Posts By Dave Bonta

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

The Trees—They Were Once Good Men by Todd Boss

A stunningly beautiful animation by Emma Burghardt, who also animated “Old Astronauts” by Tim Noland. (Remember to support MotionPoems with a donation, if you can.)

Sonnet XVII from 100 Love Sonnets (Cien Sonetos de Amor) by Pablo Neruda

Julianna Castigliego notes that this was an “Emerson College Film 1 final film project. 16mm. Shot on Bolex. Edited on Steenbeck.” This is the same poem, translated by Stephen Tapscott, that was featured in the motion picture Patch Adams.

Hate Poem by Julie Sheehan

High school student Wiyaka His Horse Is Thunder recites the poem as part of the Poetry Out Loud national recitation contest, in a slickly produced video directed by Tony Brave for KOLC-TV of Oglala Lakota College. As Sheehan notes in an essay about the poem, the poem has become a favorite with students in the competition.

Death By Water (art installation)

The artist, identified only by his Vimeo handle miaoniu, explains that the installation is so rigged that when anyone approaches it, the “Death By Water” section of “The Waste Land” is dunked into a tank of water, and slowly rises when the audience departs. “As time passed by the poem will dissolve and disappear finally.”

Call me simple-minded, but I love the literalism here. I only wish the video included a time-lapse segment so we could watch the wasting of “The Waste Land.”

Assault to Abjury by Raymond McDaniel

Raymond McDaniel reads a poem from his collection Saltwater Empire, which recently came under attack for its use of Katrina survivors’ words as “found poetry.” He defended himself here. It’s interesting that despite the huge volume of commentary both essays attracted, on the Poetry Foundation site and elsewhere, this video from his collection (albeit for a different poem than the lengthy one under attack) had been viewed just six times in the 19 months since it was posted on YouTube. It’s almost as if all the people criticizing McDaniel have never made even a cursory effort to familiarize themselves with his work.

Hum Bom! by Allen Ginsberg

This is Part 1 of the poem — a dramatisation which I think it is safe to say Ginsberg would’ve loved. The filmmaker, Caroline Petters, is a professional photographer.

For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving by Holly Karapetkova

http://vimeo.com/6501098

“A digital version of a poem of mine, first published in The Crab Orchard Review,” the author says.

June (Juni) by Dag T. Straumsvåg

Robert Hedin translated the poem from Norwegian, and Jay Orff made the video for Motionpoems. See Willow Springs Literary Magazine for the text in both languages and Straumsvåg’s discussion of its origins.

MotionPoems is currently holding a fundraiser to support its video artists.

MOTIONPOEMS was co-founded in 2008 by Todd Boss (poet) and Angella Kassube (artist, animator, artistic director, and producer). Our roles are primarily curatorial. Since 2008, we’ve paired poets with video teams to develop nearly two dozen one-minute films from poems by Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield, Marvin Bell, Freya Manfred, David Mason, and others. Over 30 artists have been involved in just the past two years alone.

[…]

BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP! We want to start paying a SMALL STIPEND to our technical and video artists. Many of them are putting more than 100 hours into these projects, outside of the 40-hour work week! We want to reward them for their passion, their creativity, and their willingness to take an artistic risk. Our video artists are our greatest asset, a key to our growing success. We’d like to show them that our community loves and supports their extensive investment in MOTIONPOEMS.

Iemand moet de tafel dekken (Somebody has to set the table) by Joke van Leeuwen

Sometimes, a videopoem is so damn good, it doesn’t matter if you can’t understand a word of it. This is one such videopoem. Lucette Braune directed.

What I Wouldn’t Give by Amie Saramelkonian

Si Clark animates. According to an online bio, Amie Saramelkonian

lives in the South West of England with her husband and two cats. Until recently the majority of her publications have been in scientific and engineering journals. She writes predominantly poetry, but also writes shorts, has several unfinished novels and is currently working on a screenplay.

Four-year-old whose Billy Collins recitation went viral on YouTube meets Collins, gets on NPR

Listen to (or read the transcript for) “Love Of Words Brings Child, Poet Together” by Ted Robbins for All Things Considered.

If you missed the video, I posted it back on August 24, just around the time it was beginning to go viral, along with another video of Collins himself reading the same poem (“Litany”). The boy, Samuel Chelpka, was 3 at the time the recording was made. Collins discovered the video and wrote them a note of appreciation, and last weekend they had a chance to meet. NPR was there.

“You’ve probably had that experience where you’ve read a poem and you don’t feel like you know what it quote means, yet you still enjoy it,” Christopher Chelpka said. “There’s something about the rhythm and the images that sparks your imagination.”

“He loves words,” Della Chelpka said. “He loves saying them and hearing them in many different forms.”

For all his sophistication, Samuel is still learning the basics of language. He grabbed an alphabet picture book off the shelf and handed it to the former poet laureate to read to him.

In a few years, Samuel may not even remember this meeting, but Collins will.

“It’s just an astounding realization of how a poem can travel away from your desk, away from the room you wrote it in and find its way into all these corners of life, and find its way into the mind of a 3-year-old child,” Collins said. “[It’s] just very moving.”

There was a lengthy discussion about this on the Women’s Poetry listserv in early September, with some people saying they found the video creepy or disquieting, but I felt then and continue to feel it’s nothing but wonderful, and might encourage other parents to inculcate a love of poetry in their kids. I see videos like this from proud Chinese parents all the time — apparently there’s nothing at all unusual about training three-year-olds to memorize and recite what must be, to them, completely incomprehensible poems from the Tang Dynasty. This is part of what it takes to maintain a vibrant poetry culture, something we haven’t really had for a very long time.

Anyway, I’m glad to see a poetry video being given attention in NPR’s flagship program, and I salute Mr. Collins for embracing the remix culture and being so supportive of other people envideoing his work.

Dirty Dinky by Theodore Roethke

I do believe Michael John Muller found the perfect text for this fun little experiment: the title poem for Roethke’s collection of poems for children.