Posts By Dave Bonta

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

Videopoetry “for the earth” sought for 2012 VideoBardo festival in Buenos Aires

I’m not sure exactly how often it’s held, but the Buenos Aires-based International Festival of Videopoetry (VideoBardo) will be on its fourth incarnation this year, and the deadline for submissions is July 31st. The call for submissions is in Spanish and English:

2012 is a year of deep changes. Humanity suffers from electronic hiperconnection and natural hipoconnection (with Nature and with the Earth that we are part of). Due to these facts, serious and urgent issues about environment, climate and humans have been provoked. We support The Earth Summit 2012 Río +20 of United Nations that will deal all those issues. We must do something as poets, artists and human beings; we must rethink all these matters. That is why our IV International Festival of Videopoetry 2012 has as specific theme “For the Earth”; its purpose will be to become aware of the fact that We Are Earth.

If you’re on Facebook, there’s also an event page with the CFS. And do join the open group for the Visible Verse Festival, where Heather Haley shared this link and shares many other calls, not all of which get posted here.

Piece Work by Robert Peake

Poet Robert Peake’s first venture into the genre arose spontaneously and in collaboration with his wife, Valerie Kampmeier, who provided the music and the idea, as she describes on her blog:

This afternoon was the last day of the Christmas holidays, unexpectedly sunny, crisp and breezy. After the departure of some visitors, Robert and I were about to go out for a walk and some tea and cake, when he suddenly pointed to a patch of light on the wall behind me. The reflections from the garden of waving branches and the wrought iron of a clothes post were casting flickering shadows onto the wall in an astonishing fashion, almost like a silent movie. Robert grabbed his iPhone and captured some video. “You could use that for a poem-film, “ I remarked, thinking about the beautiful short videos some friends had made recently.

When we got home from our walk, I began improvising to the footage on the piano, while Robert listened and wrote. Within twenty minutes we both had something. Remarkably, when Robert read his poem aloud, it was exactly the right length. He recorded it, synchronized it with the video, and then I recorded my part on top onto a different track so that we could experiment with individual volume and colour.

Read the rest (and visit Robert’s blog for the text). It’s always exciting to see a new poet entering the videopoem/film-poem genre, and the high quality and organic process here bodes well for Peake and Kampmeier’s future efforts.

Howie Good: three poems from Dreaming in Red

Swoon Bildos combined three poems — “Blue Territory,” “Ghost Train,” and “The Theory of Meaningful Coinicidence” — for a videopoem in support of Howie Good‘s new collection, Dreaming in Red. Profits from the sale of the book go to the Crisis Center in Birmingham, Alabama, which works on suicide prevention and provides services to victims of sexual assault, day treatment for the indigent mentally ill, and other services.

Something by Charles Bukowski

“A short poem by Charles Bukowski illustrated by film, texture and stills. Original soundtrack by immprint.” It’s worth noting, however, that the London-based graphic design company used the same soundtrack in another video, for William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose.” This is one of three Bukowski videopoems they’ve uploaded to Vimeo so far. It’s not clear who commissioned them.

The Call by Michelle Bitting

Michelle Bitting‘s latest poem film.

Was it I by Sheila Packa

It’s been too long since I last featured one of Kathy McTavish‘s lovely pieces of cello-accompanied video art for a poem by her regular collaborator, poet Sheila Packa. This is a piece from Packa’s new collection, Cloud Birds.

Most of the time, videos that consist only of still images don’t seem like a good fit for a site called Moving Poems, but McTavish’s videos are too full of life and movement to exclude.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAiik7SKXX8

Another videopoem from John Scott‘s projected feature-length documentary, Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing. See “Sandpiper” for more information and links. Jason Harrington supplied the animation here.

Nicholas Was… by Neil Gaiman

It would be hard to top last year’s animation of “Nicholas Was…” by Beijing motion graphics studio 39 Degrees North, but Trine Malde and narrator Aaron Kay took this in a completely different direction with “a mixture of rotoscoped animation, live action and found footage to comment on the stress and evil of christmas consumerism.”

Slow Wave Through The City by Jacq Kelly

The latest filmpoem from Alastair Cook, who describes it on Vimeo as follows:

Slow Wave Through The City is a poem by Jacq Kelly, published by Colin Herd this year. It crossed my path digitally and I watched the film in my head as I read, my adopted city of Edinburgh speeding by.

Jacq lives in Edinburgh but dreams of moving to Sweden and becoming a viking. Until this happens, she spends her time writing poetry, fiction and trying to make a difference in politics as a campaigner.

Slow Wave Through the City was filmed in Edinburgh on 8mm film in Summer 2011 on a long walk with the poet; it was shot using Ektachrome Super8, processed in Kansas by Dwaynes.

By way of a coda, this is a first, a Scottish Filmpoem. Looking through all 15 films, this is the only one which has only Scots contributors for the film, narrative and music. This was not deliberate, but is fitting, since it’s devoted to Edinburgh.

The Letters by Sigurd Tenningen

Another of Kristian Pedersen’s excellent animations for Gasspedal Animert. The sound effects are nearly are crucial as the images here. In some ways this is closer to a concrete poetry experiment than a kinetic type film.

Odds and Ends by Joseph Harker

Joseph Harker‘s poem appeared in qarrtsiluni back in October (whence the recording of his reading). Swoon blogged (in Dutch) about the making of the video here.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to make a film for my father, who died last year. Plenty of ideas. Especially ideas about how things are definitely not allowed to look. Or sound. The epitaph could not be more than a tribute to his own simplicity.

In the poem “Odds and Ends” (Qarrtsiluni Podcast 28.10.2011) by Joseph Harker, I found the words summoned up the right atmosphere for me. I was even more excited when Joseph gave permission to use his poem.

[…]

For the images I wanted a split. 2 tracks of images. Two streams of thought.

I used footage from “And So They Live,” a documentary from 1940 by John Ferno and Julian Roffman. Simplicity and warmth were the central concepts that I was looking at in these images. I also used (self-filmed) images from the train to my hometown. The contrast of the warmth and tranquility in the nostalgic images with the blurred images of the train rushing forward to my roots is, for me, successful evocation.


(Translation by Google and guesswork)

What Draws Us To The Sea? by John Siddique

http://vimeo.com/26261699

This is “Holly Moon” from John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons series. The paintings are by Dania Strong, Clarpupia Hernandez did the animation, and credit for direction and supervision is given to Walter Santucci. As with the others in the series, the original music was composed by Katie Chatburn in response to the video.