Film Poems
Redell
Olsen. Les Figues Press, $15 US paperback (173p) ISBN 978-193425451-6
Put crudely, Olsen’s films don’t do
narrative realism, actors doing dialogue, all that kind of thing. Her essay on
the poetics of the swoon in the film poetics of Abigail Child suggests some
perspectives on her own aesthetics. Along with Abigail Child, a fondness for
Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is
evident in Olsen’s recent book Punk Faun.
In search of other precedents, not least to articulate the fragility of film’s
performance, one might cite Robert Smithson’s slide lecture, Hotel Palenque (1972) or Victor Burgin’s
Between (1986). In Olsen’s work,
however, the conceptual weave is distinctive in its emphasis on poetry. Her
films rarely use the soundtracks of found film materials, preferring to create
a soundscape that can exist independently, whether as printed text or in
performance, and so as film poems. (Drew Milne, Selvage, rafts, and peaches:
Redell Olsen’s Film Poems”)
Film Poems (Les Figues,
2014) collects British poet Redell Olsen’s “texts for film and performances
from 2007-2012.” As Drew Milne opens his extensive introduction: “This book
brings together five poetic sequences, proposing film poems as the compound
title—genre even—for these different texts.” The works that make up this
collection—“London Land Marks,” “A New Booke of Copies,” “Bucolic Picnic,” “The
Lost Pool” and “S P R I G S & spots”—are curious in part simply because of
the form in which she composes: not for the page or the stage but for the
screen itself. Given the range and breadth of poetic composition, from
performance poetry to visual and concrete poetry, it would seem curious that
there aren’t more poets composing specifically for film or video (especially
given the variety of videopoem festivals around the globe). Utilizing
variations on the essay, lyric repetition, sound, description, prose and the
prose-poem, and a variety of rhythms breathy and breath-less, the range and
possibility of Olsen’s ouvre is immense, and quite impressive. As she writes in
“Bucolic Picnic / or, Toile de Jouy, Camouflage”: “first
as a painting / off cuts of brazen // dazzle of fabrics / forbidden threats //
of elsewhere // sets sells sails [.]” Given the works were originally composed
for the screen, how does one read them solely on the page?
say I and you
London land marks
say I and you in
London mark land
say London land is
marked by you and I
say I and you make
marks in London’s land
say I and you mark
lands in London
say I and you
marked by land
say London land
marks
say long done land
marks
say long done marks
in land
say land in long
marks in language
Film Poems is a good
example of and reminder that the possibilities of freshness in experimental
poetry are far more open than most practicing writers often credit, and even
manage to reduce much experimental work into a series of works that are all
pushing in similar ways, and in similar directions. Composed for performance
and the screen, Olsen’s Film Poems
breathe fresh energy into collaborations between and amid forms, and of a form
so often laden-down with purpose, seriousness and sameness. (May 2014)
Purchase
Film Poems HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious
capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was
longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes
and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty
Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). He regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
