~ November 2015 ~

Journey Home by Rabindranath Tagore

On 10 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is flight, a videopoem by Lisa Seidenberg A.K.A. Miss Muffett. Tagore’s poem is displayed in silent-movie-style intertitles with footage of the refugee crisis from Hungary, Greece, and Austria over a soundtrack of Russian choral music — an effective, high-contrast juxtaposition, I thought.

I Loved You (Я вас любил: любовь ещё, быть может…) by Alexander Pushkin

On 9 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxp2CCFaM6Q

A simple but effective video by actor John Deryl, who also does the voiceover, using Genia Gurarie’s English translation of Pushkin’s poem. (h/t: Ivan Mason, via email)

Break and Remake by Martha McCollough

On 6 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A new videopoem by artist and poet Martha McCollough always makes me do a little dance of pure delight. Break and Remake debuted on Atticus Review a week ago, and I’ve held off on sharing it till now (not wanting to steal their thunder) only with great difficulty. Here’s how McCollough introduced it:

Break and Remake came out of thinking about the recombined creatures in myths and in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The whole video is broken and reassembled, as are the griffins, chimeras, and other monsters within the video. The text is also a hybrid, combining overheard remarks, a line from a song by Son House and computer-generated text from spam.

The Colors We Ascribe by Emi Mahmoud

On 5 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry
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Death loves my people, the way they fall asleep at its feet…

Sudanese-American poet Emtithal “Emi” Mahmoud is originally from Darfur, and is now a senior at Yale. She was crowned the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam (iWPS) Champion on October 10, and has just been featured in The Guardian: “Darfur poet triumphs in international poetry slam.” Here she is performing at the National Poetry Slam in a video from Button Poetry, a Minnesota-based organization that “produces and distributes poetry media, including: video from local and national events, chapbooks, collaborative audio recordings, scholarship and criticism, and many other products.” On YouTube, they release a new poetry video every day.

Click through to the Guardian to read “Mama,” the poem with which Mahmoud won the iWPS championship.

The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Millionaire”

On 5 November, 2015 by Cheryl Gross with 0 Comments - Animation, reviews, The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross

Millionaire
Poem by Mab Jones
Animation by Lauren Orme and Jordan Brookes
Dedicated to (about) the poet Johnny Giles
2015

A love poem in every sense of the word, Millionaire is uncomplicated and embraces the value of being in love. This video poem is wonderful and exquisitely charming. Unpretentious and lovely, it gets the point across without being sappy or corny.

I love the simple frame-by-frame line animation. The motion aspect is wonderful, but when I close my eyes and just listen to the audio, the poem still works. Every aspect of this video poem can stand alone, but all together, it is a very special treat.

There is nothing complicated about this piece and that’s why it works. No kitchen sink, just plain and uncomplicated. Millionaire follows the theory and quote by Mies van der Rohe: less is more. So many times, we as artists fall in love with our work and want to incorporate every detail. This is not always necessary in order to get one’s point across.

Millionaire is a true love poem. It is stunning in its plainness and doesn’t waver. There is not much else to say, just a beautiful piece.

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The Litany of the Saints by Lucy English

On 4 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A film by Helen Dewbury for poet and poetry-film expert Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project, a “contemporary digital re-imagining of a Book of Hours,” according to English’s (non-public) postings on Facebook. Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon has also made films for the project, and apparently other filmmakers have pledged to contribute as well. Eventually all the films are to be featured on a dedicated website. I’ll be sure to link to it when it goes live.

Tiny Machine by Dave Malone

On 3 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Book trailers
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An author-made videopoem by Dave Malone that also functions as a trailer for his book O: Love Poems from the Ozarks (TS Poetry Press, 2015). The music is by Wayne Blinne. (H/t: tweetspeak.)

The Almost Prayer by Patricia Killelea

On 2 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Patricia Killelea, reading a poem from her forthcoming collection Counterglow (Mango Publications, 2016). According to the Video Poetry page on her website,

The poems from my forthcoming second poetry collection, Counterglow, are small and serious, and their sparseness prompts questions of space and the need to expand the visual-aural arc of my poetry’s scope. For these reasons, I’ve begun exploring video poetry. I’m excited about these transformations in poetics and the move toward digital experimentation. I began my video-poetry-sound experiments while I was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute during August 2013.

It is possible that video poems are a way of grounding written speech back in the body, evoking a multi-sensorial experience of language and space. It is also possible that movements in digital poetics against narrative merely reiterate the varied ways in which all experience, language, and life is inherently storied– that is, fragmented structures tell a story of fragmentation, etc. It is likewise possible that the acoustic and visual “compete” with each other as Charles Bernstein suggests (2003) and that we are in the age of poetry “music videos,” a kind of anti-MTV or a poet’s last stand against bullshit assertions that poetry doesn’t matter. It definitely matters, and video poetry makes its materiality all the more substantive.

Visit YouTube to watch more of Killelea’s videopoetry.