~ Videopoems ~

Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.

On the Eve of Death (De cara a la muerte) by Ángel Guinda

On 2 April, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Sándor M. Salas with the Seville-based Anandor Producciones made this videopoem using found footage, some footage of the poet, Ángel Guinda, in an acting role, and music by Anacinta Alonso. Subhro Bandopadhyay provided the translation for the English subtitles.

At Freeman’s Farm by Marilyn McCabe

On 29 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Marilyn McCabe which incorporates voices of war veterans and videography by Peter Verardi. There’s a long and fascinating essay on McCabe’s website about the making of this videopoem, her first. Here’s a more succinct description from an email she sent me:

I gave my poem to some local vets then interviewed them about whether it made them think of anything particular in their experience, and asked particularly about the landscapes of the wars they’d experienced. I then wove some of their words into the stanzas of my poem, and set them to images from the Saratoga National Battlefield park, and the French art song, which is about men who are leaving for the far horizon feeling held back by the souls in the cradles they leave behind.

And here’s a brief excerpt from her essay:

I think the most important thing I learned as an artist from this project is to let go and just wait and see, to try things out without fear. So I tried things and took one step at a time and things began to come together.

I began to learn that images too have rhythm, have silence; that speech – with its rhythms and stutters – is rich and complicated and that voices are a kind of text; landscape is a kind of text and has movement and emotion. That I could create a kind of lineation and space by manipulating the movement of sound and picture. In the end, the whole thing felt more like a creating dance than anything else.

One of the ways I dealt with time was in the movement from image to image. I felt a kind of rise in energy in the third stanza where they’re talking about ordnance and the mechanisms of war, so I used faster flashes, and used the rise of the music here.

Read the rest.

The Rose Thief (excerpt) by Michael Bagwell

On 28 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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A very professional, author-made poetry book trailer in the form of a videopoem. Bagwell is a graphic designer as well as a poet, and it shows. Here’s the description at Vimeo:

Constellations is an excerpt from the poem The Rose Thief, which is a part of the collaborative book Or Else They Are Trees with poetry by Michael Bagwell and artwork by Rebecca Miller. The book is new from El Aleph Press and is available for purchase at elalephpress.com.

Occasional China by Gaia Holmes

On 27 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Jessica Symons writes:

This a film of a poem, Occasional China first published in ‘Lifting the piano with one hand’ by Gaia Holmes (Comma Press, 2013)

I am a member of Bokeh Yeah, a filmmakers club in Manchester. We got together with Comma Press, publishers of poetry, and chose Gaia’s poem about a recent bereavement.

One autumn day we gathered in a local cemetery to film Pete Ramsay walking among the graves trying to come to terms with the death of his mother. It is a poignant poem which reminds us of the fragility of life, as well as the fear of the loss that death brings.

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114 & Lenox, 4AM by Molly Murphy

On 26 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - Videopoems
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A Vimeo find. I don’t know anything more than this:

Director of Photography Jordan Chlapecka
Performed & Read by Molly Murphy

Shadows by Langston Hughes

On 25 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance, Musical settings, Videopoems
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I suppose this is technically a music video rather than a videopoem, but it strikes me as much closer to the latter genre to the former — save for the fact that the poem takes the form of a very beautiful art song.

Composed by Lior Rosner
Soprano: Janai Brugger
Directed and After Effects by Tal Rosner
DoP: Adam Woodhall
Dancers: Cameron McMillan, Fiona Merz

About the project:
One of America’s greatest poets, Langston Hughes was a social activist and early innovator of jazz poetry. Hughes distilled the experience of his generation of African Americans into poems that sang in his clear and unapologetic voice. In “In Time of Silver Rain: Seven Poems by Langston Hughes,” composer Lior Rosner uses his music to liberate Hughes’ words from the boundaries of historical context. Rosner’s modern settings challenge us to consider the contemporary relevance of Hughes’ frank and often searing meditations on the universal themes of oppression, loss, frustration and love. While the emotions captured in these songs are indeed timeless, beneath the undeniable modernity of Rosner’s music, there are subtle harmonic nods to the jazz that provided the sonic backdrop for the Harlem Renaissance.

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Born to Die by Zaher Mousa

On 22 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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One poem, one cameraman, two films! Reel Festivals commissioned both Alastair Cook and Swoon (Marc Neys) to make films for a piece by the Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa, using footage shot in Iraq by American poet Ryan Van Winkle. Here’s how Alastair introduced his film (the first one above) on Vimeo:

Born to Die is a poem by Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa and is in his native Arabic. There are no subtitles, as I want you to hear to the emotion in this great poet’s voice. The English text of the poem is available on the Vimeo site if you click through. Born to Die was a commission from Reel Festivals and was shot in Iraq for Filmpoem by Ryan van Winkle. It is a pair with Swoon, with him making the English language counterpart translated by Lauren Pyott and read by Jen Hadfield; this is the second film we have paired, the first being Aan Het Water.

These films are part of a larger collaboration between Reel Festivals and Zaher Mousa. Check out Mousa’s essay, “Reel Festivals – Dialogue through Poetry.”

Pets by Vickie Vertiz

On 21 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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A mash-up of public-domain footage from the Internet Archive by Kenji Liu.

Poet Vickie Vertiz reads the poem “Pets” from her book Swallows (Finishing Line Press, 2013), available at tinyurl.com/swallowsbook

Coelacanth by Charlotte Henson

On 20 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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A new poetry film by Rachel Laine is always worth waiting for. This one features a poem and recitation by UK poet Charlotte Henson.

He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

On 19 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Film by Gianni Marini; voice by Paul Buchanan. This is the poem also known as “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

According to the Wikipedia, the poem was featured in an episode of the BBC television series Ballykissangel, where it was recited by one of the characters.

Humming Bird by D. H. Lawrence

On 18 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/61407931

In a blog post introducing this video, Nic S. writes:

I get such a kick out of people putting their creations out there for free non-commercial use by others. This happened thanks to generous Vimeo user, Equiloud, who has a clips channel offering his amazing video creations for free download and Sound Cloud user Flute Ninja doing the same. The reading itself was already up at Pizzicati of Hosanna.

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Silent Scene by J.P. Sipilä

On 15 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Themes of alienation and belonging percolate through this experimental videopoem by the Finnish artist and poet J.P. Sipilä. The music is by Machifabriek and Samuli Sailo, and Roomet Jakapi contributed what Sipilä calls sound poems.

This is a featured video at London Poetry Systems, where Henry Stead wrote: “The balance and subtlety of the non-verbal’s relationship with the verbal is extremely powerful — a truly cross-media palette in the hands of a fine artist.” On his website, Sipilä observes: “In poetry there’s something left unsaid. In music there’s something left unheard. In film there’s something left unseen.”

The lyricline.org blog posted “Poetry & Film: statement by J.P. Sipilä” last year, which is worth quoting for additional context here:

What I do is videopoetry. It has a somewhat different approach to film and poetry than poetry film. I see poetry films as visual and kinetic illustrations of certain poems. But as far as videopoetry is concerned, video and sound are not mere reflections of certain poems, but a puzzle or juxtaposition of the three elements (video, sound and text). As videopoet Tom Konyves says: “Videopoetry is a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of text with images and sound. In the measured blending of these 3 elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic experience.”

A good videopoem creates a new overall poetic experience from the three elements used. For me the video is the paper and screen is the mouth of my poetry.

Sound and visual aspects have always had a huge effect on my poetry. I usually read poetry while listening music and when I see a piece of art I somehow automatically start thinking a story or a feeling behind it. Using video as a medium for my poetry was a step that was just waiting to be taken.