~ March 2016 ~

Not the Stars by John Dofflemyer

On 31 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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This videopoem is a teaser for a forthcoming feature-length poetry documentary, The West, by filmmaker, composer and video artist H. Paul Moon (Zen Violence Films). According to the Vimeo description, it

Features poem “Not the Stars” written and recited by John Dofflemyer. Music composed and performed by Josh Coffey, with Jacob Siener. Additional camera by Bradley Winegar and Shang Ik Moon.

For more on John Dofflemyer, check out the wonderful poetry and ranching blog that he maintains with his photographer wife Robbin: drycrikjournal.

Here’s how the website for The West describes the full-length film:

This is an in-progress feature documentary about Western folklife, cowboy poets, and the American frontier. Pushing boundaries of documentary style, the film complements spoken poetry with artfully devised tableaus and landscapes that visualize the narrative themes of the poems, evincing stories of hardship and perseverance in today’s ranch culture. Surrounding this, interviews with folklorists, musicians, ranchers, and the cowboy poets themselves create an educational and historical context for this exploration, forming insightful ruminations on the West: not just a place or a moment in history, but a state of mind. Among all that seriousness, the cowboy’s lighter side will manifest in live performances and profiles from famous Western musicians like Don Edwards and Ian Tyson, and comedic monologues from legends in Western folklore like Baxter Black.

Before the current post-production stage of development, things kicked off in late 2012, when renowned historian and author Michael Wallis sat for an interview to give his insights on the West, laying a foundation for the West as “not just a place, but a state of mind.” Principal photography began around the annual occasion of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering at Elko, Nevada in January 2013, and continued at the 2014 Gathering. Icons of this culture, like Temple Grandin, Wallace McRae, Joel Nelson, John Dofflemyer, Baxter Black, Paul Zarzyski, Henry Real Bird, Amy Hale Auker, Don Edwards, The Quebe Sisters Band, Dave Stamey, Gail Steiger and many more are now in-the-can, with more footage to come. Release is planned for sometime in 2017.

In the meantime, a module from the feature-length documentary, of Joel Nelson’s reading of his poem “Equus Caballus” combined with footage from the ranch of John Dofflemyer, has been an Official Selection in the 2014 Visible Verse Film Festival at the Cinemateque in Vancouver, Canada, and in the 2015 Trail Dance Film Festival at the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center in Duncan, Oklahoma.

It sounds as if it will be an engaging and entertaining film. Moon told me in an email that he’s “heading now into concentrated post-production editing after wrapping most of the principal photography.” Visit the website to read bios of all the people involved in the production, follow news about the project, sign up for the email newsletter, and more.

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Advice Dyslexic by Lisa Vihos (3)

On 30 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Last year, I shared two videos made with Lisa Vihos‘ poem “Advice Dyslexic”: one by Dale Wisely and one by Marc Neys AKA Swoon. Now Marie Craven and Nigel Wells have given us two more. Craven explained on Facebook that she and Wells had challenged each other to each make a short video out of the poem over the long holiday weekend, and both decided to use Nic S.’s voice recording in their videos.

Both of the videos take a fairly literal, illustrative approach to the text, but for once, this seems to work, I think because the poem is so playful. The videos simply build upon that playfulness, keeping things light and fast-moving.

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The City Inside, Part 2 by Tim Cumming

On 29 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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The conclusion of poet-filmmaker Tim Cumming’s new film of a poem about London. Though the entire film is over 13 minutes long, the repetition of certain images and tropes serves as a connective glue, and the language has sufficient energy to make the film seem much shorter than it is. (Watch Part 1.)

The Day I Was Born by John Guzlowski

On 28 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A powerful poem and reading by the Polish-American poet John Guzlowski is paired with filmmaker Dean Pasch’s abstract imagery, carefully choreographed with the soundtrack. In the Vimeo description, Pasch writes:

John Guzlowski wrote a poem about his own birth – called ‘The Day I Was Born’ – for an online project I created:

53fragments.com

He sent me a recording of this he had made – and I created a piece of music and wove his recording and the music together.

I’ve been sitting on the audio creation for quite some time. I’ve thought about how I would like to make a film using it. I had many different ideas of what images I could use / would like to use. Finally I decided on non-figuration.

Click through to read the prose poem.

Falling Lessons: Erasure One by Beth Copeland

On 25 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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Directed by Anh Vu for Motionpoems, this interpretation of a poem by Beth Copeland has been winning fans by the score on both old and new media. It was featured on PBS NewsHour:

Sometimes, what a poem does not say is the most important part.

That’s what Beth Copeland found while writing “Falling Lessons: Erasure One,” a poem that explored her father’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease.

Before his death four years ago, Copeland wrote a longer narrative piece about the last few years of his life. But then, she did something unusual: she deleted most of it.

That process of erasure was a way to put herself in her father’s place, replicating what had happened as his disease progressed.

“I became interested in the idea of erasure, because I felt that the process of erasure is a reflection of what happens to people when they have memory loss,” she said. “I found out as I was doing it that the distillation process made the poems stronger.”

“Erasure One” is the first in a series of three pieces. In each successive poem, Copeland used the same technique, erasing parts of the previous poem and distilling it to the words that are left behind.

Writing the series helped her understand more about her father’s mind near the end of his life, she said. “I had time to really reflect on the process that he had gone through … I think I did learn more about my father’s experience,” she said.

Director Anh Vu, working with the organization Motionpoems, brought Copeland’s poem to the screen in a short film. The film interweaves images of the natural world with books, papers and other evidence of academia — a combination of her father’s passions, Copeland said.

Copeland wrote more extensively about her parents, who both experienced dementia, in a new manuscript titled “Blue Honey,” which is seeking a publisher. “Writing about what happened to both of my parents has been an opportunity for me to process a lot of the feelings that family members have when they have someone in the family with some type of dementia,” she said.

A Staff Pick on Vimeo, Falling Lessons: Erasure One was also one of the first two Motionpoems to be released on YouTube by Button Poetry, which has, I believe, the most popular channel for poetry videos, with 502,636 subscribers and 109,923,559 views to date. Almost all the videos they share on YouTube and on their Tumblr blog are straight-forward documentary videos of readings or recitations, many of which they produce themselves, with a heavy emphasis on material from the spoken word community. So it’s been interesting to see the enthusiasm with which their fan base has reacted to Falling Lessons: Erasure One, uploaded on March 17, and The Mother Warns the Tornado, the Isaac Ravishankara film based on a poem by Catherine Pierce, which they uploaded on March 4. The former has been played 15,206 times and the latter 22,037 times—about average for Button Poetry videos. What is perhaps more astonishing is that the comments for both videos are entirely positive so far—apparently YouTube trolls haven’t discovered Button yet?—suggesting that the supposed gulf between performance poetry and mainstream poetry may not actually exist, and that we all need to do a better job of reaching out to this most obvious and receptive new audience for poetry film. Typical reactions to the two Motionpoems videos include: “Utilizing the power of film and score with poetry was a beautiful idea”; “I absolutely LOVE these motion poems, the perfect combination of visual artistry and spoken poetry”; “I would love to see more videos that are actually stories to poems! I was left speechless at the end of this. The poem itself is amazing but the addition of the visuals made it that much more powerful”; and “Please make a million of these.”

Click through to Vimeo for the full credits. Oddly, the film has not been featured as an “episode” on the Motionpoems website just yet, so I suspect there may be some interviews or other bonus materials in the offing. Keep an eye out for that.

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Children of the Nephilim (excerpt) by Cindy St. Onge

On 24 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This author-made videopoem by Cindy St. Onge juxtaposes footage from Trump rallies with footage from Nazi concentration camps, along with other images. The choice of music for the soundtrack (by the Masonik collective) feels especially inspired. The Vimeo description:

This video is based on a poem which was originally titled “Free Range Citzens.”
Have you noticed that with the proliferation of technology and mobile devices, that we so rarely look up anymore? We should wonder about that.
Poem, concept and editing by Cindy St. Onge. Footage from Videoblocks, Cindy St. Onge, CSpan, Right Side Broadcasting. Soundtrack by Masonik.
Full text of poem can be read here: exhibitapoems.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/children-of-the-nephilim/

St. Onge has posted two versions of the videopoem; here’s the other.

Destination by Carol Novack

On 23 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A poem by the late American poet Carol Novack in a film adaptation by the Belgian-Canadian filmmaker Jean Detheux, who notes on Vimeo that

This is the second film I made based on a text written and recited by Carol Novack (1948-2011).
The first one, “Civil War,” is here vimeo.com/26869484.
The text of “Destination” (and “Civil War”) can be found in the book “Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack.” (tinyurl.com/d93v9lv)
Music by Don Meyer.
The images dialog with the narrative while following their own logic.
The images were made from a series of photos taken by my son Georges (he was 15 at the time of writing these lines) during a trip to Belgium, photos he then assembled in beautiful panoramas (used here as well).
Here’s an example: tinyurl.com/9q5l7j2 (other movies made with his help are here: vimeo.com/tag:georgesdetheux)

I processed his images in a variety of applications (Still Life, Studio Artist and especially, Final Cut Pro).

Carol Novack died of cancer on December 29, 2011. She had so much left to live, to share, to write!
May she have found her town!

There’s a good bio of Jean Detheux online in Madhat 15, accompanying another film made with a Carol Novack poem, Refuge. I particularly like this bit:

[Detheux] focuses on the importance of the hand gesture in image making (“le geste révélateur”), and especially, on the exploration of “inherent animation” (that which is done/found “by accident”), avoids “smarts” like the plague, believes that the conceptual approach is at a dead-end.

Timeline: a poetry film event in Manchester on 29 March

On 23 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events

Tickets are now available for an evening of poetry films in Manchester next Tuesday, March 29, presented by the filmmaking group Bokeh Yeah!.

Bokeh Yeah! the Manchester based filmmaking group presents an evening of poetry film produced for the Timeline Poetry Film Challenge in association with Manchester Literature Festival and local publishers Carcanet Press, Flapjack and Commonword. The project helps Bokeh Yeah! members adapt poems provided by the publishers into short films using DSLR cameras. Publishers and filmmakers from across the region were invited to take part in the 2016 challenge, widening the opportunity for creative collaboration. This screening includes all of the films created for the challenge.

Event details

This screening will be accompanied by live poetry readings from Dave Viney and Helen Tookey.

An award will also be presented for the best poem film. The independent judging panel will include Zata Banks, poem filmmaker and founder of the PoetryFilm project, poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, Vona Groarke, and Michael Symmons Roberts, poet and Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Book tickets here, or see the event listing on Facebook for more information. This isn’t the first “Timeline” event that Bokeh Yeah! has sponsored, though I notice that the list of co-sponsors no longer includes Comma Press, which used to be a major player in the Manchester poetry-film scene ten years ago. It’s good to see other local publishers also taking an interest in poetry film.

Balliwamta by Velimir Lobsang

On 22 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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On this day of international solidarity with Belgium, I’m sharing the most Belgian videopoem I could find. Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon is the filmmaker, credited on Vimeo with “concept, add. mouthsounds & music, editing & grading,” and his fellow countryman Velimir Lobsang contributed the reading and the soundpoem. In an old blog post about an earlier collaboration, Marc explained the poet’s pseudonym:

‘Velimir’ is de voornaam van de Russische futurist ‘Chlebnikov’ en ‘Lobsang’ is een Tibetaanse naam die zoiets betekent als ‘positieve, heilzame studie’, aldus J.V. een ex-collega die onder het wonderlijke pseudoniem Velimir Lobsang gedichten schrijft.
(“Velimir” is the [first] name of the Russian futurist Khlebnikov and “Lobsang” is a Tibetan name that means something like “positive, wholesome study,” says JV, a former colleague who writes poems under the strange pseudonym Velimir Lobsang.)

Chikome Xochitl by Juan Hernández Ramírez

On 21 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry
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For World Poetry Day, here’s a poem in Huastecan Nahuatl by Juan Hernández Ramírez.

Veracruz poet Juan Hernández Ramírez reads the first section of his prizewinning poem “Chikome Xochitl” in the Huastecan Nahuatl. Translated by Adam Coon with David Shook from both Huastecan Nahuatl and Spanish—Hernández’s creative process employs both in dialogue with one another—this poem and an accompanying note will appear in the print edition of World Literature Today (Jan. – Feb. 2014). […]

Video shot in Veracruz by Adam Coon. Subtitled in Los Angeles by David Shook. Poem © Juan Hernández Ramírez, 2013. Translation © Adam Coon and David Shook, 2013.

The complete poem appears in the anthology Like A New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, edited by Víctor Terán and David Shook (Phoneme Media, 2015). It may also be read online in World Literature Today, which includes a lengthier description of Ramírez’ writing and the translation process.

See Vimeo for more of David Shook’s videos of indigenous and other poets.

Multimedia-related panels at AWP 2016

On 21 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - conferences

The annual AWP conference is the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America, with more than 12,000 attendees and some 550 on-site panel discussions, readings and other events, to say nothing of the numerous off-site events. This year, it will be held in Los Angeles, so you’d think there might be at least one panel on poetry film, but I couldn’t find any in the online program. As with AWP 2015, however, there are a number of panels with at least some bearing on multimedia, cross-genre collaborations, and the like. Here are some I spotted (click through to read about the presenters):

R185. The Poetry of Comics
Room 411, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

The combination of text and image holds the power to create indivisible meaning on the page. Just as poets ground their work in the arrangement of words, ordered by such elements as sound or sense, most cartoonist-poets gravitate toward comics’ foundational device of juxtaposition. The tradition of comics has created generous, exciting spaces for the poetic, lyric, and hybrid. In this panel, artists showcase and read from works that live at the intersection of the visual and the poetic.

(The above is one of at least three poetry comics-related panels on the schedule.)

R227. Visual Arts in Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition Classrooms
Room 510, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

Writers and teachers of poetry, fiction, plays, and screenplays discuss their use of visual arts in creative writing, literature, and composition classrooms. Moving beyond ekphrasis, these educators and writers describe assignments that promote parallel thinking, metacognition, and creative problem-solving via various mediums and games at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

R204. Poetry, Politics, and Place: A Reading and Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Luis J. Rodriguez, Sponsored by Poets House
Petree Hall, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

These leading poets read their poems and discuss their poetry-activism in New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and around the country. Each engages poetic practice and community building with projects that expand poetry’s place in our lives and culture: Griffiths through photography, Nye through writing for children, and Rodriguez through publishing projects and political organizing. The transformative power of poetry brings these three together to talk about how we can make a better world.

(Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an accomplished videopoet.)

F119. Necessary Hybridity: The Politics & Performance of Making Multigenre, Multimedia, Multiethnic Literature Visible
Room 502 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 am

Hybridity in literature is often thought of as a kind of cross-pollination that leads to “vigor.” But what happens when hybridity is considered through the lens of political and aesthetic necessity? From queer politics to POC feminism to postcoloniality, hybrid forms have been a critical part of making visible otherwise illegible experiences. Join five writers as they explore the significance of hybridity to queerness, trans culture, black bodies, mixed-race narratives, and erased histories.

F249. Comics, Films, Songs, and More: Multimodality in Creative Writing and Composition Courses
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

Our students function as visually literate composers, engaging with writing and reading across multiple modes of communication. Hear from a panel of instructors that embrace their students’ comfort with multimodality by teaching in multimodal formats and assigning both composition and creative writing assignments that push students outside their comfort zones and into the types of writing they’re most likely to encounter on the job.

S125. Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Beyond Mere Description
Room 505, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 am

Contemporary ekphrasis has been described as a form of critical meditation that mixes commentary, homage, resistance, argument, and self-criticism, but what does it look like in practice, especially given digital tools? And how does one push beyond mere description or instrumentalization of the work of art? These panelists present examples from their own work and offer practical exercises, with an emphasis on digital technology, for community, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms.

S215. Why We Innovate: The Case for Hybrid Genres
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

Editors of and contributors to Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres discuss writing and teaching hybrid literature as innovative acts of artistic, social, and cultural criticism, and as radical self-creation. Panelists discuss why writers mix forms and provide ideas and examples for crafting and teaching hybrid genres, focusing on blendings of visual, performative, lyrical, and narrative techniques.

S253. From Page to Screen: Exploring Successful Adaptation with Industry Insiders
Room 501, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

Authors have more opportunities than ever to bring their works to the screen, but the complexity of that process has increased exponentially. This panel, presented by the Authors Guild, explains film and television adaptation through the insights of those best equipped to reveal its secrets: authors whose works have been adapted; producers and agents who select, sell, and develop books for Hollywood; and industry executives (HBO, Lionsgate) who oversee that lucky, and laborious, journey.

Incidentally, the AWP website does have a videos section, with “Videos of select featured presentations from the more than 550 events offered at the AWP Conference & Bookfair.”

The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: Poetry Film in its Infancy

On 20 March, 2016 by Cheryl Gross with 2 Comments - Animation, history, reviews, The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz3u0hPOTqw

from Two Too Young
poem: “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, performed by Carl Switzer
directed by Gordon Douglas
1936

In my quest to find the perfect video poem I stumbled upon a wonderful piece that brought me back to my childhood: “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as performed by Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. Could this be the early days or even perhaps the first poetry film?

When I was a child the preferred baby sitter in our house was the TV. Back then morning television was limited to Farmer Grey cartoons, and reruns of The Little Rascals.

The Our Gang/Little Rascals version of “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” may not actually be the first poetry film, but it does have a place. Strictly humorous, watered down and marginalized, for many it was our first exposure to the art form better known as pop culture. I assume the intention was not to spark a new genre, however producer and creator Hal Roach did just that. If not the first at least he played a role in the development of video/film poetry. Unintentionally history or film poetry history was made.

This particular YouTube version includes some of my favorite actors: Spanky McFarland, June Marlowe (Miss Crabtree) and Eugene Gordon Lee (Porky.)

Not to stray too far off topic, Warner Brothers had a part in introducing young minds to this satiric (distorted) form of our art as well. What’s Opera Doc? from what I can remember is probably my first opera. I got hooked not only on the music but it assisted in deepening my appreciation for the art of animation, hence my love of video poetry.

Wagner’s Siegfried starring Elmer Fudd as the titular hero and Bugs Bunny as Brunhilde. Elmer is again hunting rabbits as they sing, dance and eat the scenery. For me it’s a walk down memory lane:

What’s Opera, Doc?
directed by Chuck Jones
screenplay by Michael Maltese
voice actors: Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan
1957

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