~ February 2019 ~
The Smell of Mist by Lucy English
A wonderfully multilayered poetry film by Stevie Ronnie for Lucy English‘s Book of Hours. His process notes on Vimeo are worth quoting in full:
This is the second of two films that I have made in collaboration with the poet Lucy English as part of her Book of Hours poetry film project (thebookofhours.org). As in our first collaboration, this poetry film began as a colour palette that I generated and sent to Lucy. Lucy wrote in response to the palette and sent me back the text and a voice recording of the poem.
I had some footage sitting waiting, so I got to work straight away. I wasn’t happy with the way the words and the film were rubbing against each other so I cleared the decks and went back to the poem. I listened to the recording over several months, trying to slip under the surface of the words. The poem began to play over and over in my head.
One morning over the summer I lay in bed listening to Odette, my eldest daughter, practicing the piano. As she played, the poem was also playing in my head and I was taken by how the two seemed to fit together. I recorded Odette and combined that recording with Lucy’s voice. This audio track then provided the spark of an idea, which in turn led to new raw footage. By the time I sat down to draw the images and the audio track together it felt as if I knew exactly what I had to do.
The most fruitful collaborations always seem to involve an element of serendipity, don’t they?
Ten Invitations to the Poetry Film Genre
I am often caught between Kant and Hegel: Am I more interested in the free play of the faculties of imagination and knowledge and the incomprehensible “aesthetic idea” of a work of art, which always gives more to think than can be understood, or is the conceptual content more important for making a work valuable than its form? In this debate I never wanted to bend in one direction. Apparently my favorite poetry films have both: they create a unique mood associated with questions that are relevant and thought-provoking, but at the same time, they also create pleasure in listening and watching, a revelry in visual stimuli, textures, surprises. The following films are not a top ten list in the sense of a canon. There are just 10 examples I would like to collect here to fill in the format. Or let’s say: they are ten invitations to watch poetry films. Please enjoy them!
Arte Poetica
Director: Neels Castillon
Text: Jorge Luis Borges
The Polish Language
Director: Alice Lyons with Orla Mc Hardy
Text: Alice Lyons
A Petty Morning Crime
Animation: Asparuh Petrov
Text: Georgi Gospodinov
Pipene / The Pipes
Director: Kristian Pedersen
Text and voiceover: Øyvind Rimbereid
What abou’ de Lô / What about the law
Director: Charles Badenhorst
Text and voiceover: Adam Small
The Desktop Metaphor
Director: Helmie Stil
Text: Caleb Parkin
Chamada Geral / Calling All
Director: Manuel Vilarinho
Text: Mário-Henrique Leiria
Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk
Director: Ye Mimi
Text: Yin Ni
Spree
Director: Martin Kelly with Ian McBryde
Text: Ian McBryde
Steel and Air
Directors: Chris and Nick Libbey
Text: John Ashbery.
I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand by Francesca Bell
Rattle is one of the most widely circulated print literary journals in the U.S., and I’ve always admired its website as well. So I was very interested to see it venture into poetry film production last month, partnering with Mike Gioia and Blank Verse Films to make a film out of Francesca Bell‘s popular, sardonic poem from Rattle‘s Summer 2013 issue. Featuring the poet as an actor seems like a nearly inevitable choice for this poem, but it really works well.
The YouTube description suggests that this will be a monthly thing: “Rattle magazine presents episode one of their new video series ‘A Poet’s Space’. This month…” So that’s really good news.
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser
Julia VanArsdale Miller of Manual Cinema directed this affecting film, which includes shadow puppets, live actors, and animation by Lizi Breit. Here are the full credits.
In this startling animation of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars),” two lives unfold in split screen, one during the tumultuous world events of 1968, the other 50 years later against a new landscape of uncertainty and ever-present digital technology.
The film was produced by the Poetry Foundation just last year, part of a new focus on poetry videos on their website, which I was excited to discover recently. When I started this website ten years ago, the Poetry Everywhere series of animations produced by the Poetry Foundation (in association with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) was one of the major caches of poetry animations on YouTube, and though they were made by university students and therefore not as sophisticated as the series of Billy Collins animations that had been produced by JWTNY a few years earlier, they were plentiful and my standards were low, so they had a lot to do with turning Moving Poems from a short-term gallery into a long-term blog. I’d always hoped that the Poetry Foundation would devote more of its considerable endowment to producing poetry films some day. It looks as if that day might finally be here.
