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.
An interesting solution to the problem of how to envideo a poem whose typographical arrangement was very important to its author. Susanne Wiegner notes at Vimeo,
“just midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax that describes a temporal and spacial situation by very minimal means. For Robert Lax the composition of the letters and words on the paper was very important. And so he created one of his vertical typefaces, that was transferred for the film. The letters become spaces and actors, crossed and circled by the camera. Step by step a three-dimensional formation of words is generated and disappears again in a sheet of paper.
The film has been very widely screened — click through for a full list of festivals and awards.
You’ve probably seen these animations before — if not, check out the dedicated site Billy Collins Action Poetry, or watch them (and others) on Moving Poems. What I found interesting here was Collins’ explanation for why he decided to let the animators go ahead and illustrate his poems, since in general he didn’t understand why a poem would need to be animated. His remarks evince little familiarity with the genre, and in questioning why any poem would need to be illustrated in this manner, strangely echo Ron Silliman’s criticism of one of them:
Thus Billy Collins’ The Dead is animated by Juan Delcan, neither poem nor cartoon threatening to break any new ground whatsoever. … [It’s] nothing more than a reading of the piece over which a cartoon has been superimposed.
But he gave in because he says he’s always loved cartoons, and because he figured it would bring his poems to a wider audience.
Found text has played a central role in the development of videopoetry, so this montage of advertising tropes by the late comedian George Carlin becomes a full-fledged poem merely by adaptation to the kinetic-text medium. An inspired choice and execution by Jenny Lien.
“People and places from a recent trip to San Diego, CA,” says documentary photojournalist and filmmaker Kristyn Ulanday in the description at Vimeo. I think she rather understates the awesomeness of this videopoem. (For the text of the poem, see Poets.org.)
http://vimeo.com/38687396
Three poems in one video by the indefatigible Swoon. The poems are: “Spread Out,” “Trash” and “A Sonnet for Edgar Allan Poe.” For the texts, see Swoon’s blog post about the video.
These poems are from Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The wonderfully whimsical drawings by Cheryl Gross are animated in a fairly basic style which the description at YouTube dubs “motion graphics.”
http://vimeo.com/37387784
According to the description on Vimeo, these are
Words and pictures from the English Peak District, courtesy of Mark Gwynne Jones and Andy Lawrence… 2012
This film was made in one day, using the Canon 220 sx powershot HS, a cheap compact camera, and iMovie..
Lawrence and Jones are part of a band/multimedia partnership called Psychicbread which has produced a whole series of filmpoems with texts by Jones. According to the Horizon Review,
Four times fringe-award winners, Mark Gwynne Jones and the Psychicbread use poetry, music and humour as their messenger. From the girl who spent too long on a sunbed to the joys of driving a Sherman Tank at rush hour. . . the result is contagious, gritty and sometimes startlingly sensitive.