Filmmaker: Dave Bonta
“Heaven is so far of the Mind” by Emily Dickinson
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.
on being constantly civil towards death by Nic S.
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.
the wanderer’s blessing by Nic S.
This new Moving Poems production features a poem and reading by Nic S. from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday. She blogged her reaction to the video here. “The wanderer’s blessing” originally appeared in the online journal Escape Into Life.
For more about Nic, including links to a number of her poems online, see the bio page at her blog.
The Green Man by Dick Jones
A Moving Poems production by yours truly. The text and reading are by the English poet and blogger Dick Jones. Thanks are also due to the blog carnival The Festival of the Trees, edition #60, which reprinted Dick’s poem, and featured as well a number of videos, helping to inspire this effort.
hollow by Peter Stephens
A Moving Poems production, with the cooperation of Nic S. at Whale Sound, who agreed to let me use her reading for the soundtrack, and the author, who perhaps unwisely gave his permission without any constraints whatsoever. Read Peter’s original text at his blog, Slow Reads. I think it’s a spectacular poem, and I hope my video does it justice — or at least excites interest in the poet and the reader.
I found the rest of the soundtrack at ccMixter, and a public-domain film to poach footage from at the Prelinger Archives (just two of the many online resources I’ve found for videopoem makers — check out the whole list).
What is to Give Light by Yahia Lababidi
Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, a Facebook contact, shared the text of his poem at The Idler just after I discovered that Al Jazeera has a cache of Creative Commons-licensed videos available for remix. So with Lababidi’s blessing I pulled this videopoem together, using some of that Egyptian street poetry for a soundtrack. I did the reading myself because he was having internet-connection problems and wasn’t able to send me his own reading.
Videos in the film/animation category at YouTube don’t seem to attract too many views, so I identified it as “News & Politics” instead. We’ll see if that makes a difference. In any case, it needs to be watched by people with an interest in the uprising.
Gacela of Unforeseen Love by Federico Garcia Lorca
I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.
Ars Poetica? by Czeslaw Milosz
A Moving Poems production (with fingers crossed that Milosz’s heirs aren’t too litigious). The audio is Milosz himself, not the same translation as the one that made it into the Collected Poems (which you can read here).
This was “found video” rather than something deliberately planned and acted to go along with the poem, though of course I edited it to make a better fit.
