~ 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.
Memoir in Bone & Ink (#1) by Kristy Bowen
The first in a projected series of author-made videopoems for Kristy Bowen’s upcoming collection Memoir in Bone & Ink. As a publisher herself (dancing girl press), Bowen’s relationship with books is more hands-on than the average poet’s, and that’s what drew me to this videopoem: the bibliocentric images and text come from a place of deep knowledge. The result is a poetry book trailer that feels like a commentary on book promotion generally, the author trying to coax a book out from under the covers.
Here’s the bio Bowen used for the YouTube description:
A writer and book artist working in both text and image, Kristy Bowen creates a regular series of chapbook, zine, and artist book projects. Since 2005, she has blogged about writing, art, and other creative pursuits at dulcetly: notes on a bookish life. She is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent SEX & VIOLENCE (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and the self-issued ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER; DARK COUNTRY; and FEED.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (EnD)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
From Australian director EnD, AKA Nigel Wells.
Director’s statement: “Produce, Produce, Produce!”
Judges’ statement: “A colorful film with some great changes of pace and use of speeded-up footage. Though rather literal at times, there was an interesting mix of images that worked to not feel too obvious overall.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
Au jardin bleu (In the Blue Garden) by Jean Coulombe
A 2020 videopoem by regular collaborators Jean Coulombe (text, images) and Gilbert Sévigny (images, editing, sound). I’d meant to share it at the time, but I do enjoy looking at wintry shots in the middle of summer: a natural surrealism. As a long-time blogger, I also love the fact that Coulombe and Sévigny make their videopoems primarily to provide content for a group blog called CLS Poésie, which has been around since 2009 — as long as Moving Poems. They describe their collective as a
Free association of unclassifiable poets, broadcasting via a blog (which never sleeps) texts, photos and video-poems of a poetry on edge, with blues, neo-country and urban trash accents… (Association libre de poètes inclassables, diffusant par le biais d’un blogue (qui ne dort jamais) des textes, photos et vidéo-poèmes d’une poésie à fleur de peau, aux accents blues, néo-country autant que trash-urbains…)
This is only the sixth videopoem of theirs we’ve shared. Check out the others, but be sure to spend some time on their Vimeo page and discover your own favorites.
Flush by Luisa A. Igloria
This recent videopoem by Marc Neys may be one of my favorites of his to date, exploring each line of a text as one might explore a new beach on holiday, with several lovely and joyous surprises amid the contemplative flow. The text is from Night Willow, a 2012 collection of prose poetry by Fil-Am poet Luisa A. Igloria, who just concluded her second term as the Commonwealth of Virginia’s poet laureate. (The poem originally appeared at Via Negativa, a daily poetry blog that Luisa and I both contribute to.)
This is, by my count, Marc’s sixth film with Luisa’s poetry, though I may be forgetting about one or two. Nor is Marc the only filmmaker to work with Luisa; here’s her page at Moving Poems. So many brilliant films there (plus two of mine).
Orée du désastre (Edge of Disaster) by Sylvain Campeau
A videopoem by Montréal-based filmmaker Mériol Lehmann with text by Sylvain Campeau. Click on the CC icon for subtitles in English or Spanish. I found the English translation by Peter Schulman rather too reliant on cognates for my taste, but was seduced nonetheless by the juxtaposition of landscape and domestic spaces, as well as the contrast between the fast-flowing recitation (by Pierre C. Girard) and the slow panning shots and glacial music.
ROTA by Andrea De La Paz
A very clever, bilingual (Spanish and English) videopoem that I just stumbled across, with text by the director, Andrea De La Paz, a young filmmaker from Vancouver. Leah Dean Cohen is the actor and Rogan Lovse the cinematographer.
A Film About Tears by Sam Theunissen with Sean Louw
A Dutch videopoem that feels much longer than its 38-second runtime, A Film About Tears was directed by Danu Caris with text by Sam Theunissen, but was mainly the idea of the cinematographer, Sean Louw, who uploaded the video to his account with this description:
15/03/2022 – Today is a strange day. Grief comes and goes and you never really know why and how. But with time, you learn to observe it and live with it. And maybe even look back with a smile. This film is about that.
Today, exactly a year ago my mom passed away.
Her handwriting was used for the credits.This project meant a lot to me, so huge thanks to director Danu Caris for dealing with my chaotic ideas and bringing her photographic finesse to the table. Laura Bakker for taking this tiny little roll to a whole new level and breathing life into her character. Boyd Bakema for pretty much saving the day on set. Fons Beijer for making us forget all about our old temp music by creating magic. And Sam Theunissen for writing a poem that really hits home with exactly the right amounts of serious and playful. (Also for casually translating it last-minute)
Shot on a Bolex as part of a third-year project for The Netherlands Film Academy on 16mm Tri-x film supplied and hand-developed by Onno Petersen.
How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón
This is “An animation created for MTV’s Women’s History Month. It was made using watercolor cut paper stop motion” by Providence, Rhode Island-based artist and animator Hayley Morris. Ada Limón is the poet. See Vimeo for the full credit list.
Octopus Empire by Marilyn Nelson
James Dunlap animates art by Edwina White in a recent video from blogger Maria Popova’s wonderful Universe in Verse series, in collaboration with On Being, mixing science and poetry. Here’s how she sets this one up:
The octopus branched from our shared vertebrate lineage some 550 million years ago to evolve into one of this planet’s most alien intelligences, endowed with an astonishing distributed nervous system and capable of recognizing others, of forming social bonds, of navigating mazes. It is the Descartes of the oceans, learning how to live in its environment by trial and error — that is, by basic empiricism.
Meanwhile, in those 550 million years, we evolved into creatures that placed themselves at the center of the universe and atop the evolutionary ladder, only to find ourselves in an ecological furnace of our making and to reluctantly consider that we might not, after all, be the pinnacle of Earthly intelligence.
That is what Marilyn Nelson explores with great playfulness and poignancy in her poem “Octopus Empire,” originally published in the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day lifeline of a newsletter and now brought to life here, for this seventh installment in the animated Universe in Verse, in a reading by Sy Montgomery (author of the enchantment of a book that is The Soul of an Octopus) with life-filled art by Edwina White, set into motion by her collaborator James Dunlap, and set into soulfulness by Brooklyn-based cellist and composer Topu Lyo.
Click through to The Marginalian to read the rest (including the text of the poem). For more on Nelson, see her Poetry Foundation page.
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland
The late Irish poet Eavan Boland’s poem “Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet” in an atmospheric poetry film by Dutch filmmaker Pat van Boeckel, whose work we’ve featured here in the past. There’s also a version in Dutch.
Be Your Dog by Mike Hoolboom
Dave Bonta and I were recently discussing via email the films of Mike Hoolboom. Mike is one of my most-admired film-makers and very highly regarded world-wide in the experimental film arena, where my own roots as a film-maker lie. I first discovered his work at an experimental film festival in Madrid in 1994 and it hit me like a revelation. So I’ve been keen to share his work here at Moving Poems, and have shared two of his films before.
Dave found this one, Be Your Dog, before I did. As is often the case with Mike’s work, there is a wrenching sense of sadness here, with dark observations about humanity and an allegorical approach that is both fantastical and deadpan, as well as absurd and tragicomic. I find the latter qualities especially in the way the main visual subject in this film is the film-maker himself, seen far in the distance, almost a speck, and steadily walking away from us without appearing to move at all.
Dave and I were both enthusiastic about the idiosyncratic way Mike makes this film almost completely from a single shot, but Dave wondered if it could be a could be called a poetry film. Indeed, every time I share one of Mike’s films with the readership of Moving Poems, I have the same hesitation.
And yet, Mike’s spoken narrations are highly poetic, and Dave and I both share an interest in stretching the boundaries of what might fit a definition of poetry film. I do get frustrated with the idea that a film in this genre needs to be faithful and subordinate to a poem that is basically traditional in form. From my point of view, we’ve had more than a hundred years of avant-garde art exploding these kinds of restrictions and so why keep poetry film inside such an old-fashioned box.
In any case, genres are ultimately just concepts, grids to place over the top of creative works in order to make them categorisable to our top-heavy minds and their craving for order, shoulds and should-nots.
As always, when writing in a personal way like this, I get to a point where I start to doubt all I have said. After all, everything I have written here indicates my own top-heavy mind, my own craving for order, along with an artist’s contrary need to rebel against a sense of limitations. In addition, I’m probably just banging on about stuff I’ve said here before.
Up until now, I have not written in this personal kind of way at Moving Poems, but Dave also reminded me recently that this site is essentially a blog where personal approaches to writing are more than permissible.
To end, here is Mike’s brief description of Be Your Dog:
A palm tree-gilded road in rural Cuba is the setting for a meditation on a dog’s life. Traffic flows accommodate the uneasy terrain, the fellow travellers, as if we were all in this together. After Iggy Pop, the balm of Adorno.
Recusio Redacted by Jacqueline Saphra
Recusio Redacted is a film by Helen Dewbery, from a poem by Jacqueline Saphra. The poem appears in the collection Dad, Remember You Are Dead, published by Nine Arches Press.
Helen will be familiar to followers of Moving Poems from her earlier films previously shared here. Aside from being a marvelous film-maker, she is co-editor with Chaucer Cameron of the online journal Poetry Film Live.
Jacqueline Saphra is a playwright as well as a poet. Her writing has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, among other honours. She lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School.
