Posts By Dave Bonta
El pájaro revolucionario (The Revolutionary Bird) by Oscar Alfaro
This is LoCo by Azucena Losana, a Mexican multimedia artist based in Buenos Aires. The soundtrack is a poem by the Bolivian poet Oscar Alfaro, recited by Jorge Cafrune with English subtitles translated by Roger Colom.
Event review of Alastair Cook’s “Absent Voices”
Writing for the Scottish Review of Books, Theresa Muñoz reviews a live screening and performance of Alastair Cook‘s “Absent Voices” series of filmpoems. Since I’ve never personally seen a filmpoem screening done in what might be called a karaoke-like fashion, with the poet present to read the text while live musicians performed the soundtrack, I was especially interested in hearing how well these videos worked in that context.
When folk read poems, images sparked from the narrative float through their minds. Alastair Cook’s own brand of Filmpoems, whereby the poet reads his work against a running 8mm or 16mm short film, provides the audience with a firm set of visuals. It’s an intriguing art form which both expands and contracts the poem’s possibilities, as the audience tries to thematically integrate the text with the established visuals of the film (and soundtrack). The majority of Cook’s Filmpoems are lush, evocative and dark creations filmed in the derelict sugar shacks on the James Watt Dock in Greenock.
Set in the Scottish Poetry Library’s cosy downstairs area, the setting was that of a makeshift cinema. A white screen hung from the high wall. A golden clarsach, later trilled by Rita Bradd, stood in the corner. Musician Luca Nasciuti was on hand to provide a haunting soundtrack. Cook began by describing how the batch of film poems came about. Commissioned by the arts collective Absent Voices, Cook asked seven poets to contribute a work: Gerard Rudolf, Jane McKie, Brian Johnstone, John Glenday, JL Williams and Sheree Mack. The poets were each given archived pictures of the sugar industry and watched a short film about the dilapidated buildings.
Writing Behaviour by Rosemary Norman
Stuart Pound describes this on Vimeo as
a poem set to images and sounds. The image foreground is made up of the lines, words and letters of the poem, floating and twisting in the light, as the incarcerated writer writes his escape.
Some very interesting kinetic text effects bordering on concrete poetry, especially with the light-hearted musical accompaniment provided by James Cordell and Frances Wright.
I feel a bit abashed at not having discovered Pound’s work until now. His Vimeo profile says,
Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s. He hopes to return to painting. Since 1995 he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman. Work has been screened regularly at international film and video festivals.
Rosemary Norman says on her page at poetry pf that she and Pound “began by using spoken poems and have experimented with digitally processed recordings and with putting text on screen.” There’s a website devoted to their collaboration at stuartpound.info with texts, stills and clips.
Jump Into Air by Guinevere Glasfurd
Alastair Cook’s Filmpoem 25 features the text and reading of Guinevere Glasfurd. The description on Vimeo reads:
Jump Into Air is a poem by Guinevere Glasfurd on the subject of the deathly decline of the British fishing industry, commissioned by North Light Arts. Guinevere, as well as being an exceptional author and poet, has written for the Fishing News, the industry paper, and drew both on this and her stay with the fishermen of Dunbar during this Summer. Jump Into Air has sound commissioned from Luca Nasciuti and was filmed by Alastair Cook using Kodak Ektachrome.
New at Moving Poems: a mobile-ready theme and a links page
This week, the main site of Moving Poems got a facelift. Videos now fill almost the entire width of the page, and will automatically resize, along with the rest of the site, to fit any screen. Check it out and tell me what you think!
A fresh look often prompts fresh ideas. This week I also decided it was high time to add a links page to the main site. That way I could not only include more links than what I can fit into the footer, but I can also make the footer links section more useful by restricting it to a handful of top sites (and linking to the full list). The links page is still nowhere near exhaustive; too lengthy a list can overwhelm visitors and thereby defeat its purpose. But I welcome suggestions for additional links I should include. For example, I’m thinking there have to be a few more poetry presses with video divisions…
The nitty-gritty
For fellow web publishers and others who may be interested, here’s a more detailed account of what changed and why. The device-responsive video resizing is thanks to a jQuery plugin known as FitVids, which is bundled into the new WordPress theme: Origami Premium from SiteOrigin. I’d been putting off the change to a more modern theme because I liked the look of the old one a lot, but the upgrade to WordPress 3.5 forced my hand — it no longer made sense to keep trying to re-write the code of an aging theme to keep up with changes.
This is the third major redesign of the site. When I started Moving Poems nearly four years ago, few videos looked good at much beyond 600 pixels wide, and it made sense to devote the remaining screen real estate to a sidebar. Now, even most non-HD videos, whether uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo, look decent at full-screen size on a desktop monitor, so why shouldn’t a site devoted to video appreciation take full advantage of that? The smartphone and tablet revolution worried me for a while, especially after Apple decided to stop supporting Flash, but the major video hosting platforms have found work-arounds for that. I’m told that the small viewing area on most mobile devices is compensated for by an ever-increasing sharpness of the display. In any case, the fact is that more and more people are interacting with the web primarily through their phones and tablets, even sometimes watching full-length movies on them. So whether we like it or not, this is the new media landscape that web publishers have to adapt to.
Call for submissions: apocalyptic-themed poetry videos
InDigest magazine is asking for video submissions from poets and storytellers for an end-of-the-world YouTube compendium to be issued next Friday, December 21. Although the submission guidelines state that the video “can just be you reading a poem,” they add: “the submissions must have great writing or be an exceptional video.” Editor Dustin Luke Nelson said in a contact message to Moving Poems, “I’m not asking all poets and writers to create short films, but I hope to get a few that are a little more in line with what you curate here as opposed to just people reading into a camera, but either way I thought this might be of interest to you or your readers.”
Be advised, however, that previously web-published videos are not eligible, so if you’re interested, you’d better get busy. The end of the world is less than a week away!
Call for submissions: The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival
Professional filmmaker and poet R.W. Perkins (whose award-winning videopoems may be viewed on Moving Poems) has announced the formation of a new poetry film festival in his hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado.
The Body Electric is set to be Colorado’s first ever poetry film festival. To be held at The Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, the festival will be directed and curated by poet/filmmaker R.W. Perkins.
At The Body Electric we are looking for innovative and technically sound filmmaking coupled with a strong grasp of poetics. It is our hope to showcase a wide range of talented film-poets from around the world to best represent the budding art form of videopoetry.
The festival opening day has yet to be determined, likely in late April or early May, but submissions are now open to all. Please check back with us soon for an updated schedule.
Visit the website for submission guidelines. There’s also a Facebook page and Twitter feed. According to the latter, submissions are already flowing in.
Nirvana by Charles Bukowski
A very popular poem — there are three videos for it on Vimeo alone — probably because it captures in simple language an experience most of us have felt, and also because there’s a great recording of Tom Waits reading it (which is the narration used here). It also has that wistful, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” kind of vibe, even though the holidays aren’t mentioned. And for me this poetry film epitomizes the appeal of down-home, local diners. (I worked as a short-order cook in a diner for a few years when I was young.)
The director, Patrick Biesemans, says about himself:
I currently work as head of production for a cool little company in Manhattan, and when the opportunity arises I am a freelance director of commercials, fashion films, and music videos.
The film was supported by a successful Kickstarter campaign and shot on a $4000 budget. The campaign description shows Biesemans’ thinking about the project:
We would love the opportunity to pay tribute to Waits and Bukowski by creating a short film inspired by, and complimentary to, this great poem. This video project would be visual poetry, focusing on the atmospheric qualities that Waits’ presents with his voice, and Bukowski with his words. A story revolving around the quiet moments that spark and inspire great writing. […]
Our approach would be to shoot this live action and on location, with a playful mix of practical effects and miniature elements (mainly using model railroad train elements); A surreal yet welcoming artistic representation of the world. I want the influences of the 1950’s and 60’s to shape the art direction, costuming, and mood of this project.
We have no plans to submit this to film festivals or get praise for completing such a great project. We’re doing this as a “love letter” to travelers, writers, singers, campfire storytellers, and poets.
Four Desires by Jason Heroux
According to the description on YouTube, this is “a book trailer for Jason Heroux’s new poetry collection NATURAL CAPITAL published by Mansfield Press,” though I must say it’s awfully subtle for a trailer — and a very fine videopoem, however one categorizes it. In a blog post introducing the video, Heroux adds that it was made by his brother Darren.
