Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier
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
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.
Free stock footage on Vimeo
Thanks once again to Nic S. for one of the latest additions to our growing list of resources for videopoem makers: a Vimeo group dedicated to sharing free HD stock footage. It’s the work of Phil Fried from Austria, and imposes only the condition that users not sell or redistribute the clips elsewhere. There are currently 149 videos in the group. It’s particularly good for nature imagery: flowers, sunsets, the beach, and animals.
Another user on Vimeo (found via the links in the aforementioned group) goes by the handle Free Stock Footage, and has so far uploaded 85 videos “free to use in non-commercial projects” (though donations are appreciated). The videographer appears to be a resident of Alberta, Canada, and includes some great sky, water and landscape footage, a few wildlife videos, and some random CGI stuff.
New Year’s Eve by Thomas Hardy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX746yXs96A
With all the videopoems that have been made with her readings or for her poems, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later Nic S. would have to try making one of her own. This is her maiden effort — and the first Hardy poem in the Moving Poems archive. She used some wonderfully creepy footage of cockroaches from the Prelinger Archives. She her blog post for more about her process.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
Two poems (personality fragmented and notes from a taxi cab at 2 a.m.) by u.v. ray
U.K. photographer and musician gordon eightball made this wonderfully atmospheric film, with words and voice supplied by u.v. ray, whose website says he has been “a stalwart of the underground literary scene for 20 years.”
Three poems (Flute Boy, Marriage of Opposites and Half-caste) by John Agard
John Agard is joined on stage by the flautist Keith Waithe, a fellow Guyanan, in an extract from a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce called John Agard Live!, which was included as a DVD along with Agard’s 2009 collection Alternative Anthem, from Bloodaxe Books. (There’s also video of Agard reading the title poem.)
New additions to the web resources page: video effects, videos from space, and Soundcloud
UPDATE (9/1): I’ve added close to a dozen more links in the past three days, courtesy of Nic.
- I’ve updated the list of Web resources for videopoem makers to add some new links. I discovered last month that SoundCloud, the online audio-sharing site for musicians (and sometimes spoken-word artists), encourages members to apply Creative Commons licenses to their works and make them available for download (though frustratingly, some do the former and neglect to do that latter). Adding to the site’s utility for remixers and filmmakers is a very useful advanced search function, even better than ccMixter, so if for example you want to find a piece of electronica with French horns that’s licensed CC non-commercial, you can do that. The site overall is very comparable to Jamendo, but I think may have even more users.
A couple weeks ago, Diane Lockward let me know about a whole new category of free resources: prekeyed footage, brief stock clips and other video effects. I have so far included just the two sites she recommended, Footage Crate and Movietools.info; others I looked at seemed pretty spammy.
The most recent addition comes from Nic S., who has just made her first videopoem after being so heavily exploited often called upon to provide audio for videos by me and Swoon. In addition to the Prelinger Archives, Nic got the bright idea of using footage from the NASA Video Gallery, which, as I say on the resource list, looks like the go-to site site for videos of the earth from space and other cool spacey stuff. The site’s very easy to navigate, and every video has a download link.
Thanks, Nic and Diane! And if anyone else has a discovery to share, please don’t be shy.
This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way, by Sherry O’Keefe
A film called “Nightvision” by Swoon Bildos, which he blogged about (in Dutch) here. Fortunately for us English speakers, though — and for everyone who’s been following Swoon’s work — the poet, Sherry O’Keefe, blogged a conversation with him about the process of making this video, how he got into videopoetry and more.
The poem originally appeared in PANK, and was recorded by Nic S. for Whale Sound. The video includes some camera work by Kristoffer Jansson and Keith Marcel.
