Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

MIX conference to explore “transmedia writing and digital creativity”

On 16 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - conferences, related genres, theory

Videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves is a featured speaker at an intriguing-sounding conference slated for July 16-18 at Bath Spa University in Britain. Registration is open for the MIX conference, which has its own website.

The conference will take place at Bath Spa University’s postgraduate centre at Corsham Court from 16th-18th July 2012. Its aim is to bring together practitioners and theorists working with writing in digital media. The purpose is to create a core of research knowledge both practical and theoretical. The conference will present academic papers as well as presentations and workshops by current digital practitioners. There will also be a public exhibition of digital work created for this conference.

The questions we will be addressing are: How can new media be used for serious artistic purposes and how can we create a suitable critical vocabulary for this? What is the relationship between digital writers and the commercial world of ‘gaming’. Who are the audiences for digital writing and how can they be accessed? There will be submissions from those who work in digital media, concrete poetry, text art, poetry and performance, poetry and film, film poems, digital poetics, poetry and art, poetry and music, digital narratives, game writing, intermedia poetry, transmedia writing, language art, visual writing and installations.

Though the deadline has passed to propose a paper, there’s an open call for video narratives to be exhibited at the conference — deadline June 1st.

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Becoming Judas: five poems by Nicelle Davis

On 16 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Book trailers
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These poems are from Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The wonderfully whimsical drawings by Cheryl Gross are animated in a fairly basic style which the description at YouTube dubs “motion graphics.”

Epithalamium by Timothy David Orme

On 15 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An interesting experimental piece by filmmaker and poet Timothy David Orme, who describes it at Vimeo as follows:

Epithalamium is a hybrid work of “poetry” and altered, erased, and intentionally damaged 16mm film–an odd marriage poem to an ex-wife, the first part being a poem for the speaker’s marriage day, the second part being a poem to the divorced wife’s future marriage, a sort of ‘future memory.’

Epithalamium is a silent project.

For more examples of Orme’s filmmaking, see his online portfolio.

The Itch by Mark Gwynne Jones

On 14 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/37387784

According to the description on Vimeo, these are

Words and pictures from the English Peak District, courtesy of Mark Gwynne Jones and Andy Lawrence… 2012

This film was made in one day, using the Canon 220 sx powershot HS, a cheap compact camera, and iMovie..

Lawrence and Jones are part of a band/multimedia partnership called Psychicbread which has produced a whole series of filmpoems with texts by Jones. According to the Horizon Review,

Four times fringe-award winners, Mark Gwynne Jones and the Psychicbread use poetry, music and humour as their messenger. From the girl who spent too long on a sunbed to the joys of driving a Sherman Tank at rush hour. . . the result is contagious, gritty and sometimes startlingly sensitive.

Daughter and two other poems by Emily Hinshelwood

On 13 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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http://vimeo.com/38151568

“This is an animation of my poem Daughter which I wrote after visiting the Old Point pub near Angle in Pembrokeshire,” writes Welsh poet and playwright Emily Hinshelwood in the description at Vimeo.

As a bonus, here’s Hinshelwood reading two poems for poetryvlog.com, “Lady Cave Anticline” and “And whan all else fails.” The audio quality isn’t great, but her readings make up for it. As a bit of a geology geek, I especially like the first.

Voices from Haiti: Boy in Blue by Kwame Dawes

On 12 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Kinestasis
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This is the English version of the “visual poem” Boy in Blue with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by photographer Andre Lambertson, editing by Robin Bell and music by Kevin Simmonds. See YouTube for the text.

I’ve decided to change course here and begin occasionally posting films that consist entirely of still images so I can feature projects like this. The technical term for a film montage of still images (often found in documentary films) is kinestasis, so that’s the name of this newest category at Moving Poems.

I previously shared Dawes’ kinestases with photographer Joshua Cogan, Live Hope Love, which was about living with HIV in Jamaica. Voices from Haiti is a newer series, also produced by the Pulitzer Center, which explores life after the earthquake in Haiti, focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS.

At the AWP conference in Chicago the week before last, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Dawes speak about the collaborative process involved in making these videos, and was impressed by the extent to which he and the other artists involved in these projects seem to have stumbled upon some of the same principles that make regular videopoems or filmpoems work: the importance of the soundtrack and the need for juxtaposition rather than simple illustration to created multiple narratives in the listener’s head — “reportages in dialogue,” as he put it. These visual poems are creations in their own right, different from purely textual poems, and would not have happened without collaboration between poet, photographer and composer, he said.

Words (poems by Polish immigrants in the UK)

On 8 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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A beautiful film written and directed by Maciej Piatek with photography by Karol Wyszynski. The poems are “Kupiliśmy cegiełki” and “Translator” by Honorata Chorąży-Przybysz, “Wulgarni” by Jacek Raputa and “I’m telling you, Mate…” by Paweł Lysak, all of which may be found (in Polish) on the webpage “Poezja polskich emigrantów” at the Kobieta na Wyspach (Woman on Island) internet portal for Poles living in the U.K.

War Rug by Francesco Levato

On 8 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Francesco Levato is one of the most ambitious filmmakers in the American cinepoetry tradition. Here’s his description of War Rug at Vimeo:

The film is based on a work of documentary poetics in the form of a book length poem. Multiple interwoven narratives explore life within zones of conflict as viewed through the lens of current warfare. The narratives range from passages inspired by journal entries, firsthand accounts, and news reports to poetic constructs collaged from military doctrine, Freedom of Information Act released government documents (like CIA interrogation manuals, and detainee autopsy reports), and numerous other sources. The film collages and juxtaposes archival source material with U.S. Military footage in an exploration of alternative narrative interpretations of the source text.

A Game of Sevens by Robert Peake

On 7 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A film-poem by Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier — their fourth. For the text, see Robert’s blog.

Motionpoems at the AWP book fair

On 6 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, conferences, interviews

A brief interview with Todd Boss, poet and co-founder of Motionpoems — the most ambitious poetry animation project in the U.S. to date, on a par with Comma Press’ film division in the U.K.

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Oedipus by Nathan Filer

On 6 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This light-verse film, starring the poet and directed by U.K. filmmaker RONG, won the Best Poetry Film prize at the 3rd ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2006.

To Learn From Each Thing by John Siddique

On 4 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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http://vimeo.com/28658512

This is “Vine Moon” from John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons series, directed and supervised by Walter Santucci. For this one, Raul Torres and Britt Wallstrom are credited with the animation and concept.