~ Poet: Howie Good ~
Childhood’s End by Howie Good
I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.
The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.
Aleppo by Howie Good
A new videopoem by Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon for a poem by Howie Good. Soundbites from Al Jazeera appear in the soundtrack together with Marc’s original music. When he shared it on Facebook, he included a brief note about its origin:
Howie Good wrote a strong poem, Aleppo. It called me and in one burst I created this video/soundpiece yesterday. Enjoy!
And a few days later, he indicated it might lead to more Swoon videopoems this year. Fingers crossed!
mimes in hi-fi by Howie Good
https://vimeo.com/120554706
Dale Wisely has been making videopoems at a great rate, playing with a variety of techniques and approaches. Here, a Babel of voices and text gradually gives way to a poem in the soundtrack and (partially) on the screen. Howie Good is one of the hardest working and most widely published poets on the internet; it’s always a pleasure to add to his archive here.
Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas by Howie Good
This is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas) by Swoon (Marc Neys), made with the text of a poem from Fugitive Pieces, Howie Good’s new collection of poems. Here’s what Marc blogged about it:
So. A New year. New sounds. New videos. A big new project (more on that one later)
A solo exhibition (more on that one later) and
New collaborations.My first video of the year is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas)
I first got the idea for this when reading ‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Howie Good.
It’s a great book of found poems published by Right Hand Pointing Press.
All proceeds from the book go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.People who follow my work, know I’m a big Howie fan. His writing moves me and (very often) is a perfect fit for my videos and sounds.
In Fugitive Pieces Howie Good used the techniques of the collagist.
The poems are collages sourced from various texts as well as his own imagination.
From the author’s note:This meant creation through destruction, lifting things from one context and dropping them into another, establishing unfamiliar relationships among familiar objects.
That sounds a bit like creating videopoetry. I often find myself using that same approach (especially when working with found footage or archive material)
I first created a track around samples I took from a documentary ‘Target for today’.
Only after creating that track I chose a poem from ‘Fugitive Pieces’: Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas
The poem was the perfect match for my soundscape and would work well as ‘text on screen’ in a film composition.[…]
I collected footage (from Videoblocks) to combine with certain lines from the poem. Played around with timing, font and placement of the text and started puzzling it all together. I believe it works well.
Click through for the text of the poem (or, you know, just watch the film).
Dark City by Howie Good
Marc Neys, AKA Swoon, has turned a quintessential Howie Good poem, dark and surreal, into a noirish film with two narrators, one male and one female. Neys writes:
It’s been a while since I last made a video for a Howie Good poem. When I made ‘The Killing’ last year I worked with Michael Dickes for voicing the poem. This time I wanted to work with 2 voices, so I asked Michael again and I also knocked on Nic Sebastian’s virtual door for a reading. Both of them were willing to do a reading. Both delivered a great one.
The poem(s) I picked out for this project come from Howie Good’s book ‘The complete absence of twilight’ (MadHat Press, 2014)
[…]
I had this footage (by cinetrove) lying around for months waiting for the right words to come by. A sequence of repeated actions… You see a guy running around, being busy and mysterious but without purpose. Senseless actions, repetition, paranoia… It’s Dark City.
I combined parts of this footage (that I turned blue for a darker feel) with more colourful footage to chafe along the blue footage. I think the combination of the 2 voices and the 2 ‘storylines’ work well together.
For more about The Complete Absence of Twilight, or to order, see the publisher’s page.
The Death of Me (trailer) by Howie Good
A poetry book trailer that appears to give a pretty good indication of the tone and flavor of the book. (I say that having read a number of Howie Good‘s books and chapbooks, though not this particular one yet.) Sizable chunks of text alternate with underwater footage of swimming penguins, apparently shot on a mobile phone at an aquarium. Unlike so many trailers for poetry books from micropresses, where the initiative to make a video originates with the author, this was made by the publishers themselves.
This is a video promoting the launch of Howie Good’s limited edition poetry collection ‘The Death of Me’ through Pig Ear Press. The text is from Howie’s book, the video was shot in Basel Zoo and the soundtrack was created on a ukulele. The video and audio were created by Mr [Pete] Lally.
Pig Ear Press are a (very) small press using letterpress printing and handbinding to create limited run books of quality. You can purchase Howie’s book and see information about previous publications by visiting pigearpress.co.uk.
I’m a little late in sharing this, but the press run doesn’t seem to be sold out quite yet.
Quartet by Howie Good
http://vimeo.com/46184070
Another of Swoon‘s adaptations of poems from the qarrtsiluni podcast, this one by Howie Good from the Fragments issue currently in serialization. (Read the text here.) It was screened at “Filmscape” in Dunbar, Scotland on July 30. Here’s what Swoon said about it in a recent blog post:
I had a track (‘Gaze‘) that I used before for an older videopoem that I wasn’t to happy with.
But I still love the track.
‘Gaze’, by the way is on ‘Pathways’, a great sampler on netlabel NSI. You can get that just for free.I made use of some great footage I found on Prelinger from a guy Ivan Besse, who filmed everyday life in South Dakota somewhere in ’38 ’39…
I combined that footage with layers of recordings I made myself to add a ghostlike atmosphere (to fit the soundscape) and a bit of colour and depth.
The poem also appears in a brand-new collection from Fowlpox Press, Desecrations by Howie Good, available through Smashwords.
Disintegration Nation by Howie Good
A “mash-up-videopoem” by the indefatigable Swoon Bildos, focusing on “truth and fiction in the US…TV and violence…reality and fear.” The poem is from Howie Good’s Dreaming in Red. The video uses footage from Kansas City Confidential by Phil Karlson (1952) as well as CCTV from the security tapes of the fatal police beating of Kelly Thomas.
Howie Good: three poems from Dreaming in Red
Swoon Bildos combined three poems — “Blue Territory,” “Ghost Train,” and “The Theory of Meaningful Coinicidence” — for a videopoem in support of Howie Good‘s new collection, Dreaming in Red. Profits from the sale of the book go to the Crisis Center in Birmingham, Alabama, which works on suicide prevention and provides services to victims of sexual assault, day treatment for the indigent mentally ill, and other services.
Everything Simple Becomes Complex by Howie Good
http://vimeo.com/29124206
Another Swoon film for a poem by Howie Good — his seventh to date. The description at Vimeo characterizes this as “an edited, layered compilation of ‘simple’ camera-errors, to fit the jagged music and the title of the poem itself.”
Welcome to Hard Times by Howie Good
http://www.vimeo.com/27002489
“Between the waves and the fog, we haven’t got a clue of what might be ahead of us,” Swoon writes about his latest film based on a poem from Howie Good’s Whale Sound audio chapbook, Threatening Weather. He credits Matthew Augustus for some of the images, and of course Nic S. for the reading.
An armed man lurks in ambush by Howie Good
Swoon’s latest in his series of videos for poems by Howie Good is something a bit different: a short called “Not Again (Pripyat),” using footage of the abandoned city in the Chernobyl evacuation zone, with Howie’s text appropriated for a kind of surreal documentary. Let me quote the description on Vimeo for the credits and such:
The images in the film are footage from a film about Pripyat (credit to Golden Movies Productions,2009)
Images before the disaster at the nuclear plant, images of the evacuation of the town, images of the ghost town now. Hence the title of the film, Not Again.
Although the poem by Howie is about other things and places, I wanted the images from Pripyat [to] add another dimension to the story, the poem, the atmosphere of the whole film.
Words: Howie Good
Voice: Nic S. for Whale Sound
Concept, videotreats, editing and music: Swoon
“An armed man lurks in ambush” is the title poem of a full-length collection forthcoming from Despertanto (who also published Howie’s third book, Everything Reminds Me of Me, back in March). The text of the poem may be read on a site Swoon has set up for the texts used in all his videopoems to date, as well as in the Whale Sound audio chapbook, Threatening Weather, in which it originally appeared.
