~ 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.
Letter by Doyali Islam
Filmmaker: Amrita Singh
Filmmaker: Laurice Oliveira
Filmmaker: Jane Glennie
A poem from Canadian poet Doyali Islam‘s second collection, heft, gets three different film interpretations, thanks to the wondrous Visible Poetry Project, which released these on April 12. I’ll take the liberty of lifting their bios for each of the filmmakers (though Jane Glennie is probably already familiar to many Moving Poems readers):
Amrita Singh is a writer/director born in Chennai and raised in Chicago. She’s currently attending NYU Tisch’s Graduate Film Program and developing her thesis film about a ruthless spelling bee wunderkind and her immigrant family.
Born in Brazil, Laurice Oliveira bravely moved to NYC with the ambitious hope of becoming a filmmaker. In her long journey to The Big Apple, Laurice met the unseen people and listened to unheard voices. From people of the poorest Brazilian slums to abused immigrant workers in the US, Laurice has made her goal to tell the stories of people that often do not have the privilege of being seen or heard by society.
Jane Glennie is an artist, filmmaker and typographic designer. Previous projects include an installation at The National Centre for the Written Word in the UK, and the publication of ‘A New Dictionary of Art’. Her videopoetry has been awarded a special mention at the Weimar Poetry Film Award in Germany and she was a finalist for Best Production One Minute or Under at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2018. Poetry films have been selected for festivals in the UK, USA, France, Germany, Ireland and Singapore.
The Danger Meditations by Marc Zegans
Directed by Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp of Archipelago Theatre as a companion piece to Manicotti, based also on a poem from Marc Zegans’ Typewriter Underground, with the voice-over this time by Tom Marriott. See its dedicated webpage for the full credits, and the main Archipelago Productions listing for more of their cinematic and theatrical works.
Like Manicotti, The Danger Meditations premiered at the Henry Miller library, and has also been screened at the Durham Typocalypse and an Athens Typewriter Underground event. In addition, it was an official selection of the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Manicotti by Marc Zegans
An interpretation of one of the poems from Marc Zegans’ Typewriter Underground co-directed by Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp from the Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Archipelago Theatre. Haverkamp is the narrator and one of the videographers, along with Alex Maness, and the score was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. Click through to Vimeo for the full credits.
This film, together with a companion piece which I’ll share tomorrow, premiered at a theatrical production of the Typewriter Underground at the Henry Miller Library, Big Sur, California. It was also screened at the 2019 Cosmic Rays Film Festival, at the Durham Typocalypse, “a celebration of all things typewriter,” and at the Athens [Georgia] Typewriter Underground.
A Clack in the Tunnel by Marc Zegans
Continuing with this week’s feature on Marc Zegans, here’s the first of three videos I’ll be sharing based on texts in his latest collection, circulated to select video artists and filmmakers while still in manuscript. This one is described on YouTube as “retro-collagist Eric Edelman‘s animation of the First Fragment from the Typewriter Underground. Full text can be found in La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere: Swizzle Felt’s First Folio from the Typewriter Underground. Available from Pelekinesis March 1, 2019.” The publisher’s webpage calls La Commedia
a gathering of verse fragments and collages describing and illustrating the life of the Typewriter Underground, a spontaneous sub-cultural phenomenon that appeared with near simultaneity in a variety of cities and smaller locales across the globe in the late 20th and early 21st Century.
Broken Lines by Marc Zegans
Oakland-based video poet Jenn Vee makes a poem by Marc Zegans her own in this charming mash-up of poetry film and vlog. It’s the first of four films based on Zegans’ work that I’ll be featuring this week. The poem appeared in his 2015 collection The Underwater Typewriter.
Reflections on La Scapigliata by Lois P. Jones
Los Angeles-based poet Lois P. Jones supplies the text and part of the voiceover (along with Katia Viscogliosi) in this wonderful new poetry film by Jutta Pryor. It’s the April 5 installment in the Visible Poetry Project‘s release of 30 poetry films in 30 days, which anyone with an interest in poetry film or videopoetry should be following, either on Vimeo or at the website, which includes much more information about the poets and filmmakers (but sadly shoehorns all the videos from each year into a single post, making subscription impossible and download times formidable for those of us with DSL connections).
Canoe by Kate Marshall Flaherty
Mark Korven directs this adaptation of a poem by Kate Marshall Flaherty, one of a series of three such films supported by a grant program associated with the Georgian Bay Land Trust,
integrating [Flaherty’s] performance poetry with the original music of award-winning composer and film-maker Mark Korven […] Set against the memorable backdrop of Georgian Bay landscapes, these films will highlight the jack pines and quartz rocks of the shorelines, striving to capture in word, sound and image the unique character of this region.
Watch all three films on Korven’s Vimeo page.
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi
Indian poet and fiction writer Tishani Doshi dances the title poem from her third collection in this film by Gareth M Davies. The music was composed by Luca Nardon.
I’ve featured a lot of unique dance poetry videos here over the years, but this is certainly one of the most powerful — perhaps because the poet herself is the dancer and choreographer. This doesn’t feel like an interpretation of the poem so much as the poem itself in a different form.
St. Umbilicus by Cindy St. Onge
Portland, Oregon-based poet Cindy St. Onge is no stranger to Moving Poems, but mostly as the maker of her own videos. This one’s the work of Australian filmmaker Marie Craven, herself a Moving Poems regular, and I love the way she both literalized and extended the poem at the same time. She posted some process notes on her blog last May which are worth quoting in full:
‘St. Umbilicus’ is from a poem by Cindy St. Onge, and is one of my shorter video pieces. As well as a poet, Cindy is a maker of videopoems I admire. She also gave her voice to the soundtrack of this video. This is the second video I’ve made from Cindy’s poetry. The first was ‘Double Life‘. The collaboration was closer on ‘St. Umbilicus’ and grew out of personal chats we had recently on Facebook and via email. These led to me expressing an interest in collaborating further, to which Cindy agreed. The poem is about the navel and its bodily reminder of our connection to our mother. To express this, I chose a very close, still image of a navel to be a ‘frame’ for a series of central images featuring mothers and children. The still image, which rotates slightly throughout the piece, was found on creative commons licence at Flickr. The artist is Linnéa Sjögren. The moving images contained within it are from ‘Scenes at the Beach Club‘, a 1927 home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I selected historic images here to emphasise the timelessness of the theme. Music is by Chris Zabriskie, his ‘Prelude No. 12’ from the ‘Preludes’ album.
