Billy Collins: “Now and Then”

Kudos: JWTNY

Billy Collins: “The Best Cigarette”

This came to mind on a cold DC morning as I prepare to jog.  Video kudos to JWTNY.

Billy Collins: “The Country”

Video kudos: JWTNY

Billy Collins: “Budapest”

Video kudos: JWTNY

For Mark, Andrea, and the unvisited cities

Billy Collins: “The Parade”

Read by Garrison Keillor.

Billy Collins: “Some Days”

 

Poem by Billy Collins, animations by Julian Grey of Headgear

Billy Collins: “Sweet Talk”

I like Liza Romero‘s take on Billy Collins’ already virtually famous poem “Sweet Talk.”

Adaptation: Poem to Video

More Billy Collins poetry, with video animation and the author’s narration. In this case, the poem’s words appear (sometimes partly so), line by line, variously positioned in successive shots. That effect forges another link between the aural and visual, but the variation in the positioning of the lines and the truncated words disturbs the perceptual processing in a interesting way, I think. Generally, the animator has associated the poetic line break with the traditional horizontal montage cut.  You like?

Adaptation: Poem to Video

Here’s an interesting example of a golempoem: Billy Collins reads his poem Forgetfulness “over” a series of animated dream images that “illustrate” the poem. How does the animation add or detract from your experience of the poem? How does the poem add or detract from your experience of the animation? Would this work differently if someone else (say Harvey Fierstein) were reading the poem instead of Collins? Would this work differently if, in fact, no one read the poem at all, but the words appeared between or within the animation?

If you’d like to hear more, I’ve collected a number of Billy Collins poem videos in a You Tube play list. There’s a fairly wide variety of approached represented here. I’ll want to delve more deeply into particular adaptations in coming posts. But, for now, what do you think of Forgetfulness?