Posts By Dave Bonta

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

For My American Lover, Upon My Leaving by Holly Karapetkova

On 16 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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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

On 15 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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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

On 12 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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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

On 11 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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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

On 10 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - live readings and documentaries, video hosting

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.

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Dirty Dinky by Theodore Roethke

On 10 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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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.

Currie by Dorothy Baird

On 8 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This new collaboration for the This Collection project features Anna Dickie, who also contributed a poem to the project (see “Same Place, Different View“), in charge of camera and editing, joined by Stefanie Tan for the sound editing. As Stefanie explains on Vimeo,

With the help of the local butcher, traffic lady and sporting residents, Dorothy Baird and Anna Dickie bring to life the portrait of Edinburgh’s unassuming suburb, Currie.

The bus 44 links Anna’s stomping ground, Haddington to Dorothy’s neighbourhood, Currie and this intimate collaboration adds to the magical mysterious connections the poems from thiscollection continues to unearth.

Anna used only photographic stills to piece together the concept for the film.

For more on Dorothy Baird, here’s a bio and interview.

Purple Lipstick by Heather Haley

On 5 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A poem about domestic violence, on YouTube courtesy of a magazine called Shattered Thought which appears to be no longer online. Heather Haley, however, is very much still online — in fact, the annual videopoetry festival she organizes in Vancouver, Visible Verse, will be celebrating its 10th anniversary on November 19-20. This is the premiere videopoetry event in North America. Go if you can.

The Videopoems page of her personal website says about this film, in part:

Heather’s videopoem Purple Lipstick still garners kudos having been an official selection at the VideoBardo 2nd International VideoPoetry Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 3rd Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany and the Women in Film Festival in Vancouver where she was a guest speaker. Purple Lipstick also screened at Commfest, Wildsound, Female Eye in Toronto, Northwest Projections and Reel to Real in Seattle.

Purple is the colour of a fresh bruise and domestic violence the single greatest cause of injury to women in Canada. Purple Lipstick confronts its insidious nature through compelling juxtapositions. A disembodied female voice employs vivid language, absurdist against a backdrop of banality, images of *normal* family life. Numb in her isolation and still in her nurse’s uniform, a wife and mother prepares dinner. The inherent terror of her home life is invoked with excruciating tension. Its brutality can only be alluded to.

Shot on Bowen Island near Vancouver, Purple Lipstick features actors Bazil Graham, Ripley Ferguson, Cairo Ferguson and slam poetry star Alexandra Oliver-Basekic.

The Ramble by James Brush

On 4 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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James’ first video haiku — see his blog post about it.

Immigrants by Ren Powell

On 3 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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I’ve posted a number of Ren Powell’s other animations, but for some reason I skipped this one. As always, see her site Anima Poetics for a much sharper, Flash version.

Tickets to Your Morning in the Mirror by Tyler Flynn Dorholt

On 2 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Dorholt’s poems on the page are long, difficult and packed with arresting images, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that his videopoems would be the same. The text of this one originally appeared in Slope.

For links to all Dorholt’s films, see his blog.

Kleine Reise (Little Trip) by Claire Walka

On 1 November, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Outstanding poet-made videopoem. Claire Walka says in a note on Vimeo:

Doing shopping in the supermarket can become an expedition into a new world… A poem made of brand-names.

I’m grateful she took the time to add English subtitles so those of us with no German can appreciate this ingenious little film.