Pre-Occupied by Heid E. Erdrich
A masterpiece of collage/remix videopoetry co-directed by the author of the text, poet Heid E. Erdrich, with R. Vincent Moniz, Jr. Art direction, animation and effects are by Jonathan Thunder. The excellent audio track is the work of Gabriel Siert, and additional visual art is credited to Carolyn Lee Anderson, Andrea Carlson, and Angie Erdrich. The synopsis on Erdrich’s website reads:
“Pre-Occupied” is a new and experimental form, the poem-film. Originally written for the website 99 Poems for the 99%, poet Heid E. Erdrich created a visual landscape of associations and references that match the tremendous irony of how the word “occupy” can be meant. The film version of this poem is a collaborative collage that means to reveal the distracted human mind at a particular point in history. Released in early 2013, the film inadvertently anticipated the Idle No More Movement. [link added]
Erdrich has made several other poetry films as well, including a new one that should be released shortly, according to Saara Myrene Raappana of Motionpoems, who kindly emailed me after attending an AWP panel at which Erdrich shared her films.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
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[…] by Jonathan Thunder. Though it may seem tailor-made for the film, like Heid Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” the poem originally appeared in text form at 99 Poems for the 99%, where the author included […]