May 2018

This month featured 4 works by poets who have made their own films.

The beautiful load by Chika Oduah is both stunningly beautiful and powerful.

I grew up watching my mother tie huge pieces of fabric on her head. I’d stand watching my mother’s reflection in the bathroom mirror as she firmly held the ends of crisp fabrics with her hands. I would silently observe her in wonder. She was the creator before me and with an unseen power, she’d bend that thing, place it down and lift it up, wrap it around and drop it back, pull it like rope and then caress it like a child. And at the end of the creation process, her ichafu would glow like the crown on her head that it was.

Golden Book by Marilyn McCabe also provides a link to her blog with an interesting essay about video poetry on the April 30 2018 entry:

I struggle with this in making videopoems. My grasp of technology and visual arts is tenuous, my understanding of what sound can do rudimentary, and my distrust of the way emotions can be manipulated by sound is high, but I stick with it. Because this is the era of the audiovisual milieu, and I’m interested to explore how poetry can be engaged actively in it.

Vivos Voco by Aaron Kent
This is the first of 6 poems by Aaron about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Yield by Gen3ration Y (which the author describes as visual poetry), is a love poem.

 ‘The way you looked at me that first night made me write the first love poem of my life…’