Posts By Dave Bonta

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

YouTube Play contest — an opportunity for videopoem makers?

On 24 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, contests

The deadline is July 31. Here’s a New York Times article on the contest. For more, go to YouTube.com/play.

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A Throw of the Dice (Un Coup de Dés) by Stéphane Mallarmé

On 23 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance, Musical settings
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Excerpts from the premiere performance of “Dice Thrown,” a new opera by American composer John King, at CalArts on April 23-24, 2010. Every performance is unique, according to an interview with King at Operagasm:

Can you explain in more detail how the configuration of the opera is determined by a computer-generated time code? From the description I read, it sounds like there are pieces that make up the opera, but that the order of those pieces is determined each night… am I way off? Does this mean that the text isn’t always delivered in the original order?

Yes, that’s exactly right. Each night the order changes, the durations of each aria changes (within set limits), the orchestral music changes so that sometimes a singer is singing with a full, complex orchestral texture, and the next night the same aria sung against a solo english horn (for example). The lighting changes, the video, the movement, the live electronics, etc. all change for each iteration of the piece, the changes being determined through chance operations and random number generators [that is “I” have nothing to do with it!]. We do the opera in two “acts”, each act being a different version of the poem, so that the audience can experience this “shift” within a single evening’s performance. And it will be a premiere every night!

I wonder if King has each performance filmed to preserve it for posterity? This video was uploaded to Vimeo (and also to YouTube) by the composer himself. Video appears to play a major role in the opera as well, and its design is credited to Pablo Molina.

The composition flowed directly from the sound of the poem in French, King said, which is one reason I wanted to feature this video here.

I was setting other Mallarmé texts, to be combined in a group of songs with texts by Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Artaud. At the end of this one collection was Un coup de Dés/Dice Thrown. I was immediately struck by its visual appearance, by its use of different text styles and font sizes and by the sound of the words when read in French. There is no rhyme scheme per se, but the words have what I call an “internal rhyme”, where vowel sounds within words of a phrase or line are the same, or consonant sounds are reiterated, so that I immediately heard these wonderful shifting rhythms of sound.

The full title of the poem is “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A throw of the dice can never abolish chance”), and can be seen in all its glory at A. S. Kline’s Poetry In Translation site, including an easier-to-read “compressed” translation.

Congratulations to Alastair Cook for having two of his videopoems selected for the 5th ZEBRA Poetry film Festival in Berlin, which will be held October 14-17. Both films have been featured at Moving Poems: “Emily Melting” (a poem by Gerard Rudolf) and “Scene” (a poem by Morgan Downie).

Separation by W. S. Merwin

On 22 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - Videopoems
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A highly imaginative use of Merwin’s short poem in a film called “Coping,” which Grace Cho says is the “first video/stop-motion that I made for my video class at Simon Fraser University.”

Rio Grande by Enrique Cabrera

On 21 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Another animation by Francesca Talenti. Enrique Cabrera appears to be an Austin, Texas-based poet, though I couldn’t turn up a good webpage for him.

The Winter Rain by Wendell Berry

On 19 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Time for another winter-themed poem to inspire those of us weathering the summer heat. This video is by The Erie Wire; the filmmaker isn’t identified.

Hypnosis at the Bird Factory by Thylias Moss

On 16 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYxhMAFK-e0

An enjoyable “adventure in vibration studies” from Forkergirl, who includes it in a webpage devoted to her limited fork theory. I’m not sure if this is a serious theory or a gentle parody of Thylias Moss’s academic colleagues, but it doesn’t matter. The video’s description at YouTube is delightful and worth reproducing in full:

STATUS REPORT OF A SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE WITHIN FORKING AND FORKED UNIVERSES, EMPHASIZING THOSE OUTSIDE OF SETI DOMAINS

SUBMITTED BY FORKERGIRL

So many vibrations, so many patterns of movement on so many scales in so many bifurcating systems, but at last a (temporary) match to the pattern of movement (and its associated audible and inaudible, on human scales, music) of a search for signs of intelligent life.

This status report describes the finding of a feather in a forking universe system in which the feather led to hypnosis at a bird factory presumed to be the source of the feather as no other intelligent-life constructions were observed though their unavailability for observation does not preclude the existence of other intelligent life constructions in this particular universe system. The feather itself was alive with possibilities, but as forkergirl had prior knowledge of birds, vibrations of that knowledge imposed limiting factors on those possibilities, resulting in a bounded infinity, as infinite as any other, though of a different size.

An inability to find other intelligent life constructions doesn’t mean they aren’t there and indeed could indicate that parameters of the search itself do not support finding evidence that forks so far from the parameters, the parameters cannot detect or measure presences outside detectable thresholds.

It is difficult at best to report on a reality based on hypnotic evolutions when such behaviors in many western depictions of Earth realities tend both to lack and to be unable to acquire scientific credence despite the existence of terminology for the mystical and supernatural, terms that refer to something, including, though not limited to, the substance of various forms of delusion, the mind being able to generate and sustain realities that do not require confirmation of existence from outside the mind’s imagined authority, real within the imaginary realm that (at this time) is difficult to measure though its roots are tethered to an organic and electrical human body nervous system relied upon by both objectivity and subjectivity, the empirical and the aesthetic.

The full status report is available as a PDF.

The Dot by Moniza Alvi

On 15 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://www.vimeo.com/12538662

British-Pakistani poet Moniza Alvi’s poem as interpreted by a student filmmaker in British Columbia.

God Bless Johnny Cash by James Brush

On 14 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Poet and blogger James Brush’s very first go at the videopoem genre.

I haven’t made a video for fun in 16 years. Perhaps it was the time spent working on film sets in the early ’90s, but I lost interest somewhere along the way. The inspiration for this came from Christine Swint’s “Anybody’s Child” and Dave Bonta’s post on poets and technology over at Very Like a Whale. In the comments I mentioned that I have a film degree and probably should take a crack at doing a video poem sometime.

Then, this evening, I was about to post this poem along with audio of me reading. The poem started with some pictures I had taken of my guitar with the iphone Hipstamatic app, and I thought it would be cool to put one of the pictures up. Next thing I knew, I was building this video.

The “music” is something I recorded a few years back by overdubbing several tracks of me playing my guitar (well, really I was mostly playing the amplifier) and my wife’s bass. I’m not sure if it’s too loud, but I was trying to submerge the voice a little bit without losing too much clarity.

The post also includes the text of the poem. James’ film expertise really shows here, I think: the mix of sound and images is just right, and there’s just enough movement going on for this to qualify in my mind as a “moving poem,” even though, as he says, he was inspired in part by a recent, high-quality slideshow-video from Christine Swint. I love seeing poetry-blogger friends experiment with multimedia, and I’m proud of whatever small role I might have played in helping to make that happen.

Something I’ve Not Done by W. S. Merwin

On 13 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Dance
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Another section of the production Men Think They Are Better Than Grass by the Deborah Slater Dance Theatre, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. This section features a trio of dancers: Shaunna Vella, Kelly Kemp and Wendy Rein.

Autobiography by Djelloul Marbrook

On 12 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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Video trailers for books are becoming increasingly common, and sometimes, as here, they take the form of videopoetry. This is one of two trailers by Brent Robison for Djelloul Marbrook’s prize-winning collection from Kent State University Press, Far From Algiers.

Marbrook has had a distinguished career in journalism and now authors a blog on literary and cultural affairs.

Cold by Emily Kendal Frey

On 9 July, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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With the northeastern U.S. just coming out of a heat wave, winter seems a far-off and delicious prospect. This is a poem from the collection The New Planet by Porland, Oregon-based writer Emily Kendal Frey. The video is by Zachary Schomburg, with whom Frey has also done some collaborative writing, according to this interview with her at The Collagist. For this project they also brought in Emily’s sister Elinor Frey, an accomplished cellist, whose music helped create a very wintry ambience indeed.