Stimuli by Helen Vitoria
A poem by Helen Vitoria at the Poetry Storehouse gets the Swoon treatment. Marc Neys writes,
As long as The Poetry Storehouse stock keeps growing with more and interesting poems and writers, I’ll keep coming back.
For this work I picked out a poem by Helen Vitoria. I worked with Helen before a few years back and I love her choice of words. Pure and rich.[…]
Those who have been watching my last series of videos know that I’m a fan of the ‘home movies’ that are collected
at IICADOM. It’s such a rich and beautiful collection. To be able to take a peek in all those lives… Create your own stories… I truly enjoy that.
For this poem I wanted footage from a wedding.
Young people in love on the beginning of their journey.
A lot of wedding footage on IICADOM, but this stood out (for me) Beautiful B/W, brutal cuts. Faces full of joy and hope.I thought these images would make a great pairing with Helen’s poem.
The High Hills Have A Bitterness by Ivor Gurney
Filmmaker Othniel Smith combines a 1946 recording of Pygmy music, “Chant Magique en Partant pour la Chasse au Filet,” with footage from a 1936 movie, Millions of Us, for an evocative remix of a brief poem by the early 20th-century English poet Ivor Gurney.
Sorry, Google Doesn’t Know Jealousy by Denise Duhamel
Producer Didi Menendez found the perfect way to translate a Google search poem into video: have a different person read each line.
Poem by Denise Duhamel read by 65 poets including Terrance Hayes, Richard Blanco, Collin Kelley, Michelle Buchanan, Diego Quiros, Emma Trelles, Amy Gerstler, Maureen Seaton, Matthew Hittinger, Stephen Mills, Major Jackson, Duriel Harris, more. Video is part of the FIXATION gallery event taking place at the Zhou B Art Center April 2014.
Poet Denise Duhamel explains in a note at the end of the video that
I chose for my “Fixation” entry jealousy, a very human reaction under certain circumstances, but one that I am embarassed to have. I used “googlism” to search Jealousy, as though it were a person or place. There are four googlism choices: who, what, where, and when. When I searched Jealousy under “when,” there was nothing, only this message: Sorry, Google doesn’t know Jealousy. I knew instantly this would be my title. I collaged the lines from the other three googlisms for jealousy, pruning away the repeats. Many of the lines that pop up on googlism are truncated in some way, and I let those stand, as it seems to me they imply a hesitation, a shame in finishing the thought about this very vexing emotion.
For more about Fixation, see poetsandartists.com.
The Mad Gardener’s Song by Lewis Carroll
This is The Gardener’s Dream, a terrific poetry film by the Moscow-based animator Valeriy Kozhin. It was recently featured in a post by Alison Pezanoski-Browne at Tin House Reels. As Pezanoski-Browne writes,
Kozhin’s film transforms Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Mad Gardener’s Song” into a surrealist adventure that maintains the spirit of the poet’s work and incorporates a wildness that is all Kozhin’s.
The film conveys an abstracted conceit of a logic game. Using paper cut-outs and puppets, porcelain dolls, and minuscule objects, Kozhin draws on images of childhood. Using a color palate rich in natural pigments, his work also feels like more classic animation–a mixture of Marc Davis era Disney and Jan Svankmajer, one of Valeriy’s favorite filmmakers.
“I see a new world with my eyes when I am inside a film,” Kozhin said. “I think that cinema is a young art. We have the great opportunity to make more than we can imagine in animation.”
That imagination, which seems to be equally enamored with the romantic and grotesque, has created an alluring lullaby for those boys and girls who still read under the covers after the lights have been turned off.
Click through for a bio of the filmmaker. Kozhin has also uploaded a version in Russian, Сон Садовника.
The Convert by Eric Burke
https://vimeo.com/93042677
A Nic S. video based on a poem at the Poetry Storehouse. Eric Burke is based in Columbus, Ohio and blogs at Anomalocrinus Incurvus. The music is from Soundcloud user Elan Hickler.
The poem originally appeared in qarrtsiluni.
ہمارے گھر کوئی آتا نہیں ہے / Nobody comes to our home by Abrar Ahmad
Pakistani poet Abrar Ahmad reads his poem in this video from Umang, directed by Ammar Aziz. Press the CC (closed captioning) icon for the English translation by Zahra Sabri, and visit the video’s page on the Umang site for the complete original Urdu text as well as the translation.
Two Miles After the Gravel Road Ends by Sherry O’Keefe
This video based on a poem by Sherry O’Keefe uses public-domain footage shot in South Dakota in the late 1930s, as Marc Neys (Swoon) explains:
Promises are there to be broken (the ones I make to myself, that is)
I’ve said never to use the footage of Ivan Besse again. I didn’t.
Not until I came across ‘Two Miles After the Gravel Road Ends’ by Sherry O’Keefe in The Poetry Storehouse.
Sherry was one of the poets I did a video for in ‘my early days’. A videopoem and a collab that is still dear to my heart.
It was a pleasure to find her words on the shelves of the warehouse. Such beautiful words.A lot of her poems tell stories. Great chunks of life wrapped in words and images. And these were just a perfect match for the storytelling images of Ivan Besse.
الإدعاء Al Ediâa (The Claim) by Youssef Rakha
Another great film adaptation from Mariam Ferjani of a poem by Youssef Rakha, whose blog post of the video includes an English translation by Robin Moger:
My thinnest girlfriends always complain
Of gaining weight, which confuses me
When I think of fat girls.
But then I remember
That I’ve never suffered from loving my lover,
Except when it provides a good excuse to leave her,
And I reflect that things are less important
Than they seem, if we look at them
Long-term,
Which eases my terror a little.
So I say to myself that the world is really like this:
The thin fear fat,
The fat love food,
Lovers never suffer for the right reasons
And everything does not ride
On everything.
The Vimeo description includes a full list of credits in English:
Text: Youssef Rakha
Screen Adaptation: Mariam Alferjani
Actors: Alaeddine Slim – Mariam Alferjani
Photography: Alaeddine Slim – Mariam Alferjani
Producers: Kamel Laaridhi – Alaeddine Slim
Editing: Mariam Alferjani
Disappointment by Jade Anouka
British actor and poet Jade Anouka stars in this film of her poem directed by Michael Dickes, publisher of Awkword Paper Cut. Here’s the description on Vimeo:
Jade Anouka: Poem and Narration
Michael Dickes: Camera & Concept
Audio/Video Editing
Filmed on location at 59E59 Theater in
NYC using one camera and 1 lightbulb
on a wire. Kind thanks to theater staff.
Jades voice-over recorded at 48k using an AKG
large diaphram microphone.
Original soundscapes by Erokia (CC) Re-edited
Metanoia Lost by Risa Denenberg
https://vimeo.com/92423501
This video remix by Nic S. of a poem by Risa Denenberg layers in footage of one of those natural sights that moves us at a very primal level, I think — rain falling into water — to very good effect. In some process notes on her blog, Nic writes:
Poems on big metaphysical themes are some of the most rewarding to work as video remixes, because they leave the visual field wide open and give the remixer real opportunities to insert him or herself into a poem’s narrative and move it forward in complementary but different ways. This lovely poem by Risa Denenberg at The Poetry Storehouse was a case in point. I read it as beautifully capturing one of those devastating moments of big doubt we sometimes encounter.
Which is where it got personal. The belief I try to live by is that we are lying fallow during such bleak periods, and that, their awfulness notwithstanding, they are at the same time periods of underground preparation, restoration and growth. So I went with that approach. I thought rain, with its double connotation of weeping/mourning and of life-inspiring nature, was the perfect backdrop metaphor. […]
For the cross-fades, I chose images with very personal connotations for me, but which I thought added the right ‘universal’ overtones of the twin companions, loss and hope. All of them jumped out at me as being ‘right’ as I flipped through my clips library. Ending with the bear family at the end might perhaps be a more upbeat conclusion than originally intended in the piece, but the image was insistent, so I went with it. The soundtrack with its lonely piano and melancholy motif and underlying energy was by Mustafank and really felt like rain to me.
There’s a bit more if you click through. I must say I’m grateful to Nic for blogging about her techniques and thought-process in such detail with almost every videopoem she makes.
