~ National Poetry Month ~
The Flame in Mother’s Mouth by Dustin Pearson
The Flame in Mother’s Mouth is a collaboration between poet Dustin Pearson and film-maker Neely Goniodsky. It is another film shared here at Moving Poems as among the best from the Visible Poetry Project.
As a participating film-maker in this year’s project, I had the good fortune to read this emotionally affecting poem before it became a film. At the start of the production process, we considered about 200 poems by 60 writers before indicating the poet we’d most like to be our collaborator. This process may have happened in the reverse too, with the writers considering the work of many film-makers. It would be interesting to know. Either way, The Flame in Mother’s Mouth was in the top three poems from all I read, and Neely Goniodsky has done a fabulous job with her animated screen adaptation. My only hesitation is the very abrupt ending. I even wondered if this might be a technical error in the rendering of the film.
Since 2017, VPP has been releasing a video a day during the month of April—National Poetry Month in the USA. Various celebrations of poetry also take place around the world at this time, many of them involving daily writing prompts. One poet I know does most of their writing at this time of year. Another began writing in April 2018, with one of his poems now published in an anthology. All in all it’s a good time of year for poetry, and via the VPP, for videopoetry as well.
The call for entries to poets and film-makers around the world for their 2020 season is online now, officially opening on 1 September and closing on 31 October. I highly recommend filling out the simple application form if you are a poet or film-maker interested in expanding skills, both as an individual artist and in collaboration.
The Washington Post sponsors ten poetry animations for National Poetry Month
Wednesday’s Washington Post online published ten brief but innovative animations of portions of poems by contemporary U.S. poets. The feature, authored by Phoebe Connelly, Suzette Moyer, Julio Negron, Amy King, Emily Chow, and Ron Charles, has a headline complete with line breaks:
To celebrate
the 20th anniversary of
National Poetry Month
We asked
10 poets for
poems.
10 designers
put them
in motion.
Sadly, there’s no accompanying text to give readers any indication that poetry animation might be a thing that other people have done before — a missed opportunity to, for example, link to Motionpoems, who have been matching up prominent U.S. poets with top animators and directors for years. (Though to be fair, Motionpoems too has sometimes acted as if it’s the only organization doing this.) In another indication of the newspaper’s scarcity mentality, they made the unfortunate choice to host the videos themselves, streaming them from the Amazon cloud, which translates to poor performance at my slow DSL speed, and probably for plenty of others in flyover country as well. And anyone who isn’t a paid subscriber may be blocked if they’ve already used up their monthly quota of articles. Fortunately, the Post has also uploaded the videos to AOL.On and Dailymotion, and a couple of the animators have posted their work to Vimeo, so let me share those versions as a public service, in the order in which they appear in the article. (The one thing that’s missing here is the text of the poems, which is useful to see how the excerpts used in the animations relate to the larger works. For that, you’ll still need to visit the Post‘s website.)
Kevin Young + Art&Graft: ‘Commencement’
Edward Hirsch + Ellen Porteus: ‘Cotton Candy’
Mary Karr + Charlie Brand: ‘Face Down’
Dunya Mikhail + Hannah Jacobs: ‘A Second Life’
Nick Flynn + James Price: ‘Harbor’
John Yau + Bran Dougherty-Johnson: ‘Portrait’
Patricia Lockwood + Paul Cooper: ‘The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love’
Michael Robbins + Rafael Verona: ‘Not Fade Away’
Tracy K. Smith + Muti: ‘Visitation’
Can’t be embedded — Watch on AOL.
Victoria Chang + Phil Borst: ‘The Boss Calls Us at Home’
Can’t be embedded — Watch on AOL.
