Posts By Dave Bonta
we hear them cutting by T. L. Kelly
According to the author’s resume, this was
a poetry film collaboration with poetry by T. L. Kelly and film by Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin and sound by Paulo Beto, in Born Magazine, October 2003. Screened in 2004 at Resfest Brazil and Anima Mundi, both in Brazil; and Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin (where the film won a special mention).
Born Magazine has been around in one form or another since 1996, and is now probably the best-known web journal for literary animation, as well as a standard-bearer for artistic collaboration in general.
The magazine launched on the Web in 1997 with a focus on editorial design and traditional editorial topics, including essays, film and music reviews, and topical articles. As Web technology continued to evolve, contributing artists began focusing on the connections between literature and visual arts, and experimented with the dynamic relationship between text, cinema, audio, and interactivity. In response, Born redefined its mission in 1998, focusing on collaboration and media-rich interpretations of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, and eventually arrived at its present incarnation.
Shelby the Dog by Robert Sward
A wise and funny poem by Robert Sward from Blue’s Cruzio Cafe, an online space for poetry animations that’s been in operation since 2004. The animations are by Beau Blue, but authors collaborate by providing readings, photos, ideas for storyboards, and other sugggestions, according to the About page.
Great to see all the discussion here this morning (well, afternoon for some of you). Minor housekeeping note: You’ll probably notice I just switched the default setting to show rather than hide comment threads. Though this might make the site initially more confusing to navigate for first-time visitors until they discover the global toggle button, I found I was getting annoyed by the fact that I had to toggle-on comments even on single-post views, and decided it would make for better usability if comment links in the sidebar worked by default. If you prefer things the way they were, though, let me know — I’m not wedded to this.
Poetry + dance
Today’s post at Moving Poems, The Lovers by Dorianne Laux, is equally a testament to the imagination of the director, Bob Lockwood, as to the performers: great care has obviously been expended on both the filming and choreography. Lockwood says that the video is “an amalgam of takes of two rehearsal runs.” Having three female dancers take turns reciting the poem worked brilliantly to universalize the very personal, intimate subject-matter of the poem, I thought. The only way it might’ve been improved would have been to have made them wear masks.
“The Lovers” joins a small number of other very impressive offerings in Moving Poem’s Dance category, which several people have told me includes some of their favorite videos on the site. Perhaps the best-known of these poetry-dance videos are the ones for Anne Carson’s series of lectures in the form of sonnets, filmed by Sadie Wilcox, but the approaches to filming, choreography, and integration of text are diverse and also very multicultural, including Iranian, Burmese, Indian and Swedish poets. Together, these videos should serve to remind us that poetry has been a part of multi-media productions for millennia, as dance, drama, and/or musical performance. From this perspective, the merging of poetry with film or video is simply the latest manifestation of a very ancient impulse.
The Lovers by Dorianne Laux
A wonderful interpretation of the Laux poem that takes one, crucial liberty with the text, turning it from a third-person into a first-person poem in the woman’s voice. Here’s the director’s description on Vimeo:
The Lovers is performance piece based on the poem by Dorianne Laux. It examines the ecstasy, complexity and contradiction of female sexual experience.
This performance was developed as a collaboration between The Kelman Group (UK) and The Tuesday Group (Portland, OR, USA) in July and August 2009.
Performers : Juli Gun, Anet Ris-Kelman and Taru Sinclair
Director : Bob LockwoodThis edit is an amalgam of takes of two rehearsal runs of the piece at Hipbone Studio on E.Burnside, Portland.
Self-registration off
An obvious spammer registered this morning, so unfortunately I’ve had to turn off self-registration already. I’ve deleted that contributor, plus one other I wasn’t sure of — if you are that other person, and you’re not in fact a spammer, please accept my apologies and email me to have your status reinstated. For anyone else who who would like to join — and the more, the merrier! — please do email me as well: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. (Contact pages are more hassle than they’re worth, in my experience.)
Stadt-Fisch (City-Fish) by Jan Kummer
A 16 mm film by Patrizia Monzani, who describes herself on her blog as “a film director and editor. Author of videopoems in collaboration with contemporary poets, she is currently involved in the videoart world also as a curator (cooperations with LOOP festival, Visualcontainer.org and Videoartworld.com).” Of this film, she says on Vimeo:
Three characters cross each other – without really affecting one another, thoughts and voices overlap, strophes are repeated… Actually they are not alone and lonely, they just don’t see what they are surrounded by.
Jan Kummer, the poet here, is an artist and author from Chemnitz, Germany.
Minor site-usability note: those Recent Comments links don’t always work, I find — the AJAX is a little screwy or something. When that happens, refresh the page, and hit “Toggle Comment Threads.” Then the links should work.
She is Overheard Singing by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A music-video-style film titled Overheard by composer Briareus (Clayton Corrello). Millay’s poetry doesn’t do much for me by itself, but put to music and envideoed, it’s really quite compelling, I think.
What this is for and how to use it
Rather than standard forum software, which can be clunky to use, I’m trying a special kind of WordPress theme where logged-in authors can post directly on the front page, and see comments updated in real time as on Twitter. My hope is that it will have the ease of use of Twitter or Tumblr but the power of WordPress, without the hassles attending a full-fledged social networking site. (We’re mostly artists and poets here. How much more sociable can we stand to be?)
How to get an avatar
Whether you’re a contributor or just a commenter here, you can get an avatar by going to Gravatar.com. (If you’ve ever registered for a site at WordPress.com, you already have a gravatar and it should show up if you use the same email to sign in here.)
I believe we are witnessing the evolutio…
I believe we are witnessing the evolution of a unique form of poetry, a form which was barely recognizable 50 years ago, a new form of “visual poetry” which has survived the leap from the page to the screen, a form that is so intriguing and new that its definition, its features, characteristics, categories, its very NAME is being questioned — videopoetry.
Tom Konyves (forum thread at Read Write Poem, now offline)
