~ qarrtsiluni ~
Witness by Lissa Kiernan
A film by Swoon for the poem “Witness” by Lissa Kiernan, recorded for qarrtsiluni‘s Animals in the City issue. This is Swoon’s 11th film for a qarrtsiluni poem. A couple of snippets from his blog post about it:
The track I wanted to lay this podcast in had to be a bit dreamy but also suspenseful and foreboding (with a small hint of mysteriousness) […]
The images had to be lush, but with a hint of decay. I had a vase with tulips, way past their ideal point of freshness. The petals falling gave me the idea for this video…
The first time I watched this, the images Swoon chose to accompany the text struck me as possibly a bit too random. But now they strike me as a subtle but inspired match. And the poem is, after all, directly concerned with how we might view an odd conjunction.
drylung by Clayton T. Michaels
This is the video my co-editor Beth Adams and I commissioned at qarrtsiluni in support of the soon-to-be-released winner of our 2010 poetry chapbook contest, Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels. James Brush wrote about why he elected to envideo this poem, and what influenced his choice of imagery, at his blog Coyote Mercury.
Watermark was chosen by the noted nonfiction author and naturalist Ken Lamberton, who was impressed by the “wonderfully controlled surreal and mesmerizing quality” of the poems. The print edition is already available for ordering ahead of the official launch on Monday, August 30, when we’ll also unveil online and podcast versions. We’re also running a series of poems from the other ten finalists at qarrtsiluni between now and then, hoping in part to interest other micropublishers in snatching up some of these terrific manuscripts (would that we could publish and release videopoems for every one of them!).
Letter From a Parasitic Head by Dana Guthrie Martin
Dana Guthrie Martin wrote the poem — see qarrtsiluni for the text — and Donna Kuhn collaborated with her to make the video.
By way of explanation, the poem begins with this epigraph:
Upon autopsy, the neck stump of the parasitic head was shown to contain fragments of bone and tiny vestiges of a heart and lungs.
— www.phreeque.com
