Poetry

A playful and dark conversational study—wrapping prose poetry into the recognizable conversational form and allowing both connections and missed meanings. First the ladies visit, the image—a roving camera lovingly viewing a still image—calls up both the progress and stagnancy of their talk, then they go to watch a play—on a television, in a snow garden. In many ways the play references the cadence of the ladies' conversation—the tedious animosity and lack of attentive or appropriate response.

Mike Kuchar

Tickled Pink

He is mute flesh that the stroking of fingers can bring to sing.

-- Mike Kuchar

Cecilia Dougherty

The Writers Series

The Writers Series is a series of video portraits of writers whose work I love.

-- Cecilia Dougherty

Cecilia Dougherty

Kevin & Cedar

I arranged a visit to poet/novelist Kevin Killian’s South of Market apartment in San Francisco to shoot a portrait of him, and when I arrived he had a guest, poet Cedar Sigo. They had corresponded earlier, but were meeting for the first time, and Cedar agreed to participate in our video shoot. This is perhaps the least planned, most verité and documentary of the videos about writers so far. Our immediate plan was for Kevin to read one of Cedar’s poems and for Cedar to read one by Kevin.

Cecilia Dougherty

Eileen

This video is an unabashed fan letter to poet Eileen Myles. As in Laurie, my desire was to romanticize the poet, but not through her writing so much as through her reputation as the natural born child of the New York School and the Beats. I shot the movie as I imagined Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie shooting Pull My Daisy, a film that left an impression on me chiefly of the struggle between form and formlessness, plan and improvisation, sketch and story.

Cecilia Dougherty

Leslie

In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. I could not understand the writing, which can seem difficult and unwieldy to a reader unaccustomed to language poetry, and understood less the more I tried. After a certain point in the reading I stopped trying to figure it out and I let the words seep in. My reward was an effortless understanding of how her poetry works.

Mike Kuchar

Litany of the Seven Kisses

OverRiped words from the lips of an OverExposed boy decorates this litany in pink with purple bruises.

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Midnight Carnival

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

Deborah Stratman

...These Blazeing Starrs!

Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

Dani Leventhal

Shayne's Rectangle

In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody.

-- Jeremy Hoevenaar

Dani Leventhal

Tin Pressed

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal's Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life - with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics - and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera's odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal's deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing and terror.

Mike Kuchar

High Rising

Rock and ice soar among the clouds.

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Midnight Suite

Run, unholy woman; your passions deceive you!

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

The Stone Boy

He hears the whispers of gargoyles in a hall of heavy stone.

-- Mike Kuchar

Kevin Jerome Everson

Blind Huber

Blind Huber is a film interpretation of a poem by the American writer Nick Flynn loosely based on the life of Francois Huber, the blind 18th Century beekeeper, who sat before a series of hives for fifty years unlocking an unknown world.

Written by Nick Flynn. Cinematographer: Alex Stockwell.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Poetry

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