The Body Show: How to Boil an Egg by Nora Robertson
UPDATE (3 August 2015): I’ve found and swapped in the complete film.
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This is actually a trailer for a short film by Jason Bahling called The Body Show, due out in November. The whole film is essentially a videopoem for “How to Boil an Egg,” which is from Nora Robertson’s unpublished collection Body-Making Cookery — or so I gather from Jason’s notes at Vimeo and a recent post at Nora’s blog:
About five years ago I appeared in a line-up at Borders downtown and read from my then-new collection Body-Making Cookery which is still in progress (cue internal groan). The collection is all recipe poems and explores the associations food has for us, that food is almost never just a way to keep our bodies going, that it reminds us of other things like family, personal biography, history, body image, desire, mythology, religion. When we eat, it’s my belief that we don’t just take the food into our bodies, but all of these associations into the body of our self. I was experimenting with a persona, the housewife, which later morphed into cooking show host gone awry as explored in the short film The Body Show, a collaboration with video artist Jason Bahling to be released in November 2010.
My Friend, The Parking Lot Attendant by Charles Bukowski
English film student Tom Ralph notes,
The piece is meant to be shown on two screens facing each other, one for each character in the film. This gives the impression of a conversation in which the audience can place themselves where they please. For the purpose of viewing now, both characters appear on one film. Filmed on a Kodak Zi6 and edited on Final Cut Pro. Thanks to Dennis Thompson and Roy Winspear.
On Writing Hat Poems by Marvin Kimbrough
An animation by Francesca Talenti. I wasn’t able to locate a website for the poet.
UPDATE (9/7/10): After posting this, I got a note from Austin-based poet Scott Wiggerman on Facebook saying that Dr. Marvin Kimbrough had been active in the Austin poetry scene and was “a very warm, wonderful person,” though now she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. Yesterday, he sent a follow-up note saying she’d died that morning. Rest in peace, Dr. Kimbrough.
How to be Alone by Tanya Davis
Another videopoem gone viral, with well over a million views at time of posting. It’s not high art, but I guess like a lot of people I love the message here, and I thought the film was charming, too. Andrea Dorfman is the filmmaker. Tanya Davis is the actor/performer as well as the author, justifying this video’s inclusion in my Spoken Word category.
Dreaming of Hair by Li-Young Lee
http://vimeo.com/26980867
A kinetic text piece by Dara Elerath, a student at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. Michael McCormick narrates.
For more on Li-Young Lee, see his page at the Academy of American Poets.
My Grave by Philip Levine
Written and produced by Patrick Robert Payne and Susan Ada Brown. Jared Parks directs. Oddly, this is the first decent video for a Philip Levine poem that I’ve run across — the first of many, I hope.
Hangman by Maurice Ogden
Classic film poem from 1964, directed by Paul Julian and Les Goodman with animation by Margaret Julian. According to a Wikipedia entry on the poem, it was a co-winner of the Silver Sail award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1964. A couple of the user reviews at IMDb are worth quoting. Old_tv_guy calls it
An eerie and disturbing little gem from Melrose Studios. Animation is excellent, of a photocollage style you hardly ever see: stark photo images and gaunt, jagged lines. It seems to be taking place in a backwater of infinity, or a nightmare world of pale colors and limitless space.
And tim_gatchell wrote in 2008,
I also saw this short as a child. Probably in about the 5th grade. It left an indelible impression on me and I continue to use this poem as an example for people when groups allow other groups to be ganged up on and have their rights taken away.
Even more remarkable is that while attending college at Cal Poly, I would take summer classes at the local community college to get credits and save money. Took 2nd Semester Freshman lit and guess who my teacher was…yes, Mr. Ogden himself. He is a remarkable man and I have total respect for the man.
He is still teaching I believe in Costa Mesa at the Coast Community College.
I was unable to verify this biographical information about Ogden.
Though a poorer-quality version of the film exists on YouTube, this was uploaded to the Internet Archive by the Academic Film Archive of North America.
Litany by Billy Collins
A three-year-old recites Billy Collins — another reminder that YouTube is still a vast repository of wonderfulness if you can only find it among all the dross. Fortunately, this one has gone viral. The mother says in a comment,
Billy Collins did see this and wrote a letter to my son and I. We feel very honored.
Thank you all for your kind comments. We are working on a few new poems I hope to have up very soon. If there are any suggestions as to poems you think might be good ones for him to memorize, let me know! I will consider them, if he likes them too.
Here’s Collins himself introducing and reading the poem, in a selection from Fora.TV:
