Posts By Dave Bonta
Alex Cigale becomes Moving Poems’ Russian-language editor
This week, Ukranian-American poet and translator Alex Cigale became the first foreign-language editor at Moving Poems, contributing translations and analysis of videopoems for works by Alexander Vvedensky and Anna Akhmatova — see Alex’s author archive to view both posts.
I know Alex from his work as an author and now issue editor at qarrtsiluni, and I’ve come to appreciate his enthusiasm for poetry of all kinds and passion for bringing it to ordinary readers. In addition to qarrtsiluni, he’s placed poems in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n and McSweeney’s, among others. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
I’m excited by this sudden broadening of the site’s horizons, and I’d welcome volunteers for other languages, as well (Dutch? German? Spanish?) presuming that we could agree on the quality of the videopoems in need of explication. Contributions could be as regular or as occasional as you like — I have an aversion to schedules. Contact me via email, bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, if you’re interested.
The Deer by Wendy Burk
A 16mm film by Audrey Smith and Jesse Moore. “The Deer” is available as a broadside from Kore Press.
Music, When Soft Voices Die by Percy Bysshe Shelley
http://www.vimeo.com/18828632
A kinetic text piece called “In the Memory” by Hyunjoo Oh, who writes, “I wanted to talk about how longing and yearning become stronger as the relationship fades away. Through the process of blowing away and forming typography in various ways, I tried to express Shelly’s poem ‘Music, When Soft Voice Die’ visually; existing permanent values among many things that fade out in this world.”
November Graveyard by Sylvia Plath
Update: Video has been made private.
A new videopoem by Swoon titled “Red Lost Ghosts” remixes an old audio recording of Plath with other audio samples, video and stills to very good effect in what he calls
A remembrance-piece for Birkenau.
Not the blunt and awful images of the place, but the those images of horror hidden behind the automation of a wind-up-toy and the slight hope of some ‘forget-me-nots’
For the hope we will not forget that awful ‘machine’
Skinhead by Patricia Smith
The great Patricia Smith performs at (I think) the HBO show Def Poetry Jam.
A Nephilim Grieves by Vignette-Noelle Lammott
http://www.vimeo.com/16896497
Anna Patel, the director, says, “How often do you let something consume you? This film was about setting aside our instincts of closure and being open to a wide variety of emotions.”
Jellyfish by Andrea Gibson
This video by Daizy Zhou is pretty effective, I thought — but then, so is the original video on YouTube of the poet herself, from which she took the reading:
In fact, this may be one of the most gorgeous spoken-word videos I’ve seen, both for the floating-seed imagery and for the background of Swainson’s thrush song. Gibson has what appears to be a thrush on the footer of her website, which makes me like her right away.
A Sound (from Objects) by Gertrude Stein
Art student Marika Cowan says:
A cutout animation project. Music by Kimya Dawson, voice by Cory Hill, poem by Gertrude Stein, sound effects from freesound.org.
The cat puppet and its skull mask is paper painted with acrylics. The tiger is cut out from some tiger-printed patterned paper. All of the backgrounds are paper as well.
This is from the opening piece in Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), available as an e-book from Project Gutenberg.
Black Swan by Amir Sulaiman
Amir Sulaiman writes,
This an installment of our new art series called VisualVerse. Mustafa and are collaborating on short 24hr mash-ups of his filming and my poetry. sometimes i will write and record something and he shoots to it. other times, he’ll shoot and ill write to it. all done in 24hrs
Click through for poem-text and explication — unnecessary, in my opinion. But Mustafa Davis’ description of the filming process is interesting:
I shot this on f/1.4 – 50mm prime lens overcranked at 60fps (slow motion) using a single tungsten light. I moistened the warehouse floor to get the mirrored look in the video. The entire video is in reverse. I decided to pour ash down over the frame to trick the eye into thinking the video was playing correctly (as the ashes appeared like smoke rising when played back in reverse). This is a single continuous shot. The flames and water are real. This is the RAW out of camera footage. No effects.
For more on Amir Sulaiman, visit his website. And Mustafa Davis is here.
Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke
Update: Video has been made private.
A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice.
Here’s a video of Clarke doing the poem at a live reading from 2008:
Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery
http://vimeo.com/18034144
Art student Al Belancourt made this film of Ashbery’s poem as an assignment for a poetry class, he tells me, inspired by viewing Moving Poems in class. Cool! We definitely need more Ashbery videopoems, and this is a great start.
