Words from the pages of Stephen King’s novel, Misery, are erased and otherwise transformed to become poetry. Images found in the collective unconscious of high-to-low culture, are snipped and pasted into the newly emergent page-poems. The resulting visual poetry pieces are further edited and given motion, to arrive at this videopoem.
Sarah Sloat creates visual art that is also poetry. She does this by using various techniques to ‘erase’ most of the words from pages of Stephen King’s novel, ‘Misery’. Her ‘erasures’ leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that might recall surrealism. With Sarah’s permission and ongoing feedback, I have here selected a number of the visual poetry pieces and adapted them to video. The video of ‘Misery’ attempts to construct a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected pieces. It focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah’s ‘Misery pages’ and creates a new form for them. Not a strict ‘presentation’ of Sarah’s visual poetry, the video is my response to the inspiration of them.
