Henry Doyle’s award-winning Poem captured in this Animated Video!
An animated chronicle of poet Henry Doyle’s ordinary day as he goes to do his laundry with a favourite poetry book in hand, encountering a range of local residents along the way.
Full of both humour and humanity, “Drunken Laundry Day” depicts an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary inhabitant of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, encountering a cross-section of residents in different settings. It also shows how poetry counts, not just an elevated art form, but as an essential part of our everyday existence that transcends social, economic, and geographic boundaries to engage and connect us. The poem’s image sequences are vividly rendered through a combination of text, rotoscopic animation (line-drawing on film footage), and illustration, and of course Henry Doyle’s warm, resonant, and authentic voice.
Poet Henry Doyle has lived in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside since 2004 and is a long-time member of Thursdays Writing Collective at the Carnegie Centre coordinated by local poets, Elee Kraljii-Gardiner and currently Amber Dawn. His poem, “Drunken Laundry Day with Charles Bukowski” won Geist magazine’s DTES Writers’ Jamboree writing contest in 2011. Fiona Tinwei Lam was one of the contest judges at Geist at the time, and subsequently became his writing mentor through the Downtown Eastside Manuscript Coaching Project. Inspired by the poem and its multi-faceted depiction of life in the Downtown Eastside, Fiona co-directed and produced this video poem in collaboration with her long-time friend and documentary filmmaker, Analee Weinberger, and an extremely talented young up-and-coming local animator, Kristen Campbell, skillful sound designer Tinjun Niu, and poet Henry Doyle himself who was consulted regularly throughout the two-year process.
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