Posts By Dave Bonta
Call for submissions: 6th annual Trevigliopoesia Festival
The Trevigliopoesia Festival has been held in Treviglio – Bergamo (near Milan, Italy) every year since 2008, and includes a competition called La Parola Imaginata. From their website:
TRP – Trevigliopoesia is VIDEOPOETRY: Video-Art, Video Documentary and Poetry Film.
The word as language but also a symbol that becomes an element as the expression of thoughts, images, visions of the poets and their lives. Combining inspirations and influences from the field of philosophy, music, theatre and literature the result of the artistic creation meet the public showing the perfect union between POEM and VIDEO.Under the patronage of the Office of Culture of the town of Treviglio, the arts association Nuvole in viaggio advertises the sixth edition of the video poetry competition LA PAROLA IMMAGINATA.
March 1 is the deadline for submissions. Download a PDF of the rules from their website. (And don’t forget that Italy’s other international poetry film festival, DOCtorClip in Rome, is also still open for submissions.)
What is Life? by John Clare
https://vimeo.com/57929732
This is the work of Sao Paulo-based writer Juliana Mendonça. According to her description at Vimeo, it was
Inspired by New York City fall and John Clare’s poem.
This was my first time in the city and my first time shooting with a Go Pro only.Made 100% with a Go Pro Hero 3 Black Edition.
Poem: What is Life by John Clare.
Music: Hægt, kemur ljósi› by Ólafur Arnalds.
If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein
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[Edited 10/19/17: The original upload has gone missing, so it’s been replaced with two excerpts.]
This is Shutters Shut, choreographed by the legendary duo Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, A.K.A. Lightfoot León, and premiered by the Nederlands Dans Theater II in 2003. Paul Lightfoot told Ballet magazine, “In a way Shutters is a study, it’s an exercise.”
This performance is by Gauthier Dance, the dance ensemble of Theaterhaus Stuttgart. The dancers are Armando Braswell and Rosario Guerra. The film was edited by Valerie Haaf-Seidel, with camera work by Fritz Moser and Werner Schmidtke. (There’s another performance on YouTube, by Nederlands Dans Theater II itself, but that’s only an excerpt and seems to have been uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder.)
Limbo by dikson
A good example of the music-video style of poetry video, directed by Laurence Dobie. Dikson is a slam poet from Zimbabwe. The text is here.
Upgrade to the Moving Poems directory page
Visitor stats show that the directory page, Moving Poems’ index of poets and filmmakers, is one of the most-visited pages on the site. But it’s long been difficult to read, especially since the switch to a new, wider template. So I finally decided it was time for an upgrade and found a WordPress plugin, Multi-column Tag Map, that appeared to do everything I wanted. (The previous page was entirely hand-coded.) It is still perhaps a little unwieldy on smaller screens and mobile devices, when it shrinks to fewer than the maximum five columns, but on a desktop monitor it should now be fairly browsable. Check it out.
“Another new kind of poem is made”: Michelle Bitting on the making of poem-films
In an interview at Connotation Press, American poet Michelle Bitting, author most recently of Notes to the Beloved, answers a couple of questions about her poem films:
Second, I see that you have created poem-films. Does the strong visual component of films influence your poetry? Is it the other way around (does the visual element of poetry influence your films)? Or is it both? Or that you’re (like me) a very visual person?
I made the poem-films in much the same way I believe I want to make poems. Going intuitively on what I want it to feel and look like and then seeing what actually falls in my path as I go along. So, the illusion of control and then surrender to what’s happening. That’s a truly fun tight-rope to walk. I try to be willing to fall, meaning fail, and I do, a lot. Sometimes the chemistry just ain’t happening and sometimes it’s an alchemical triumph. To me, the films are poems made out of images and sound. Then, informed by the text, another new kind of poem is made. When it’s working right, it’s all poetry.
On the subject of poem-films, how do you approach and understand them? Do you have expectations for them?
I’m pretty much called to create a visual text for a particular poem and then I just start to see it and keep following the thread that spins out of whatever I’ve begun. I let what naturally falls into my lap (or lens) enter into the conversation. For instance, in the film I did for my poem “In Praise of my Brother, the Painter”, at one point, I took photos and filmed bits of an exhibit on Houdini that was showing in my city (Los Angeles) at the time. Later I wanted a particular person to be in the film as a kind of muse-slash-nod to Houdini. Eventually, I realized I was supposed to wear the top hat and so the configuration of Brother, Houdini, Me and the final images led me to a new understanding of what the piece was trying to tell me, or I was trying to tell myself, in the first place. I could never arrive at that stage of revelation without just simply putting one creative step in front of another into the unknown.
Read the rest of the interview (and scroll down to read the poems). (h/t: R.W. Perkins)
Moving Poems adds a Twitter feed
You can now follow Moving Poems on Twitter: @moving_poems. Though I continue to favor RSS feed readers myself, I have to admit that the Twitter feed proved its utility this week when Vimeo went down for several hours at midday on Wednesday — exactly the sort of thing worth mentioning on Twitter, where savvier web users tend to look for updates about site performance.
Inscrição (Inscription) by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Director Cine Povero notes:
A poem by Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner (1919-2004)
Read by Natália Luiza (“Ao Longe os Barcos de Flores”)
Music: “Guidemebytheshiplights, part 2” by Matt StintonFilmed at Terra Nostra Park (São Miguel Island, Azores) and Sintra National Park (Portugal).
To sample more of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen‘s work in English translation, see the Poetry International website.
