No Road by Philip Larkin
A piece called “Type in motion,”
designed by Joseph Allison and Sophie Tanat-Jones. The piece is inspired by the design ethos of Lazlo Moholy Nagy. The work features a poem by Philip Larkin called ‘No Road’.
This is just the first stanza of the poem, which may be read in its entirety at ilikethispoem.
The Dead by Billy Collins (McDonalds remix)
Lauren Adolfsen spliced together some footage from old McDonald’s commercials to make a new video for Billy Collins’ poem. This uses the same audio as the animation by Juan Delcan, which was one of the 11 videopoems authorized by the poet. I am not sure he’d approve of this one, but it definitely changes the way I think of the poem.
Currach by Tony Curtis
Animation by Ronan Horan of a short piece by the Irish poet Tony Curtis.
The New Vestments by Edward Lear
This is “Verse Versus…” by Australian artist Anna Glynn. Though marred a bit by her watermark, it still seemed worth sharing for the extent to which it captured the oddness of the Lear poem — and oddly, won first prize from a local historic preservation group.
Anna Glynn was awarded first prize in the Historic Houses Trust’s 2009 Meroogal Women’s Arts Prize for her work ‘Verse Versus…’, a digital video art work which brings characters from Edward Lear’s poem ‘The New Vestments’ to life against a backdrop of images of the Historic Houses Trust property, Meroogal.
Contemporary Australian artist Anna Glynn works in a variety of media – this evocative short film features her original artwork: drawing, painting, photography, sound, animation and video/film SFX. Glynn’s main interest is in narrative works, in expressing this essence of “place”, either physical or temporal.
Family Group Day by Radames Ortiz
“Video Poem written and performed by poet Radames Ortiz featuring music by Trills, graphic design artist Alberto Capetillo and videographer Gilbert Camargo.” See the rest of the YouTube info bar for the text of the poem.
Ortiz blogs as the amplified bard.
Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley
This video is the work of Tasmanian “freelance visualisation consultant” Peter Morse. The music was composed by Glenn Rogers and performed by Alistair Foote, Penelope Reynolds and Samantha Podeu. Morse describes the project as follows:
The Video & Text
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s classic poem (1818) is used in the video in relation to romantic and Neoclassical architecture, with particular reference to Boullée and Speer, as a kind of critique of the ideology of power articulated by these architectures. The poem ‘Ozymandias’ is a vivid portrayal of the vanity of demagoguery and monumentalism, explored here as a trope for the moral ambiguities of these unbuilt architectures, that stand as fascinating historical symbols of the folly of certain types of power, albeit from varying political persuasions. The strong counterpoint of the ‘modernity’ of the score with the inflated Neoclassicism of the architecures is an attempt to dramatise the counterpoint of these different aesthetics, both of which have struggled for power in this last century. Ironically, these buildings will ever be as virtual as they are here: fictions of history re-imagined via computer simulation.
The Music
Ozymandias is mostly based on the enigmatic minor and the enigmatic major scales. These are rather unusual and obscure scales not generally associated with Western music. In the more polyrhythmic and densely orchestrated sections the inversions of both these scales are used. In some sections notes from the enigmatic scales act as pedal points (tonal centres). From these pedal points are used their associated harmonic series and their inversions to generate a palindromic type of effect. These techniques were largely employed as formal compositional methodologies and may not be obviously audible in the music.
Note: This was the ‘blurb’ from the “Liminal” interactive CD-ROM (2000). The video was made on a Mac in 1998, using 3D animation and compositing, with footage shot in Berlin.
The Sad Mother (La Madre Triste) by Gabriela Mistral
Harry Garcia goes into some detail about the filming:
This is a visual experiment based on Gabriela Mistral poem “The Sad Mother”. All shoot with a Nikon D90 on a cold late October evening.
Lens: Nikkor 50mm 1.4. All lighting controlled with manual aperture. We took advantage of a couple good tricks to “tease” the D90, flashing right at the lens on “Aperture” mode to force the camera to lower down the ISO speed in order to eliminate any grain or noise. Then we locked the exposure with this settings and controlled light exclusively with manual apertures. Another reason for Nikon to add full manual control to our beloved D90!
The audio is from Daily Poetry Reading by Karin. For those who know Spanish, here’s the original poem:
La Madre Triste
Duerme, duerme, dueño mío,
sin zozobra, sin temor,
aunque no se duerma mi alma,
aunque no descanse yo.Duerme, duerme y en la noche
seas tú menos rumor
que la hoja de la hierba,
que la seda del vellón.Duerma en ti la carne mía,
mi zozobra, mi temblor.
En ti ciérrense mis ojos:
¡duerma en ti mi corazón!
Dust of Snow by Robert Frost
http://youtu.be/3PIZzPGdMa0
I’m not always big on typographic animations, especially ones with no sound, but this one has just enough graphic elements to be interesting. Plus, it’s seasonal. Erik A. Baker created it “for Ben Van Dyke’s typography class at the University at Buffalo Fall semester 2007.” (I’d say at least half the videos on Moving Poems were student projects.)
“A word made Flesh…” by Emily Dickinson
A fascinating linguistic deconstruction of the poet’s lines just uploaded to Vimeo yesterday, by one Eliza Fitzhugh, for Dickinson’s 179th birthday. The multiple accents should remind us that now more than ever, with the advent of the web, Dickinson’s poetry belongs to the world. I spend some time yesterday looking up favorite Dickinson poems on popular poem-sharing sites and reading appreciative comments from places like Iran, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan — the traditional Sufi heartland. I had always thought her work would translate well to an audience weaned on Hafiz, Rumi, and Khayyam.
Here’s the text from R. W. Franklin’s variorum edition (the video repeats lines 9-10 for a conclusion):
A Word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength –A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He –
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology.
Poet’s Work by Lorine Niedecker
Excerpt from a documentary called Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker, by Cathy C. Cook, which won a Jury Award from the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival. Cook reproduces the official blurb on her blog:
In this unconventional documentary, filmmaker Cathy Cook takes cues from Niedecker’s work and the Wisconsin heritage they share to explore the poetry and life of Lorine Niedecker (1903 – 1970). The poetry and film subjects included are: nature, history, ecology, gender, domesticity, work, culture, family and social politics. Cook gives new voice and visibility to the extraordinary works of this very private poet that some literary critics have described as the 20th century’s Emily Dickinson.
There’s a review and an interesting discussion of possible omissions from the film at The Irascible Poet.
For more on Niedecker, see the website for the poet from the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, Inc. Here’s another video, featuring Wisconsin Poet Laureate Marilyn Taylor discussing and reading from Niedecker’s work, part of the Dead Poets Society of America’s 2009 cross-country gravesite tour.
http://www.vimeo.com/8077295
Tears, Idle Tears by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Inspired by artist Eugene Atget, this student piece by Heather Kendrick and Lauren Kvedaras cleverly plays on the two meanings of “tears.” Kendrick explains:
After being given an artist and a poet at random we were asked to select a poem and use inspiration from the artist to create a motion piece under the title “Words in Motion”.
Drop’t Sonnet by Anne Carson
This is the last of six YouTube selections from Anne Carson’s Possessive Used as Drink (Me), a lecture on pronouns in the form of 15 sonnets, with three Merce Cunningham dancers and video direction by Sadie Wilcox. See playgallery.org for more on the project.
