Posts By Dave Bonta

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

Qué se ama cuando se ama (What do we love when we love) by Gonzalo Rojas

On 15 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/1871573

“A tribute to the poet and to love,” says Cristián Tàpies, the maker of this widely screened photomotion film. English subtitles are the work of Pedro Donoso. Gonzalo Rojas was a major Chilean poet who lived much of his life in exile, and died this past April.

Our Father by Veronica Keszthelyi

On 14 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/4539639

Veronica Keszthelyi says in the description at Vimeo:

A seemingly normal young woman goes to a church in search of peace.

First film ever, shot an a Canon handycam on location in Gaithersburg, MD, USA.

Starring Rachel Simko
Music by James Clarke
Produced, directed, shot and edited by moi.

Actually was accepted and screened at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2008.
Yea, I’m still in shock.

Reprieve by Luisa A. Igloria

On 13 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Luisa Igloria has been writing daily poems for my blog, Via Negativa since last November, but I didn’t get around to envideoing any of her poems until her 50th birthday last week — shameful, I know! Luisa is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and eight other books, and grew up in Baguio City, the Philippines. I blogged about the making of the video here, and Luisa’s poem first appeared on the blog in text form here.

read these roads by Kai Lossgott

On 12 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A very interesting approach to stop-frame animation by South African videopoet Kai Lossgott, who also organized, directed and curated the City Breath Festival of Video Poetry and Performance last year, and is currently searching for experimental films about climate change for a new exhibition called Letters from the Sky. (See the Moving Poems forum for more details on the latter.)

Kai’s notes about this film at Vimeo are worth quoting in full:

The evaporating water puddle images in this stop frame animation hint at the living systemic relationship between Table Mountain’s hydrology systems, the City of Cape Town’s water system and the biological systems of the human body. This is a video poem of unfulfilled desire for the lost personal bond with the natural world. The soundtrack of the video is taken from Adderley Street in the Cape Town CBD, above the underground storm water drain where the now forgotten Varsterivier, among others, (3 million cubic tons of untapped fresh spring water) runs into the sea daily. Fresh water is one of South Africa’s scarcest resources.

Two new festivals are looking for poetry films

On 12 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Two new peripatetic film festivals are currently accepting submissions of videopoetry and other poetry-related films. South African videopoet Kai Lossgott is organizing Letters from the Sky: experimental films on climate change, which seeks “experimental film, artist’s film, video art, microcinema, animation, screen dance, video poetry” which address the question:

How does climate change affect your habitat? Participating artists should respond to the brief and the theme of evidence of climate change. In researching a personal but informed response to the topic, dialogue/collaboration with scientists is encouraged. Using film as a medium, the complex issues at hand should be transformed into dynamic but simple audiovisual experiences with both popular and critical merit. The work may not be longer than 4 minutes. Brevity is strongly encouraged.

The original screening will be part of the COP 17 global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, 28 November – 9 December 2011, “as well as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Thereafter, selections of the programme will travel to international film festivals.” The deadline is coming up soon — September 20. See the Open Call for Films and Proposals for more information.

The International Literary Film Festival is scheduled to kick off in Brooklyn, New York in November, and thereafter to travel to Berlin, Leiden, and Cha-am, Thailand over the following 14 months. The organizer, Lee Bob Black, is looking for films in four categories: feature literary film (longer than 60 minutes), short literary film (shorter than 60 minutes), documentary film about literature (longer than 60 minutes), and documentary short film about literature (shorter than 60 minutes). The deadline is October 14. See the website for a submission form and additional details.

How to make subtitles for videos with YouTube captioning — new tutorial

On 10 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - video hosting

Brenda Clews — sometime contributor to this forum and author of several videopoems on the main site — has knuckled down and figured out how to add subtitles to her YouTube videos using CaptionTube. Needless to say, captioning is an extremely valuable addition to videos not only for accessibility, but also to offer English translations of videopoems in other languages that can be turned off by those who know the languages. And YouTube captions in any of Google Translate’s languages can be machine-translated with a click of a button into any other. Brenda shares what she’s learned so far in a post at her blog.

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The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds by Helen Vitoria

On 9 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A film called Flight, showcasing the collaborative efforts of Swoon (video editing, production, etc.), Nic S. of Whale Sound (voice), and Kathy McTavish of Cello Dreams (music). This was the dry run for their new collaborative videopoem project announced in a call for submissions last week (which was soon answered).

Pennsylvania poet Helen Vitoria is the editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal. The text of “The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds” is available as a PDF from Gold Mark Press.

The video features footage of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by Ira Mowen. Swoon states in the description at Vimeo that it is “dedicated to Vladek & Anja Spiegelman, the main characters in Maus by Art Spiegelman.”

I’ve just installed a caching plugin at the main Moving Poems site to try to reduce CPU spikes at the server (we’re on a typical, cheap shared webhost). Please let me know if you run into any problems viewing or using the site.

Challenge Me Vista by R.W. Perkins

On 8 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/13102380

This is the first in a projected series of poetry videos by R.W. Perkins, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based video producer. The YouTube version of the video has garnered an impressive 10,595 views since it was uploaded a little over a year ago. I especially enjoyed the light-hearted tone and the great soundtrack.

The Wall by Brenda Clews

On 7 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Video, words, voice and music are all by Brenda Clews, who notes in the YouTube description:

I meditate regularly and often do yoga sets. Especially I do this when I am working through issues. During one of my sessions last week the metaphor of the wall arose, and while resting after the yoga set I picked up my iPhone and began speaking, intending to write a prose poem from my voice notes. I left the recording as is, and added the background of sounds and instruments. My speaking of the words is not a performance but an embodiment of the meaning. Then I began to work with recent footage of a lightning storm I had shot. Initially, when looking at the rushes, I was perturbed that I hadn’t removed the mesh screen. Yet the footage is perfect for this video. The subconscious is all of a processing, mobile, energy of constantly equilibrating unity, and what we are voicing here is what we are filming there. Our lives are always moving beyond their boundaries as we push into deeper processes of who we are, alone and together.

Brenda also blogged a few process notes at Rubies in Crystal, where she went into more detail about the soundtrack:

The sound track is a midi file of the text that I generated at http://www.p22.com/musicfont/ and yes, I used copters, and gunshot, and a pad4choir from the music text generator (I did have to copy the sound files from the site one by one and mix them later) and ethereal sunrise, smooth clav, whirly, and nature sounds from GarageBand, plus the original track of thunder and lightning, so it is meant to be a bit, well a bit of a war zone. It works, but it’s not for relaxation, obviously!

The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier

On 6 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Portland, Oregon-based poet Dale Favier has been blogging at mole since 2003. His first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out this month just out from Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. A subsequent sighting of a mole in the yard resulted in this video. (See Via Negativa for a more detailed description of the process.)

In Extremis by Marly Youmans

On 5 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - Videopoems
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Marly Youmans reads another poem from The Throne of Psyche, out earlier this year from Mercer University Press. Film and music once again are by Paul Digby. In her description at YouTube, Marly writes:

This poem is about a visionary experience that flooded in during a harrowing passage in my life. The timing was a bit difficult; I had given birth to a third child and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Not long after we arrived, our eldest, a little boy of 8, was struck with meningitis. The short blank verse poem begins at a point where he had been immobile for a week: still and unresponsive, and was about to be moved from St. Francis Children’s Hospital to a larger hospital with an Infectious Diseases specialist.