A while ago I began to solicit videos of friends and associates reading/performing/interpreting poems from my collection, In This Alone Impulse, in exchange for a copy of said collection. A dozen or so videos into this project, I’m amazed and impressed by the range of attitude, voice and dimension the videos have exhibited. Each of these videos represents not just a reading, but a unique response to poetry, and in that respect I think they’re quite valuable and interesting art-ifacts.
Ariel Basom took this with his cell phone, put the result through a filter, and came up with what seems to be a kind of eerie, Lynchian singles ad:
Matthew Simmons snuggles with his cat Emmett at the end of his video, and I can’t help but feel a vicarious comfort:
Maxfield Chandler lends his sad eyes to this reading, and the abstract background appears thought-like:
Mel Bosworth’s calm during his reading seems unsettling, as if he’s expressing some kind of condolence:
And compare Mel’s “Fatness” to Eric Leuschner’s, which robs the poem of any sentimental chords, switching sadness for bathos:
Paula Bomer had her reading recorded by a hand-held camera, and the result is a strange outtake from COPS, complete with a villain in fur to read the ransom note:
James J. Williams III thought for some reason that Philip Seymore Hoffman’s drag queen from Flawless ought to weigh in:
Ryan W. Bradley adds atmospherics to his reading, and obscures his face in a way that suggests testimony or alien abduction:
Daniel Coughlin describes his acrobatic video as “A metaphoric (re)birth”:
BL Pawelek gives a gravelly, weary voice to a harsh chiaroscuro, forefronting a chosen image from the poem:
Tan-ya Gerrodette uses the shoreline in an entirely different way for her video, and her voice-over adds an interesting anxiety:
I love the ambient insect and bird noises that give Greg Olear’s reading a kind of cozy, homespun feeling:
Zac Whittenburg defamiliarizes body parts to create an abstract composition that evokes the broken utility of the poem’s language:
AD Jameson throws himself at a playfully counterintuitive grift on his poem’s central image:
Stephen Johnson talked his yoga class into the service of his video, bringing community to the poem’s intimate dialog:
Todd Zuniga makes fun of me a little, which certainly touches on one of the central elements of the collection as a whole:
As these continue to come in (a few more are expected this coming week), I’ve come to see them as a kind of communion between myself and the reader, a shared experience in a way, that instead of reducing the work, expands it beyond what I alone could have managed. You can see these poems and more at my YouTube Channel.