Posts in Category: Videopoems

Field by Catherine Pond

21 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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Update: this video has been made private.

Catherine Pond doesn’t appear to have a website yet, but it’s always exciting to see a talented young poet venturing into videopoetry.

(By the way, sorry about yesterday’s disappearing post. I’d set it to auto-publish and didn’t realize until after it appeared that the filmmaker had restricted the video from playback on unapproved sites. Not sure why people do that, but whatever.)

An armed man lurks in ambush by Howie Good

19 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - 1 Comment - Posted in Videopoems
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Swoon’s latest in his series of videos for poems by Howie Good is something a bit different: a short called “Not Again (Pripyat),” using footage of the abandoned city in the Chernobyl evacuation zone, with Howie’s text appropriated for a kind of surreal documentary. Let me quote the description on Vimeo for the credits and such:

The images in the film are footage from a film about Pripyat (credit to Golden Movies Productions,2009)

Images before the disaster at the nuclear plant, images of the evacuation of the town, images of the ghost town now. Hence the title of the film, Not Again.

Although the poem by Howie is about other things and places, I wanted the images from Pripyat [to] add another dimension to the story, the poem, the atmosphere of the whole film.

Words: Howie Good
Voice: Nic S. for Whale Sound
Concept, videotreats, editing and music: Swoon

“An armed man lurks in ambush” is the title poem of a full-length collection forthcoming from Despertanto (who also published Howie’s third book, Everything Reminds Me of Me, back in March). The text of the poem may be read on a site Swoon has set up for the texts used in all his videopoems to date, as well as in the Whale Sound audio chapbook, Threatening Weather, in which it originally appeared.

When Nights Were Dark by Forrest Gander

15 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - 1 Comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/22523543

It’s great to see a writer of Forrest Gander’s stature making his own videopoems. (So many don’t even bother to put up websites.)

Gander’s poetry can be challenging, but the images in this video tempt me to listen more than once, and I think also encourage receptivity through visual suggestion. Incidentally, there are lots of rock canyons like this scattered around the Appalachians — mossy, fern-draped, secret places — if you know where to look.

“Heaven is so far of the Mind” by Emily Dickinson

14 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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A new Moving Poems production. This is from 1862, #413 in the R. W. Franklin edition, and while not one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, it does encapsulate, I think, one of her core beliefs, and is therefore a useful key to understanding her work as a whole. I couldn’t resist adding an ironic visual reference to one of her most famous poems.

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

12 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Animation
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A lot of kinetic type poetry animations don’t really say anything about the poem, I feel, so don’t make the cut here. This was an exception: somehow the colors, typography and design seemed just right. It’s by Tamisha Harris, “a designer, visual storyteller and a student at the London College of Communication [whose] creative practice revolves around graphic moving image.”

Another reading worth checking out is the one at Poets.org, in which Brooks discusses the background and reception of the poem in her introduction.

Three “heart” poems by Simon Barraclough

11 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - 1 Comment - Posted in Animation
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Three poems by Simon Barraclough — “Starfish Heart,” “Pizza Heart” and “Celeriac Heart” — from his new collection, Neptune Blue. The animations are the work of Carolina Melis, and are quite extraordinary, in my opinion — a novel solution to the problem of how to interpret poetry through animation without getting mired in excessive literalism.

The Difference Between Our Bodies by Cynthia Cox

8 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - 3 Comments - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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Houston-based poet Cynthia Cox asked me to contribute a reading for her first videopoem (we’re blogging acquaintances). I was happy to comply. Cynthia noted in an email that she has only a point-and-shoot camera and the most basic of software (Windows Movie Maker), but I think the results show that it is possible to make a decent poetry video under such conditions, as long as one doesn’t try to get too elaborate. Having a good idea and being able to execute it effectively with the tools at hand trump everything else; there are so many professionally made poetry films that I would never share here because they are filled with visual or musical clichés.

Good decision to go with black and white, I thought, and the inclusion of children playing in the soundtrack seems apt. Cynthia told me that since she also wanted to post the video to Flickr, that helped enforce concision, since Flickr doesn’t allow videos longer than 90 seconds.

The Stockholm Syndrome by Howie Good

7 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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For his fourth film for a Howie Good poem, Swoon enlisted the help of a couple of other cameramen. Here are the credits as given in the film description on Vimeo:

Words and voice: Howie Good
Camera: Diego Diaz, Anthony Jackson and Swoon
Treats, editing and music: Swoon

Credit and many thanks to: Diego Diaz (woman in shower) and Anthony Jackson (man on balcony) for their footage and great camerawork.

Howie sounds especially sinister slowed down like this. The stark black-and-white imagery and unusual wide-screen format are also a great fit with the poem, I thought.

The poem may be read online at Threatening Weather, the audio chapbook from Whale Sound.

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on being constantly civil towards death by Nic S.

6 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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A new Moving Poems production in support of Nic S.’s chapbook Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, which is available in a variety of media: online text with audio players; free downloads in MP3, PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats; audio CD and print-on-demand.

For links to more of Nic S.’s work, see her blog Very Like a Whale. Nic’s other online projects include the audio poetry journal Whale Sound and Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks. I blogged about the making of this video last night at Via Negativa, for anyone who’s interested in the process.

Instructions on How to Cry by Julio Cortázar

5 July, 2011 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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This is from the first chapter of Cronopios and Famas, translated by Paul Backburn, “The Instruction Manual” — “an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format,” according to the publisher’s description on Amazon.

Sari Rachman is the actress, and also supplied the voiceover reading of the poem. Leonardo Cariglino did everything else. You can read the text at Maud Newton’s blog. Someone else posted a video interpretation of the poem on YouTube, and had I not discovered this one, I might have posted it. But I’m afraid Cariglino’s film blows it out of the water.

Incidentally, Cariglino is in the midst of a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to make a film inspired in part by a Baudelaire poem. Check it out.