MSU Filmetry festival relives pandemic in poetry and film

MONDAY, April 26 — What good are poems in a pandemic? A short film called “How to Make a No-Sew Coronavirus Mask From a Poem,” based on a poem by Wendy Drexler, takes a disarmingly direct approach.

The film is part of MSU’s third annual Filmetry Festival, a lively on-line mash-up of poetry and film devoted this year to life in the time of COVID.

Tear the poem out of the book. Fold down a flap of fear. Fold up a flap of hope. Add elastic bands, pleat the page carefully and wear it “as if your life depended on it,” the poet tells us.

”This poem is not guaranteed to save you, or the world,” she cautions. “However, evidence suggests that a poem may help you to get through one more day.”

The meat of Filmetry, which premiered April 21 and can be viewed on line, is a set of 18 short films based on poems from, “Voices Amidst the Virus,” a new anthology edited by Eileen Cleary and Christine Jones.

The prospect of reliving the past year may not seem appealing to many people at first, but Filmetry’s “cinepoems” satisfy a deep hunger, sharpened by months of isolation, to find out how people are doing, what they are doing, and what’s inside their heads.

Freedom of thought and confinement of body is a charged combination. The words and images presented in the films zap around freely in the vacuum of quarantine, floating from mood to mood with the speed of thought.

“In This Way,” filmed by Marcus Fields, follows isolated poet Kevin Prufer as his thoughts flow from the Trojan War to the soup bubbling on his stove. Tiny Greek soldiers spring from a 3-D printer and morph into virus particles on the screen. The poet’s final mental leap is to imagine dying in a hospital room. A nurse asks, “How are we doing today?”

“Doing the best we can,” he answers, “here, in the past, looking out my window onto the dark street.”

Processing trauma is not a rational business. 

In “Potatoes, their various moods,” poet Eileen Cleary struggles to grasp the scale of the pandemic while making dinner. Filmmaker Aileen Dwyer juxtaposes horrific images that flooded our screens in 2020, from overflowing hospitals to stacks of caskets, with shots of potatoes going into the oven. 

There is an almost subliminal shot of a potato trying to wriggle away before getting chopped. “We are all foxfire, or timber decayed,” the poet concludes, hanging for dear life between incoherence and profundity. “We are not. What I mean is, it’s early March. Let’s see how the weather holds.”

MSU students, staff and faculty made most of the films, so expect to spot familiar locations. “Mercy in a Cold April,” based a poem by Michael Mercurio, is filled with gorgeous aerial images of empty Lansing streets and surrounding farmland, filmed by Michael Rautio, 

The festival is the brainchild of Pete Johnston, a filmmaker and MSU Film Studies faculty member, and poet Cindy Hunter Morgan, director of communications at the MSU Library and instructor of an introductory poetry class.

This year, Hunter Morgan invited her students to participate by writing an original piece about the pandemic. Johnston invited his film and digital media students to adapt the poems into a film.

Two of their students’ pieces are included in the festival: Carlos Lundback’s melancholy film of Loren Rascoe’s poem “Neverland 2020,” and Maddie film of a deeply empathic poem by Natalie Mannino, “2020 Vision.”

In “2020 Vision,” a series of masked faces look directly at the camera. “These eyes have turned into much more than windows, as they struggle to be mirrors, hearts, hands,” the poem reads. “What a burden laid upon such a small organ.”

In “Neverland 2020,” slow pans across empty playground equipment accompany the poet’s longing for the “Neverland” of pre-pandemic times.

In a filmed introduction to the festival, Hunter Morgan said the films gave her a “bigger and better understanding of the magnitude of the pandemic and the impact it’s had on our students.”

“We’re all connected in our feelings of disconnection,” she said.

One Filmetry entry, “Dear Johnny Cash,” is based a poem by Hunter Morgan that was awarded a spot in the “Voices Amidst the Virus” anthology. Johnston, her Filmetry co-founder, made the film.

Like many of the festival entries, the film takes a witty leap beyond familiar pandemic clichés, but circles back to a merciless shared reality. Sepia images recreate the moment when country music legend Johnny Cash, while stationed in Germany with the 12th Radio Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, intercepted a radio bulletin and became the first American to learn of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s death.

 “We’re all desperate for a message but we’re not sufficiently trained to hear it,” the poem reads.

Is the 2021 version of Stalin dead yet? In the film’s final shot, a glossy vinyl album with a bright red label — “The Fabulous Johnny Cash” — slowly rotates to a standstill.

“We need you, Johnny Cash,” the poet pleads.

The crackles and pops die out and the disc decelerates to silence.