A collaborative video-poem by poet Klara du Plessis and videographer Qirou Yang, Eye Rhymes is a meditative reflection on the interplay between lyrical being, sight, and creation. Through the central image of the eye, the desire to touch—so exacerbated during the COVID19 climate of isolation and social distancing—is pushed to its limit because “eyes cannot touch.” The urgency to touch is systematically muted, transforming sight itself into a generative space of growth and creativity. Starting with the lines “Putting words in the eyes, / eyesight writing,” Eye Rhymes is also a self-conscious collaboration between word and image, poem and video art, emphasizing the resonance between mediums, but also the slant off-rhyme of translating word into image and vice versa. This work forms part of du Plessis’ Deep Curation practice, which recombines and reorganizes excerpts from a number of her other poems into a new whole. The poem’s fragmentary technique is continued to great effect in Yang’s moving montage of visual glimpses of literary interpretation—blinking and shifting perspective with the languorous shutter speed of the poetic eye. The soundtrack, created by Niayesh Ebrahimi, generates abstract, textural sounds by manipulating field recordings through electronic processing.

Poetry: Klara du Plessis
Videography: Qirou Yang
Soundtrack: Niayesh Ebrahimi

Commissioned by Le Festival de la Poésie de Montréal