Posts By Dave Bonta
Hold Me, the Walls are Falling by Robert Krut
Another videopoem-trailer for the new collection by Robert Krut, This is the Ocean. As with the other two, it was directed by Nick Paonessa of lowercase productions.
Lark, from the autobiography of John Muir
A passage from the autobiography of Scottish-American conservationist John Muir is treated as found poetry in a filmpoem by the Dutch photographer and filmmaker Judith Dekker. She writes:
Made as a part of my residency in Dunbar, Scotland for North Light. For this film I’ve used John Muir’s words as a starting point: my film is an interpretation and carries these words to a different place. All footage was shot during my time there; the poet John Glenday was kind enough to read a passage from John Muir’s autobiography and composer Luca Nasciuti created a soundtrack which fits like a glove.
Thanks to Creative Scotland.
The 2014 Body Electric Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions
The Body Electric has just announced through its Facebook page that the 2014 festival, on April 26 in Fort Collins, Colorado, is now open for submissions. The rules and submission process are exceptionally simple, and last year’s festival was evidently a resounding success, so there’s really no reason not to submit. The deadline is February 16.
New essays on videopoetry at Awkword Paper Cut and Connotation Press
Just a reminder to check out the new posts from Marc Neys and Erica Goss in their respective monthly videopoetry columns at Awkword Paper Cut and Connotation Press. Most of the films shared in the columns have yet to appear at Moving Poems, so that’s an additional bonus for me as well as for readers. In “Swoon’s View” this month, Marc looks at two cinematic-style videopoems from the Bokeh Yeah! collective in Manchester, made in association with Comma Press, by Adele Myers, Ra Page, and James Starkey. November’s installment of The Third Form with Erica Goss focuses on the poetry filmmaking of Michael Dickes, who is, among other things, the editor of Awkword Paper Cut.
Swoon on leading a videopoetry workshop in Vilnius
Belgian filmmaker and musician Swoon (Marc Neys) gave a two-day videopoetry workshop as part of the TARP festival of audiovisual and experimental poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania earlier this month. His blog post about the experience should be of interest to videopoets and poetry teachers alike.
The participants get to experience the importance of timing, the power of coincidence, and, hopefully, the fun of playing with words and images. After that two groups were formed (making sure each group had someone familiar with film and/or video and someone willing to write) to work on a project of their own. Both groups took the results of the writing experiment as a starting point; One group used footage shot by one of the participants and combined two ‘poems’ of the experiment. In doing so creating two streams of thoughts played out against two streams of images. The other group wrote a new poem (using the same basic idea) and added self filmed footage and filmed some new material the day before the second part of the workshop.
The second evening we recorded the poems. Each group explained and showed their work in progress. Giving me a change to suggest, answer questions and help out where needed.
Discharged into Clouds by Dean Young
The November selection from Motionpoems is by their co-founder Angella Kassube, and I think it’s one of the best they’ve ever made. The minimalism here really works for me, in part perhaps because I like Dean Young‘s poem so much. The soundtrack (by Carly Zuckweiler) is a perfect match to Tim Nolan’s reading.
Kassube’s process notes are worth a read (scroll down past the poem text). The poem is from Young’s new book, Bender.
Good to see a major player in American poetry film use a reading from someone other than the author. It’s kind of surprising to me that poetry film makers rely so heavily on poets’ own readings, given that all too often we are the least inspired oral interpreters of our own words.
Fallow Field by Scott Edward Anderson
This is Filmpoem 34 by Alastair Cook, who writes:
Fallow Field is a poem by Scott Edward Anderson, from his brand new eponymous collection. It’s been a pleasure to make a Filmpoem for a friend and this harks back to my earlier work, motifs I explored and delighted in a number of years ago which suit Scott’s incredible words.
Scott’s collection Fallow Field is available from Aldrich Press, Amazon and scottedwardanderson.com.
Of the various blurbs on the website, I particularly liked this one:
“Wow, Pop, I had no idea you wrote so many poems!” – Walker Anderson, the author’s 10-year-old son
Anderson blogs at The Green Skeptic and Scott Edward Anderson’s Poetry Blog.
Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats
https://vimeo.com/77916729
Nic S.’s latest poetry video is especially noteworthy for its soundtrack, which blends the voices of four different LibriVox readers to great effect.
The Poetry Storehouse aims to connect poets with artists and filmmakers
Just a few weeks old, The Poetry Storehouse, poetrystorehouse.com, is already beginning to live up to its slogan, “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Everything in the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and there are also links to off-site collections of work with remix-friendly CC licenses of one variety or another. The site’s editors, led by Nic S., are actively soliciting for submissions of poetry in English, and new material will be added on a weekly basis. The editors tag and categorize the poetry on the site fairly exhaustively in order to maximize its findability.
The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of freely-available high-quality contemporary page-poetry for those multimedia collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by copyright and other restrictions. Our main mission is to collect and showcase poem texts and, in some instances, audio recordings of those texts. It is our hope that those texts will serve as inspiration or raw material for other artistic creations in different media.
I’m one of the site’s advisors, along with Marc Neys. My primary agenda is probably pretty obvious: generate more videopoems/filmpoems to share on Moving Poems! But more than that, I strongly believe that poets should be more open to artistic collaboration, and stop viewing a printed book as the ultimate destination for their work. And I think any filmmaker looking for a great short subject should consider bringing a poem to the big or small screen.
I’ve added The Poetry Storehouse to our page of web resources for videopoetry makers in the “Free and Creative Commons-licensed texts and audiopoetry” section. (And while I was updating the page, I also added a new section with links to free online filmmaking tutorials, to make it even easier for poets who want to have a go at envideoing their own or others’ works. Thanks to beginning poetry filmmaker Graham Barnes for the suggestion.)
Oir by Luisa A. Igloria
This new videopoem by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is one of his best, I think. Somehow the poem and reading by Luisa A. Igloria are just a perfect fit with the images and music.
As with his previous collaboration with Luisa, Mortal Ghazal, Marc has blogged some process notes incorporating remarks from Luisa. I’ll just quote from the first part of his post:
Some weeks ago we’ve had a thunderstorm at night. I recorded it, added some sounds and improvised piano…
For some reason I thought about the recording of ‘Oir’ Luisa sent me earlier. I combined them all and forwarded the result to Luisa.I very much love the broody thunderstorm background and the improvised piano. I like the sound of rain very much. A hard rain on tin roofs is a particularly strong memory trace I have from my growing up in a tropical country. Anyway, for me rain has the capacity for both amplifying and muffling/softening the atmosphere. It’s full of emotional portent,
she replied.
Luisa also gave me the idea of using ‘café-ambient’ noises and provided me with some insights about the poem;
…but in part the poem is partly triggered by a conversation I had in a cafe. We talked about work, creative nonfiction essays, family…
As usual the cafe was crowded and noisy. it struck me then but perhaps more afterward, when I was writing the poem, that in the spaces that teem with so much everyday life, activity, business as usual, we strive to hollow out spaces for the intimate to be enacted and reenacted.
