Posts By Dave Bonta

Malecón/Miami by Leslie Sainz

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

Cuban-American poet Leslie Sainz performs her poem in this 2023 film from The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, “Directed by Eric Felipe-Barkin and shot in Coconut Grove and Biscayne Island, Miami.” It’s one of ten films in a series called Read By Miami, produced in cooperation with O, Miami Poetry Festival, which runs throughout the month of April each year.

Tasting Notes by Matthew Stewart

This is one of the best, most satisfying films based on a poetry collection that I’ve seen. It was made in 2013 in support of a pamphlet (chapbook) of the same title from Happenstance Press. The poems are clearly differentiated, yet blend pretty seamlessly into a whole, with shots of the poet in a vineyard as part of the connective tissue. British poet Matthew Stewart collaborated with Spanish filmmaker José María Fernández de Vega of GLOW production company in Extramadura, where Stewart works in the wine trade. It’s hard to imagine a more poetic vocation! And since the speaker in each poem is a different variety of wine, and they’re all delivered in the poet’s own voice, it’s as if we’re hearing missing metamorphoses out of Ovid.

A while back I compiled my Top Ten Multi-Poem Films and Videopoems. This would certainly have occupied a prominent position in the list had it been available at the time. Conservative as the choice of images is, they rarely feel overly obvious. And Stewart’s voiceover is well done: readerly, but with excellent cadence and modulation. I’d have preferred somewhat less melodic music by way of contrast, but otherwise there were no false notes for me among these very tasty words and images.

Fuck / Our Future by Inua Ellams

Poet: | Nationality: , | Filmmaker: ,

A video made for some kind of climate series at The New York Times, locked behind the paywall, I think. My request for clarification on filmmaker(s) has gone unanswered, but it seems the result of a collaboration with the photographer named at the beginning, Josh Haner, a Pulitzer-winning feature photographer for the paper. Ellams himself also works in graphic art and design. I like how the poem’s searing language is mediated by the intimate space of an online reading, giving way to natural places and a more-than-figurative tree of life.

Earlier we shared a film by Jamie McDonald for the title poem from Ellam’s 2020 collection The Actual, among several other video interpretations of Ellams’ work. It’s fascinating to see giant legacy media organizations like the NYT and the Financial Times promote Ellams’ poetry, almost as cover for their ceaseless promotion of the planet-destroying financial and military/industrial machines.

The Lines by Andrew Motion

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker: ,

Suzie Hanna just uploaded to Vimeo this 2001 animation she co-directed with Hayley Winter. Live images and straight recordings interact with artifice at all levels, borrowing elements from glitch art and concrete text experiments. The former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion supplied the poem and reading, and Sebastian Castagna composed the soundtrack.

The Lines, a poetry animation, was selected for numerous festivals including Manchester Poetry Festival and Hamburg Animation Festival, it was part of a programme curated by the British Council ‘Shooting Rhymes and Cutting Verses’ which was shown all over the world to promote UK Culture. The Gene used it as visuals for a concert tour and it was shown in cinemas as part of the Sonimation project which was instigated by Suzie Hanna in collaboration with Sonic Arts Network and Digital Arts Network in 2001.

We’ve shared Hanna’s work often here. The bio on her website is worth quoting in full:

Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She was Chair of NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016-2019, and remains an honorary member of the executive. She is an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, and whose research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, and has led several innovative projects including animated online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014, and is a longstanding member of ASIFA. She plays the violin and the musical saw.

All will be well by Jane Lovell

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A new videopoem from UK poet Jane Lovell and artist Janet Lees, using some stunning underwater footage from Janet’s recent trip to the island of El Hierro in the Azores. Here’s how she captioned it on Instagram:

Feeling very muted going into this new year, hard to feel hopeful. I think this short videopoem holds a sense of solace. A deceptively simple poem by Jane Lovell, containing beautiful images and word-music, combined with footage I shot in the incomparable island of El Hierro recently, notably at Cala de Tacorón, a transformative place. I usually go for the lateral rather than the literal when putting film and poetry together, but somehow in this instance a straight translation between the elements felt right. This is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two JLs

Music is by The Duke of Norfolk.

Moment by Matt Dennison

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A new film by Marc Neys, with music of his own composition, for the poem ‘Moment’ by Matt Dennison. Marc used the U.S. Army’s footage of an atomic bomb test, leaning into the distressed quality of the film stock digitized by the Prelinger Archive.

A Poison Tree by William Blake

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

“A new video poem for today’s world.” From Dutch artist Pat van Boeckel, who needs no introduction here.

I See My World Shaking by Yuyutsu Sharma

Poet: | Nationality: , | Filmmaker:

This 2021 documentary poem by UK-based director Stephan Bookas uses a text from Nepalese-Indian poet Yuyutsu Sharma to portray the horror and aftermath of the 2015 earthquake with an intensity that would be hard to mimic in a standard narrative short.

Sharma is the first Nepalese poet we’ve featured on Wikipedia, and he has a fascinating background. Wikipedia notes that

In 2016 he published Quaking Cantos, a collection inspired by the 2015 Nepal earthquakes featuring Sharma’s poetry and photographs by Prasant Shrestha. In the Kathmandu Tribune, Arun Budhathoki wrote that it “immortalized the tragic event and captured the bitter memories of the Himalayan on a grand scale”. Andrea Dawn Bryant called it “stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing”.

Winter by Mike Hoolboom

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

How long does a videopoem need to be to successfully provoke a new understanding? This 42-second movie by experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, whom we’ve featured here before,

is animated by a question. Can we see what we see? I think of what is close at hand, the painting on the wall, book titles shouting from the choir on the shelf. And then further afield, to countries that have been made visible or invisible because of my media affiliations, my nervous system extended into information portals that allow some to appear as people, while others are relegated to a faceless throng. How can I see what I see?

We Are All Drowned Out by Kimberly Reyes

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker: ,

A sense of planetary emergency is vividly evoked here in a videopoem with the power and urgency of a feature film, co-directed by American poet Kimberly Reyes and Irish/Australian filmmaker Gary de Buit (Studio 8 Labs) with music by Aiden Guilfolye, and uploaded to YouTube two years ago with this description:

Made in Monaghan, Ireland by Studio 8 Labs with funding from the Irish Arts Council. First published on Poethead.

Visit Reyes’ website and scroll down for a bio, before checking out her other poetry films. It’s always encouraging to see ambitious, career-oriented poets getting into poetry film (as opposed to aging burnouts like me). Here’s how her bio begins:

Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, popular culture critic, and visual culture scholar who began her career as a music and entertainment reporter. She transitioned to creative writing after receiving her Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2013 and has since been awarded grants, bursaries, fellowships, residencies and scholarships from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, Tin House Workshops, Culture Ireland, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, New York City Artist Corps, Miami Writers Institute, the Arts Council of Ireland, CantoMundo, Callaloo, Hambidge, Cave Canem, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Munster Literature Centre, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Community of Writers, and many other places.

Read the rest.