small textlarge text

The Poetry Storehouse

Ed. note: Menacing Hedge has partnered with the Poetry Storehouse to promote collaborative audio-video remixes of poetry and will occasionally showcase collaborative works.

First Year Contest Winners

The Poetry Storehouse opened its doors on October 15, 2013 and since then has amassed a fabulous collection of poems and audio-visual remixes based on those poems, thanks to a more than 100-strong (and growing) community of poets, remixers and readers.

Creative energy is never created from scratch, nor does it ever die, but continually morphs from form to form as each of us is inspired by what has gone before us and in turn inspires what comes after us. Unique for its three categories of contributors – poets, remixers and readers – who engage with each others' work with always interesting and frequently stunning results, the Storehouse embodies that continual passing on of the creative baton.

To celebrate its first anniversary, the Storehouse held a two-part contest last year.

The first part of the contest asked poets to write a poem in response to an untitled video clip composed by a Storehouse remixer. The remixers subsequently incorporated the winning poems into the clips, with the following results:

Overall Winner

Backward like a ghost

by Amy Miller, Video by Lori Ersolmaz

They came so far to see this.
Then up close, the hollering and arrows,
the flash of something they should know
but can't quite understand. The lonely
talk of everyone. Together
we make a city, close
and warm but blinding
in its multitudes. Night,
then open glass. Backward
like a ghost, they move against
what comes. If they find
the solace of sunlight
in a shallow field,
we'll know them
by the dark birds
of their eyes, the home
only they can conjure.
It's coming,
the clearing and the day.
They'll step out into our city.
We won't see them after that,
their parties and rising,
their dust that settles
just like ours.

Runners-up

Foretold

by Luisa A. Igloria, Video by Marc Neys

In that future which pressed
ever closer toward us, time was a room
whose shape we could no longer determine.
In every city, men stood on platforms

gesticulating and making pronouncements.
Armored tanks rolled into the last

encampments, leaving tracks in the river's
boiled mud. We knew when to flee,

what to gather up, what to leave behind.
We walked deeper into blind forests,

climbed as high as our feet allowed
up the thinned hair of trees. They let us

cocoon there, they let us make hammocks.
At night, we watched as distant flares

limned the unnavigable horizon.
At night, some of us told stories,

making shadows with our hands
to mimic the movement of wings.

I was grass

by Amy Miller, Video by Eduardo Yague

Under the city, I grew
and sabotaged
the alleys.
What did I have to drink
but cracks of sun
and the sometimes slash
of paint? Or was that
song? I heard it too. Bachata,
an imagined circle step.
You don't think
grass can dance?
Stop.
The bending
blade and its shadow.
No, watch. Can you see me?
The stem, the glint,
the green.

Muscle Memory

by Michael Biegner, Video by Lori Ersolmaz

This ocean is a gray tidal yank,
That speaks with a blurred accent
of wild greens and blue – the yellow
skin, the sad-eyed light,
these make up the neurons of dark storms.
This frame is a blight of opaque water and dying
movement: go on and be brave.
Sea birds carry word of a drowning in the canals,
To all the lost faces,
To the pink buildings. Helium
lifts the mylar thinking. Salt drops are alive everywhere.
Slog on, unfocused – to the place
where breathing cannot be felt,
where it is not the kind of music we can play by ear.

Part Two

The second part of the contest – more 'traditional' for the Poetry Storehouse – asked remixers to create any kind of remix based on any Storehouse poem. The winner in that category was Marie Craven, with the following video, first grade activist:

https://vimeo.com/108593038

For information on the judges, plus their comments, check out this post at Moving Poems Magazine.