Posts Tagged: Voluble

Two poems by Tarfia Faizullah

29 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta - 2 Comments - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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This video produced for Voluble incorporates two stylistically distinct, musically compelling video remixes for poems by Tarfia Faizullah, “Feast or Famine” and “Love Poem Ending with the Eye of a Needle.” Faizullah notes in a YouTube comment that

this was a result of a collaboration between me, emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti, and tabla player and activist Robin Sukhadia. The film for the second poem is sampled from Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film that the director made available through Creative Commons. The footage for the first is tourist footage of Bangladesh.

S by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

18 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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Another author-made videopoem recently published by Voluble, this time from the enormously talented poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Click through to listen to her artist’s statement, where she explains that “‘S’ is the first piece in a trilogy of videos that engage Audre Lorde’s poem The Black Unicorn.” Her discussion of the relationship between audio and video, hearing and seeing in her creation of the video is absolutely fascinating.

This concludes this week’s focus on videopoems or poetry films made solely by the poet her- or himself. Over the years I’ve shared many such videos, and Matt Mullins put together an annotated gallery of Ten Notable Single-Author Videopoems to showcase some of the best. There are many more examples of films that emerge from active collaborations between the poet and the filmmaker. I hadn’t planned this as a promotion for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, which alone among poetry film and videopoetry festivals requires the poet to have been directly involved in making the video, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that their deadline for submissions is coming up on July 1. (Which happens also to to be the deadline for the 2016 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.)

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This Dull Chaos by A. H. Jerriod Avant

17 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Kinestasis
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An author-made videopoem by A. H. Jerriod Avant, one of the three lead curators of a new, Los Angeles Review of Books-sponsored website and YouTube channel called Voluble, where the video debuted:

“this dull chaos” wants to track a very specific emotion, through at least a singular episode of social chaos, right down to the family function. an episode where the speaker wants to escape, if just for a moment, or from a cycle of these moments, even if that escape’s no larger than one’s own mind, if that be a measure. these moments, hell bent on frightening the psyche, remind me of the love we often run from, the love that we don’t always get to keep, conflict, peace and how this breaks down at the infamous and beautiful family gathering. the photographs seek out angles, similar to the way a spider web’s thread does. also in its construction, with a center, “like an ambition done sat up in you,” I once heard an elder Black deacon say. it explores this episode of social chaos while simultaneously commenting on episodes or cycles of social chaos we witness at large and outside the walls of the home. the photographs move chaotically, not caught by any one rhythm. their changes are responses to certain disruptions. the speaker is frantic and at times, seems to wish to get a signal outside this one house for help, even if that help is time, relief or any mode of meditation and or sense-making.

Voluble looks like a promising site to follow for anyone interested in multimedia experimentation. From the About page:

Voluble is an off-the-page makers’ space for writers and artists of all kinds. The channel aspires to be an outlet for experimentation, play, collaboration, and any other gestures that coincide with a visual or literary art practice.

Voluble hopes to shed light on the personal, political, and public lives of writers and artists from around the world.

Gallery space, incubator, laboratory, studio! Each week a different artist or artists will use this online platform to show us their world.

Everyone is invited to join us in making this space as open, challenging, and diverse as the world we hope to live in. We are actively seeking works and proposals, and would love to carry on a conversation about interstitial, interdisciplinary creativity.

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