~ 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.
The ABC of Insanity by Andy Parkinson
One of the more ingenious performance poetry videos I’ve seen. Here are the details from the Vimeo description:
In fond memory of Andy Parkinson who wrote and performed the poem.
Music by Matthew Marks
Part of Insight In Mind produced by Swings and Roundabouts with a Mind Millennium Award and previously seen on Channel 4
Initiated and produced by Penny Arnold
Directed by Daniel Saul 2002
Insight in Mind is a 27-minute video containing 14 poetic pieces, of which this was one.
‘Insight In Mind’ vividly demonstrates how it feels to experience highs and lows, through the use of poetry, visual imagery, photography, animation and music; taking the viewer on an emotional and informative journey.
The 14 poetic pieces are interwoven with the voices of survivors and carers, talking openly about their experiences, married with artworks contributed from mental health survivors.Throughout the film, with the exception of two performers, everyone you see or hear has personal experience of bipolar disorder or depression, or are carers for people who have these experiences. This includes the recorded voice-overs which were edited together from interviews with survivors and carers. Alongside these spoken sections of the film are over 200 artworks by survivors of bipolar disorder or depression. The poems and artworks were selected from material contributed during the research undertaken by ‘Swings and Roundabouts’.
Andy Parkinson, AKA Andy Postman, was one of the five members of Swings and Roundabouts, and died in 2008. There’s a tribute page to him on the same website. It begins:
Andy Parkinson, also known to many as Andy Postman sadly passed away aged 53 in October 2008 from a sudden heart attack, a condition that runs in his family.
Andy made an incredible contribution to Insight in Mind. He was an inspiration to us during the planning and production of the film, with his stream of infectious and elaborate ideas. He wrote 4 (and adapted another) of the poems in the film and conceived many of the ideas for the filming of 2 of the poems, Mutter and ABC which begin and end Insight in Mind. Andy put an extraordinary amount of careful consideration into the construction of these pieces.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “At The Same Moment”
https://vimeo.com/68786837
At The Same Moment
Animation by Ezra Wube
2013
Let me begin by saying that although I appreciate the craft, I am not a poet. That’s why I partnered up with Nicelle Davis and assorted other poets to illustrate books and video poems. I visually interpret their words and manipulate the images to move in sync with the audio, thereby merging the two art forms. This is what video poetry is all about, the combination of visual, audio and time.
At The Same Moment is exactly that. It is a video poem that incorporates time and visual art, yet successfully transcends the absence of words. Again, I am not a poet, but watching this piece I feel as if I can write my own, thus allowing me to shift seamlessly from illustrator to writer and then motion artist.
At The Same Moment consists of stop motion animation paint on a single canvas. Personally I think it takes a lot of guts to paint, photograph and cover the images with new ones. Every image is well done, and they have a beautiful quality to them. It reminds me of the artist/animator William Kentridge who draws an image in charcoal, photographs it and erases it but not completely. He continues to draw over on the same paper, leaving a ghost of his images.
There is something to be said for painting. For me, good painting is uplifting and bad painting is annoying. This coupled with movement is perhaps how this type of art should be displayed, on a monitor in someone’s home, office, museum, etc. It would be a wonderful alternative to static art.
The Mother Warns the Tornado by Catherine Pierce
Motionpoems‘ latest release is a film by Isaac Ravishankara that transforms Catherine Pierce‘s poem into something that, save for its brevity, approaches a blockbuster movie in style and and emotional impact, complete with a very real-looking tornado at the end. MP’s “citizen journalist” Maggie Roy conducted interviews with both the poet and the filmmaker. Here’s some of what Pierce told her:
On April 27, 2011, the day of the tornado outbreak that killed over 300 people and injured many more, I was in Cullman, Alabama with my husband and infant son when an EF-4 tore through that town. Those moments of waiting while the tornado passed (we were huddled in the lobby bathroom of a Days Inn) really crystallized for me both the intensity of love I had for my child and what real, immediate fear felt like—not fear of something that might happen in the future, but a visceral fight-or-flight fear.
I’d been sort of stuck, writing-wise, since the birth of my son (the sleep deprivation wasn’t helping, either), but I’d been planning to write a series of poems from the point of view of a tornado; after that day, I realized that the scope of that series had to be big enough to include not only the tornado but the lives it impacted. […]
I think the film is incredible. I’m bowled over by how powerful and visceral it is, and also by how beautiful. There are so many small moments here—the lizard, the shot of the boy’s feet, the mother opening her eyes—that just undo me each time I see them, and I love the way the film slowly ratchets up the tension. I knew, from talking with Isaac at the outset of the project, that he connected with the poem exactly as I hoped someone would, but what he ended up making surpassed what I could have imagined. I just love everything about this film, and am so grateful to have been introduced to Isaac’s work.
It’s evident just from watching the film that a lot of care, attention and hard work went into it; the interview with Ravishankara suggests just how much:
I first spoke to Catherine Pierce about the project in the fall of 2014. I knew from the second I read the poem that I wanted to make this piece, and I knew from that moment that it needed to show a mother with a child who was actually her son. It wasn’t until March of this year that I was introduced to Dianna [Miranda] and her son Gus [Buck]. I knew from the moment they invited me into their home that they would be the family around which we would build this piece.
The real feeling of the piece came together in post production. There is absolutely NO WAY this film would have come together the way it did without the amazing insight from our editor, Jamie Foord at Rock Paper Scissors, who just kept making it more and more and more EMOTIONAL with every edit. And then we still had NO IDEA how we were going to make this feeling so tangible, but the team of artists at A52 not only dreamt up the tornado, but made it REAL. Of course, there are the shots where we SEE the thing, but they made sure we FELT it in nearly every shot leading up to the conclusion.
Lo Fatal / Mortal by Rubén Dario
Marc Neys AKA Swoon‘s latest videopoem uses a translation of my own, so it’s entirely possible I’m prejudiced here, but I really like his choice of footage to accompany this century-old poem by the great Nicaraguan innovator of Modernismo. He also made a version in the original Spanish.
We each shared some notes about the poem and the film in a blog post. Quoting oneself is weird, but here’s what Marc wrote, in part:
I probably fell for the poem because of the outspoken naivety in lines like
for there’s no greater pain than the pain of being alive,
no affliction more severe than consciousness.I wanted to steer away from easy or obvious choices in imagery but I also wanted the footage to be clean and simple (unremarkable almost), yet beautiful in their elusiveness.
In the editing process the starting point was the poem. I put different title blocks along the length of the soundtrack (without the presence of images). Only then I looked for appropriate footage (some of it is mine, others came from archives or videezy, videoblocks and mazwai) and adjusted them (pace and length) to make them fit the title blocks with the lines of the poem. The choice of font and placement of the text on the selected images was the last thing to do.
I still enjoy this way of composing.
Man & Dolphin / Mens & Dolfijn by Hans Faverey
As with yesterday’s film by Trevino Brings Plenty, this minimalist videopoem works because of the subject’s lack of response to a direct address, confounding the viewer’s expectations. The audio comes from a reading by the poet at Poetry International Rotterdam in 1977, and the video montage was made just last year by JW van Hemert, using footage from Conscience dauphins. Although the poem is mostly in Dutch, one can understand just enough of it to get the point.
Hans Faverey was—judging from the English translations of his poetry on the Poetry International Rotterdam website and at Words Without Borders—a great poet whose work deserves much more international exposure (I only heard of him last week, thanks to a tip from Willem Groenewegen on Facebook).
Homeopathy by Nina Corwin
A film by Lori H. Ersolmaz using both voiceover and text-on-screen for the poem by the Chicago-based poet and therapist Nina Corwin. Ersolmaz found the poem at The Poetry Storehouse and the archival footage at Pond 5 and the Internet Archive.
Inimi / The Room by Jessie Kleemann
Swoon (Marc Neys) has been taking a “‘videopoem journey’ along the Northern countries” this year, with films based on poems from Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway. This one took him to Greenland, as he describes in a recent blog post.
With Inimi (The Room) from Jessie Kleemann I found the perfect (spooky) poem to play around with. Her reading on Lyrikline in Greenlandic was an extra bonus for me. […]
I started with creating a soundscape around her reading; [SoundCloud link]
After that I was driven by the overall atmosphere of the language and the pace of her reading to look for footage by Jan Eerala again.
His images of an abandoned shed, a pink plastic bag in the wind and some shadowy puddles worked well in contrast (split screen) with the blue spooky footage I created earlier this year (playing around with software and public domain material)This marriage of Greenland, Finland and Belgium works rather well, I think.
After the Calm by Paul Nemser
A film by James William Norton in collaboration with Filmpoem. The poem by Paul Nemser was commended in the 2014 National Poetry Competition from the Poetry Society, who commissioned the film as part of a series of NPC 2014 filmpoems. NPC judge Roddy Lumsden said of the poem:
‘After the Calm’ is a mix of deliciously frothy language and mysterious narrative. It is angsty and slippery. It tempts us to solve that restricted narrative but keeps our attention. It shifts between straightforward lines and unusual phrasing (‘dizzily companionable wane’, ‘angels powdering the breezes’). Intriguing, somewhat disturbing, it impresses with its dark charm.
Historia de mi muerte / Story of My Death by Leopoldo Lugones
A Moving Poems production for a new series of poetry in translation for the group literary blog I contribute to, Via Negativa. Go there for the text of the poem and the translation; the titling on the video disregards both punctuation and lineation in the interest of displaying Spanish and English side by side, in the manner of a bilingual book of poetry. I haven’t seen this done on a bilingual poetry film before, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been — it seems like a fairly obvious arrangement.
As I wrote at Via Negativa, I translated the poem (with some invaluable assistance from Alicia E-Bourdin on Facebook) specifically with the intent of pairing it with that footage of cabbage white butterflies—which, when I shot it last week, I already recognized as having a certain Lugones-like feel. So it was just a question of finding the right poem.
