X and filmmaker Angel Clark suggests that there’s more than one way to be transported. It’s based on a poem of the same title from Bianca’s 2016 collection from Argos Books, The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor.

A Better Place is Hard to Find: two poems by Aaron Fagan

On 27 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Book trailers, Videopoems
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We’re always keen to showcase book trailers that take the form of videopoems. Here are two very different but equally compelling, brief animations by multidisciplinary artist Camilla Ha for poems in Aaron Fagan’s new collection, A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020): “The Good Light” and “Quietus.”

Aaron Fagan has been an active proponent of videopoetry for as long as I’ve been publishing Moving Poems—nearly 12 years now—sometimes collaborating with filmmakers, sometimes making videos himself. So it’s no surprise that he would have not one, but two films for his first full-length poetry collection since 2010.

Poets by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

On 26 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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This author-made cinepoem/videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas uses text from her 2013 collection Professional Poetry. I encountered it a couple of weeks ago via a post on Lina’s blog, which is worth quoting in full:

In 2013, I set out to write a poetry book that raged against the poetry MFA machine within the corporate-modeled university system. At that time, it was clear that, over the decade previous, universities, which employed most of the poets and writers whom I knew, were looking to level any sense of artistic freedom and turn colleges—places of education—into lucrative assembly lines—created to “churn out” ready-made writer-bots modeled after their “mentors”—and most importantly, to rob them of a fair living wage and and benefits.

I created a series of poems that were each dedicated to a profession—from working class to white collar jobs. The poems were also for those whom I knew at the time who were struggling to balance work “by day” and write/create art “by night”. At the time, I worked as a writer and editor for a major university in their advancement division, so I saw first-hand the emphasis the school placed upon making millions of dollars from donors to puff endowments and funnel $ to high-ranking administrators’ salaries—versus ensuring that part-time and adjunct faculty received fair, living wages and health benefits.

The entire collection, called “Professional Poetry” was meant to pay homage to a wide variety of different professions and/also to mock the commodification/capitalist push within arts organizations and universities to homogenize poetry and relegate anything “experimental” or “controversial” to unseen corners. The flattening of creativity—dictated by rich, white, old men, specifically bankers and/or “executives” who were beholden to pharma mega-corporations—forcefully swept into funding decisions for the arts. If a poet didn’t fit their dictated/defined “category”, or if a poet didn’t subserviently oblige and change their work to suit their framework, then it was deemed unclassifiable and therefore “not fundable”, “not publishable” or “un-useful” to the professional world of poetry that they dominated.

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

On 8 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry
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This is Iris, a translation of Louise Glück‘s famous poem into sign language (I presume Dutch Sign Language) by the deaf Dutch poet Wim Emmerik. It was recorded in 2014, the year before Emmerik’s death, by Ellen Nauta, edited by Max Vonk, and uploaded to Vimeo by Onno Crasborn, a linguist specializing in sign language at Radbound Univeristy in the Netherlands.

I chose this video for today in honor of Glück being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which I’m very happy about—her work has been a huge influence on me as a poet and a reader. Of all the films of her poems on Vimeo at the moment, this unpretentious, performer-focused video with a green screen struck me as by far the most compelling, even for someone like me with no knowledge of sign language whatsoever.

I can’t find an authoritative link for the text of the original, so let me just paste it in:

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Descent by Janet Lees

On 1 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Just as the third Thursday in November is American Thanksgiving, the first Thursday in October is British National Poetry Day (albeit with less carb-loading, and poetry readings instead of American football). Given that live events have been severely curtailed by the pandemic, I thought we’d better help out by sharing something from one of our favorite British videopoets, Janet Lees. (Janet is Manx, so British but not UK. I checked, and yes, they do celebrate National Poetry Day there.)

Janet uploaded this film back in July, noting:

Poem, photography and animation by Janet Lees. Poem made from perfume brand names.
Music by Scott Buckley scottbuckley.com.au

Wonderful stuff. So many advertisements have appropriated poetry in recent years, it’s fascinating to see how successfully Janet has turned that around and re-purposed consumerist language for a found poem. It feels as if, in a small but significant way, poetry and truth-telling are reasserting their primacy. Decontextualized desires and impulses shape a Neverland of mutable landscapes, unreliable weather and continually shifting baselines. (Which is one way to characterize the entire Anthropocene.)

Among other things, this really demonstrates the importance of poets learning to make their own films. It’s hard to see how a videopoem like this would be made otherwise.

[ The Ferrovores ] by Ian Gibbins

On 24 September, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Ian Gibbins‘ work is generally the first I mention when making the case for videopoetry as a genre in which “difficult” poems can become highly entertaining, even gripping. In Ian’s case, this has a lot to do with composing a groovy soundtrack. But his filming, text animation, and editing are all top-notch too. My only complaint here is that I wanted more ostrich emu.

Anyway, this one’s pretty high-concept, so I’d better reproduce the description on Vimeo:

“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … ”

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same.

Filmed mostly in the Southern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, in the midst of a multi-year drought.

A remix (2020) of the original version published in the Atticus Review (July, 2020).

Here’s that older version at Atticus Review. And Ian shared the complete text in a blog post.

The Pier by Pat Boran

On 23 September, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Strange to think we might be safe
in the harbour’s strong embrace
but still unable to embrace our friends,
our arms when we meet stiff
by our sides, a new unease
in our movements, our stillness, in our very breath.

This author-made poetry film, by Irish poet Pat Boran, really hit the spot this morning. Which is surprising, because it contains two things that are usually a red flag for me: sentimental soundtracks with piano and strings, and a number of quite literal matches of shot to text. But these are offset, for me, by Boran’s imaginative variety of shots overall, his deft touch with editing, and the quietly powerful effect of the poem/film (his term) as a whole. And it does feel like an organic whole, as if the poem emerged from or together with the filming. All he says about his process is that it was “shot on East Pier, Howth, Co. Dublin, August 2020.” (He made a blog post for it, but go to YouTube for the text.)

We’ve always had a soft spot for author-made videopoems and poetry films here, and it’s great to see a poet of Boran’s stature take the medium so seriously, and recognize poetry film as its own genre. His current author bio concludes like this:

Since 2015, and the publication of Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku, in which the poems are accompanied by the author’s own black and white photographs, he has been increasingly drawn to the possibilities presented by matching photographs and various other graphic forms with text, not only producing an ongoing series of PoemCards, but more recently exploring short poem-films.

The Actual / Fuck by Inua Ellams

On 22 September, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Book trailers, Videopoems
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This animated typography film by Jamie MacDonald is a trailer for Inua Ellams‘ forthcoming collection. In a blog post yesterday, he wrote:

It gives me the greatest pleasure to share with you the trailer for The Actual / Fuck. This poem is made up of all the titles in the collection, essentially a list poem in its own right. It was put together by Jamie MacDonald (who created the trailer for An Evening With An Immigrant) and shows his incredible skills and attention to detail.

Don’t forget, you can pre-order the collection right now from Penned In The Margins.

And from that latter link, here’s the publisher’s description:

The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury — sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy.

In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture-from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram.

Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, “What the actual—?”

Sealed Faithful Halls by Anna Fo

On 7 September, 2020 by Marie Craven with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://youtu.be/fY9CrkgqQHk

Confidently crossing an imagined border between experimental film and video poetry, Anna Fo‘s Sealed Faithful Halls is an outstanding instance of both. The poetic text is spoken by the film-maker and readable in subtitles. Before the poem arrives there is a two-minute visual introduction with a freely-shifting musical soundscape by Theofanis Avraam. Both of these wordless elements of the film are brilliant as well.

The film was created during lockdown, one of 50 short films selected for the 50 Shorts VS Covid-19 project of the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.

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I, Sheep by Jack Thacker

On 26 July, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading has a legendary, frequently hilarious Twitter account, so like many of their followers, I guess I was expecting something a bit Monty Pythonesque when they first announced the upcoming YouTube premiere of a filmpoem called I, Sheep, “the profound story of a single ewe and her links to the lives of a farm and farming family.” It turned out however to be a deeply serious, moving, and brilliantly conceived film, influenced by Susannah Ramsay’s conception of the filmpoem as “a poetic composition that interweaves experimental film practices with film-phenomenological concepts and creative self-expression.” Poet Jack Thacker worked closely with the filmmakers—Teresa Murjas, a professor of theater and performance, director James Rattee—and a sheep named Jess, whose POV shots do lend a certain droll charm in character with The MERL’s online profile. As the webpage for the project explains,

One hot summer’s day in 2018, following a workshop at The MERL, Teresa Murjas (Professor of Theatre & Performance at the University of Reading) and filmmaker James Rattee travelled to see Jack and Jess on their remote farm. They brought with them a range of cameras, one of which Jess wore during filming. Multiple perspectives on their interlinking lives and rural environments were captured in the varied gimbal, go-pro and drone footage that was collected.

As the months passed, one creative act would generate another. Roles were performed, film footage was collated, poetry written, and footage edited. Readings were performed, recorded, footage was reshaped, and audio material collated. Sound, imagery and words were progressively layered and synthesised until now, in July 2020, when the filmpoem is about to be shown very for the first time.

It’s no surprise that this kind of prolonged, intensive collaboration should produce such a varied and satisfying film. I imagine it will do well on the film festival circuit, if and when film festivals ever resume. But I’m grateful they chose to release it on the web first.

One minor point of interest to those of us who struggle to connect audiences with poetry: Despite The MERL’s well-executed promotional campaign, and despite more than 153,000 followers on Twitter, the video unfortunately did not go viral, though it has garnered a respectable 1,227 views. But getting people to watch a 16-minute poetry film was never going to be easy. And merely creating viral content is not why they made the film in the first place:

I, Sheep is one of a cluster of creative works generated for a project at The MERL entitled Making, Using and Enjoying: The Museum of the Intangible (funded by Arts Council England). This explored intersections between the Museum’s tangible holdings, the idea of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and creative and digital practices. As outlined by UNESCO, ‘cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. It also includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.’ Responsively, The Museum of the Intangible project began by bringing people together around things, and then drew on their living experiences and relationships to explore, through creative practice, the significance of ICH within a museum context.