Latest video reviews
The way of immolation by Peter Stephens
Peter Stephens says in a blog post introducing the video:
I had a nice day Monday hiking around the Appalachian Trail’s Roller Coaster off of Bears Den. I used my phone there to shoot this forty-second videopoem.
He added in a comment:
My first videopoem in over a year. Forty seconds long and a single shoot, so it’s not like it killed me or nothing.
American Haikus (excerpt) by Jack Kerouac
http://vimeo.com/10469119
A brilliant, if much too short, film by Irish artist Orla Mc Hardy.
For audio of Kerouac reading a number of his haiku (which are unusually fine examples of the form, in my opinon), see the six-minute track from the album 100 Great Poems — Classic Poets & Beatnik Freaks which someone has also thoughtfully uploaded to YouTube.
You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy by Hannah Stephenson
http://vimeo.com/44861361
The poem by Hannah Stephenson appeared in qarrtsiluni‘s Worship issue (whence the reading in the soundtrack). Swoon notes in his blog post about the film,
For me, the videopoem had to have a seventies-summer-childhood-anything-is-possible-nostalgia feel…
I wanted to say thanks to my father and mother who gave me a good childhood…But I also wanted to recycle.
Recently I had an interesting talk about recycling parts of ones own creations.
Writers can use the same words, phrases even…so why not try to create a new videopoem with exisiting and used material
(exept for the poem, I hadn’t used that before)
The music is a remix of a very short track I made for a commissioned one minute-film.The images I shot myself (from a train, through the trees, into the sun) were also the base for this videopoem (although for that one I abstracted those images, but the basis is the same)
The footage of the boy trying to climb the fence (thanks to an old family film of the Harris Family from 1975) comes from the same youtube video I used images from for this videopoem.
The blips and cuts from the sculpted head (of my father) and the hands holding it (my mother’s) were also used in this videopoem.
So, I think I was able to create a new videopoem (thanks to a poem and a reading I hadn’t used before, I do realise that) with bricks and mortar that I used elsewhere before.
For more of Stephenson’s work, visit her daily ekphrastic poetry blog, The Storialist.
Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry, by Bob Hicok
“An ounce of humility goes a long way in this grounded adaptation of Bob Hicok’s runaway musings on big oil by documentarian Joanna Kohler,” say the folks at Motionpoems. Visit their website for the text of the poem and seven snapshots from behind the scenes in the production of the film. (My favorite is captioned: “Everyone waits and works with the cow’s mood in a single-car garage.”) In this month’s Motionpoems newsletter, Kohler says:
This poem’s most important moment for me was the invitation to being honest with ourselves. I was attracted to this poem’s critical reflection and struggle to put all the pieces together.
My biggest challenge in turning this piece into a film was getting a cow into a South Minneapolis Garage. I had a kick-butt crew who worked some film magic!
I thought it was critical to have a moment in the film that shows the “mass” of what I felt Bob was holding in his words. From a distance a cow is pretty and fun to look at. Up close they are huge, breathing, dirty, sweating and alive. Which is an example of the effort I thought the speaker was trying to make at seeing himself closer.
It’s great to see Motionpoems branching out beyond animation. This is a true videopoem, and a very successful one indeed.
To Mend Small Children by B.C. Edwards
This charming videopoem using (I presume) archival footage is a video trailer for a chapbook by B.C. Edwards, To Mend Small Children, from a new publisher called Augury Books.
