Posts By Dave Bonta
When I Move by Khary Jackson
I’ve posted a lot of dance + poetry videos and a lot of spoken word videos, but I believe this is the first in which the poet dances as he recites his poem. This was produced by the St. Paul, Minnesota-based organization Poetry Observed, which according to the description on YouTube “is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, filmed off the stage. Our first series features Minnesota spoken word poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.”
from “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” by e.e. cummings
http://vimeo.com/39763560
The young South African filmmaker Coenraad Viviers and his assistants had perhaps a bit too much fun with this section of cummings’ poem. (Read the complete poem at the Poetry Foundation website.)
Post-Operative Complications Following the Extraction of Memory by Taha Muhammed Ali
The translation by Peter Cole may be read at Poetry International Web. The filmmaker, Lotte Marie Allen, notes that this was
shot in nablus, ramallah, hebron, abu dis, qalandia, jericho, west bank. sinai, egypt. animations from arabic dictionary drawings, postcards, posters, roads and rock formations, my own drawings.
This Is Not A Sales Pitch by Marianne Morris
A collaboration between artist Vanessa Hodgkinson and poet Marianne Morris, according to the video description at Vimeo.
The film is a mixture of a shoot at Leighton House Museum, London, where the artist is recreating Ingres’ Le Bain Turc, surrounded by her own personal ‘Orientalist’ objects that tell her story, and footage from a british documentary on the storming of the Iranian embassy in Iran in the early 1980s, as well as YouTube footage of more recent activities at the embassy in London, but also the British Embassy in Tehran.
The work aims to combine recreation in both painterly and documentary styles of film-making, with real life events filmed by members of the public.
Written in My Dream by William Carlos Williams
This kinetic text poetry animation by Nikolaus Lesnik uses a reading by Allen Ginsberg.
The God of Sugar by Vicki Feaver
Alastair Cook‘s latest filmpoem features cinematography by James William Norton and a terrific score by Luca Nasciuti. Vicki Feaver is a highly regarded, regularly anthologized English poet with three poetry collections out.
Cioran by Peter Wullen
Peter Wullen; voice: Bart Stouten; concept, camera, editing, music: Swoon. Of all the many videopoems Swoon has put together, this may well be my favorite so far.
Subway Services by Philip Dacey
A neon animation by Jack Feldstein based on a poem by Philip Dacey.
The Last Days of the Suicide Kid by Charles Bukowski
An award-winning film by Dutch filmmaker and artist RJ (Jetze Roel van Assen).
Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” featured as a “last poem I loved” at The Rumpus
The popular arts and culture magazine The Rumpus has a regular feature called “The Last Poem I Loved,” and the April 26 installment, by Dena Rash Guzman, focuses explicitly on the film version of a poem. This is of note not simply because it will be widely read, but because such detailed and highly personal reader/viewer responses to videopoems are far from common.
I didn’t really read the poem. The poem is a movie, too. I heard and saw and loved the poem.
It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. That reads as little bit new age, but I can explain the metaphor no better than Schomburg does in his poem-film. It is his own. It could be a redneck metaphor, or a hippie one, an academic one, or a Freudian one. Sometimes a metaphor is just a cigar.
I mean only to say, I met this poem at a time when it might have saved my life and I have returned to it many times since for CPR.
