Poetry Visualized

Official Louder Than a Bomb theatrical trailer

Louder Than a Bomb tells the story of four Chicago high school poetry teams as they prepare to compete in the world�s largest youth slam. By turns hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures the turbulent lives of these unforgettable kids, exploring the ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa. While the topics they tackle are often deeply personal, what they put into their poems�and what they get out of them�is universal: the defining work of finding one�s voice.

Winner of fifteen film festival prizes, including nine audience awards, Louder Than a Bomb has been hailed as �powerful and exhilarating� (TimeOut Chicago), �inspiring� (L.A. Times), �irresistible� (Chicago Tribune), �a get-up-and-clap kind of movie� (Paste), �vibrant and moving� (The Wrap), and �a celebration of American youth at their creative best� (Variety).

Stones from Heaven

Adapted from my poem "Stones from Heaven," inspired by the Haiti earthquake.

Nude or Nuke

15 minutes separated these two walks in a same corner even though filmed in different sides of the Hyde Park Corner in London.
They represent two visions of the world.
Which one is the least dangerous?
Orange bodies or Orange march?

The Poet's View -- John Ashbery

Transcript

Perhaps if I spend an hour—or at the most two hours, when I'm feeling really inspired—I'm done for the day and then there's the problem of what to do with the other twenty-two or twenty-three hours of the day. I feel I should be doing something important. But what?

I usually don't write autobiographical poetry, but this sort of turned out that way accidentally; I realized after I'd finished it, since in fact I did have a brother who died when we were both children.

[Ashbery reads "The History of My Life"]

I always wanted to go to France, ever since I was a child and read French fairy tales and writers like Balzac and Proust. It was just a thing I always wanted to do and ended up doing.

It took me a while to adjust to being in a country where a foreign language was spoken. My own poetry derives very much from hearing colloquial—or even worse, American—being spoken around me, especially in New York where you'd overhear strange things being said and I'd often incorporate them into poems. I didn't have that sort of cushion in France, and it took me a while to adjust and to learn how to write all over again without the background noise of American in my ears.

The Poet's View -- Kay Ryan

Transcript

I wrote this—well, I'm sure that I was thinking that I had made a lot of very stupid decisions in my life and that I was now suffering the consequences of them having all piled up and come home. This was a very personal poem, I'm sure, when I wrote it, although I like to write personal poems in such a way that nobody has to know that.

"The chickens are circling and blotting out the day." Now that's a really funny thing to say. You know, somebody has written me a letter and told me: "I love your poem 'Home to Roost' but you should know we raise chickens, and you need to know chickens don't really fly."

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

Carol and I were reading the paper on Sunday morning in bed, and Carol is reading the funnies, and she says in this stricken or awed or something tone, she says: "Kay, read this out loud" and she passes me the funnies. I start reading this cartoon and it is Boondocks and in it, the little brother, who wants to get his bit of the action now and is complaining is smacked down by his big brother, Huey, who uses my poem "Patience" in this cartoon. It was just astonishing. He says: "You know, a poet named Kay Ryan once said, 'Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable—a place with its own harvests. Or that in time's fullness the diamonds of patience couldn't be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness.' What do you think that means?" Huey asks Riley. Riley answers: "It means you're a nerd and poetry is stupid."

The Poet's View -- W. S. Merwin

Transcript

I went to see Ezra Pound when I was eighteen, when I was in college. He was in the psycho ward at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, which was the way his defense lawyer had saved him from being shot for treason for the things he'd said during World War II. The plea of insanity: they said that he was crazy, and he probably was a little crazy. I knew nothing about his politics, fortunately, and he, to my amazement now, took me seriously as a poet. He decided, "this is a young man who wants to be a poet," and he accepted that.

And he said: "If you want to be a poet you have to take it seriously; you have to work on it the way you would work on anything else, and you have to do it every day." He said: "You should write about seventy-five lines a day"—you know Pound was a great one for the laying down the law about how you did anything—and he said, "and you don't have anything to write seventy-five lines about a day." He said: "You don't really have anything to write about at the age of eighteen. You think you do, but you don't." And he said: "The way to do it is to learn a language and translate. That way you can practice, and you can find out what you can do with your language, with your language." He said: "You can learn a foreign language, but the translation is your way of learning your own language."

I love the city but I also love the country, and I realized that when I'm in the city I miss the country all the time, and when I'm in the country I miss the city some of the time. So, what I do now is live in the country and go to the city some of the time. But I can't imagine living in the country without being part of it, without growing things, without doing something.

Writing poetry has, to me, always had something to do with how you want to live. And I guess I've done something that a lot of my contemporaries didn't do. Many of them went into universities and had academic careers, and I have nothing against that, I mean I don't preach against that and say, "what a terrible thing." I think it's a fine thing, if that's what you're made for, but I didn't think I was made for it. I begin, after about a week in a university, I begin to feel the oxygen is going out of the air very fast, and I had to go somewhere else.

This is a poem that I wrote in the early eighties, shortly after I met Paula, my wife.

[Merwin reads "Late Spring"]

Emma Watson Ready To Break

Video of Emma Watson can also be seen on my youtube :)

49

by sherman alexie and eric frith

Spoken Word33

A live of the reading of poetry was made an short film by a new interpretation.
詩の朗読のライブ映像を新たな解釈でショートフィルムにしました。

http://www.toowa2.com/

Mondo America

A short video presentation.