Posts By Dave Bonta
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
A lot of kinetic type poetry animations don’t really say anything about the poem, I feel, so don’t make the cut here. This was an exception: somehow the colors, typography and design seemed just right. It’s by Tamisha Harris, “a designer, visual storyteller and a student at the London College of Communication [whose] creative practice revolves around graphic moving image.”
Another reading worth checking out is the one at Poets.org, in which Brooks discusses the background and reception of the poem in her introduction.
“Howl” now available on Hulu
The new feature-length film-poem HOWL, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, can now be seen for free on Hulu. I thought about posting it to the main site — Hulu films are embeddable — but apparently it can’t be seen overseas. I’m also told it’s available for no extra charge to anyone with a Netflix subscription. And of course the DVD is for sale.
I watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, conditioned as I was by more than two years of curating Moving Poems: a brilliant melange of animation, drama, interview and flashback, I thought. I posted a review of sorts at Via Negativa.
The Stockholm Syndrome by Howie Good
For his fourth film for a Howie Good poem, Swoon enlisted the help of a couple of other cameramen. Here are the credits as given in the film description on Vimeo:
Words and voice: Howie Good
Camera: Diego Diaz, Anthony Jackson and Swoon
Treats, editing and music: SwoonCredit and many thanks to: Diego Diaz (woman in shower) and Anthony Jackson (man on balcony) for their footage and great camerawork.
Howie sounds especially sinister slowed down like this. The stark black-and-white imagery and unusual wide-screen format are also a great fit with the poem, I thought.
The poem may be read online at Threatening Weather, the audio chapbook from Whale Sound.
on being constantly civil towards death by Nic S.
A new Moving Poems production in support of Nic S.’s chapbook Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, which is available in a variety of media: online text with audio players; free downloads in MP3, PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats; audio CD and print-on-demand.
For links to more of Nic S.’s work, see her blog Very Like a Whale. Nic’s other online projects include the audio poetry journal Whale Sound and Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks. I blogged about the making of this video last night at Via Negativa, for anyone who’s interested in the process.
Visible Verse Festival 2011 call for submissions
Submissions to the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver are due by September 1. Don’t miss your chance to be part of North America’s premiere videopoetry festival.
2011 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
- VVF seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2011
- Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee. For more information contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Instructions on How to Cry by Julio Cortázar
http://www.vimeo.com/25972154
This is from the first chapter of Cronopios and Famas, translated by Paul Backburn, “The Instruction Manual” — “an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format,” according to the publisher’s description on Amazon.
Sari Rachman is the actress, and also supplied the voiceover reading of the poem. Leonardo Cariglino did everything else. You can read the text at Maud Newton’s blog. Someone else posted a video interpretation of the poem on YouTube, and had I not discovered this one, I might have posted it. But I’m afraid Cariglino’s film blows it out of the water.
Incidentally, Cariglino is in the midst of a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to make a film inspired in part by a Baudelaire poem. Check it out.
Tree by Jane Hirshfield
Hirshfield’s reading of “Tree” is preceded by a short but eloquent statement about the role of poetry in contemporary society that really resonated with me, as well as a few words about how she came to connect with poetry as a child. (Wish I could turn off the terrible background music, though!) This is from PlumTV. Like many prominent writers, Hirshfield doesn’t appear to have her own website, but here’s what the Poetry Foundation has for her.
Where Babies Come From by James Tate
James Tate probably needs no introduction, but check out his page at the Poetry Foundation to hear more audio of him reading his work.
Zachary Schomburg probably needs no introduction to fans of videopoetry, either, but here’s his new tumblelog. I am still anxiously awaiting the release of his poem-film Asteroid, a three-minute trailer for which he released six months ago, saying that the full-length film would be “Forthcoming from Rabbit Light Movies in June 2011.” That issue doesn’t appear to be online yet.
Invisible Man by Amir Rabiyah
Kevin Simmonds’ brief film is part interview, part reading. Simmonds is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, which includes this poem by Amir Rabiyah.
