Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” featured as a “last poem I loved” at The Rumpus

The popular arts and culture magazine The Rumpus has a regular feature called “The Last Poem I Loved,” and the April 26 installment, by Dena Rash Guzman, focuses explicitly on the film version of a poem. This is of note not simply because it will be widely read, but because such detailed and highly personal reader/viewer responses to videopoems are far from common.

I didn’t really read the poem. The poem is a movie, too. I heard and saw and loved the poem.

It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. That reads as little bit new age, but I can explain the metaphor no better than Schomburg does in his poem-film. It is his own. It could be a redneck metaphor, or a hippie one, an academic one, or a Freudian one. Sometimes a metaphor is just a cigar.

I mean only to say, I met this poem at a time when it might have saved my life and I have returned to it many times since for CPR.


Read the rest (and watch the video)
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2 Comments

  1. Reply
    Dena 29 April, 2012

    Thank you, Dave. I love movingpoems.com.

    • Reply
      Sarah Allen 9 May, 2012

      Hey! I absolutely love this site, and just uploaded my own video poem. I wasn’t sure how to bring it to your attention except here in the comments, so here it is! Hope you like it: http://youtu.be/whtO9ugeNIg

      Thanks!

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