
In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.
‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.
Andrea Rexilius from joshuamarie on Vimeo.
For the past couple of years, Chicago resident and Seattle native Joshua Marie Wilkinson has been shooting video of poets reading at various locales across the country. He shares these videos online via Rabbit Light Movies.
“I wanted to start a new journal to contribute to the world of small magazines and journals–but didn’t want to just do another print or online one–with some catchy new name,” says Wilkinson, “Since I have a minor background in film, I thought it would be easy to start a dvd journal featuring 3-6 short videos of poets reading from their own work.”
At first, Wilkinson only burned these videos onto DVDs to send out to friends and “subscribers,” but that got too costly and cumbersome, so he began putting the videos online free for everyone.
Wilkinson shoots the poets reading, sometimes during public performance, other times at home, and still others in spots picked out for their resonances with the work.
Christian Hawkey from joshuamarie on Vimeo.
“Often times, I’ll invite somebody over to my house, meet them in a city, capture stuff when I’m on road trips or reading trips, or ask the poets where they’d like to be filmed,” says Josh, “Sometimes I have only recordings of the poets’ voices; in those cases I go and shoot stuff around cities and try to assemble a little montage of footage–footage I am careful to try not to illustrate their poems with. I think of it as a backdrop to the voice–something that neither distracts nor describes their words.”
Rabbit Light Movies is roughly bi-annual, with new editions appearing every six months. Anyone interested in further video/poetry sites should check out the Continental Review, or just search “Poetry” on YouTube and laugh until you cry (or vice versa).
Philadelphia resident Ish Klein is not only a fine poet whose work dances on the border between mawkish sentimentality and lyrical poignancy, she’s also an excellent–if extremely bizarre–filmmaker.
Here’s a taste:
Rimbaud asked, “Why not toys and incense already?” Play and the sacred are the 69 of poetry, its yin and yang, but to really play, one must be willing to get dirty, and nothing is messier than the World Wide Waste, a vast mud pit for poets to frolic in.
Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit (1997)
by Jonas Mekas (67 min 16mm)
To mark the tenth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s death (April 5, 1997), UbuWeb is featuring this remarkable video diary of Ginsberg in the days immediately before and after his death.
Downloadable version here (.avi, 700mb)
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
Señor Smith to you. (1)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)
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