~ Pizzicati of Hosanna ~
This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
http://vimeo.com/62503304
Nic S. blogged some process notes about the making of this video:
The reading had been up at Pizzicati of Hosanna for a while and is only 20 seconds long, so I knew I was looking for something very short in terms of video. There are still some wonderful Equiloud clips I haven’t used yet and it took me just a second of flipping through those to know that his gorgeous 28-second door-opening loop was exactly the kind of image/metaphor I was looking for, once I slowed the clip speed down by about half.
Humming Bird by D. H. Lawrence
http://vimeo.com/61407931
In a blog post introducing this video, Nic S. writes:
I get such a kick out of people putting their creations out there for free non-commercial use by others. This happened thanks to generous Vimeo user, Equiloud, who has a clips channel offering his amazing video creations for free download and Sound Cloud user Flute Ninja doing the same. The reading itself was already up at Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Parler seul / Speech Alone
A poem by the great Jean Follain, read by Nic S. for Pizzicati of Hosanna. The translation by W.S. Merwin is from his book-length selection of Follain poems, Transparence of the World, which belongs on every poetry lover’s bookshelf.
I don’t make any great claims for this video; I just wanted some Follain here at Moving Poems and no one else was envideoing him in English.
The Return by Edna St. Vincent Millay
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNkl5UqY4g
Voice and editing by Nic S., using public-domain footage from the Hubble space telescope.
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.
Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith
http://vimeo.com/35205909
Video and reading by Nic S. for her site Pizzicati of Hosanna. Though sometimes I don’t quite share Nic’s enthusiasm for outer-space imagery, I thought it really worked here.
Alone by Yvor Winters
http://vimeo.com/33484094
A recent video by Nic S. for a poem included in her online audio collection Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Chanson d’automne (Autumn Song) by Paul Verlaine
When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and longPale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours tolls deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over
And I weep.And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.(trans. by Arthur Symons, 1902)
For alternate translations and analysis of the original, see textetc.com.
British filmmaker Rachel Laine shot this on a Canaon 600D and edited in Fainl Cut Pro and Logic. It uses music by Carillion and Nic S.’s reading from Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens
A new film by the indefatigable Swoon (which he blogged about here). The inspiration and reading came once again from Nic S.’s new site Pizzicati of Hosanna… which takes its title from a line in this very poem.
