Posts By Dave Bonta
The electric kool-aid Collins test
This is a test of the auto-embed video posting feature from the front page of the blog. I’m simply posting the URL of a video on YouTube to its own line, separated by spaces before and after, as detailed in the WordPress codex. (I think this will work in all browsers, with the possible exception of mobile devices. Please leave a comment if you are only seeing links and not the videos themselves.)
Sometimes I feel as if Billy Collins is looking down on me, and he’s not even dead yet!
That was the authorized video, an animation by Juan Delcan, part of a series of animated poems produced by JWT New York. It has been viewed 756,604 times on YouTube. But I much preferred the following unauthorized video montage by Lauren Adolfsen:
The Delcan animation is a very fine illustration of the poem, but with Adolfsen’s video, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not merely a poem video; it’s a videopoem.
Which do you you prefer?
“I am” machine-poem by Brion Gysin
http://www.vimeo.com/90415
I couldn’t resist following Steven Nichol Smith’s “I Am” with this audio experiment from 1960 by Brion Gysin:
Permutation is a technique commonly used by avant-gardes and above all, and systematically, by the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is possible to permute sentences, words within a sentence, syllables and phonemes within a word. Permutation is a typically modern device and considerable use was made of it in the plastic arts by the constructivists. In fact it permits the complete exhaustion of all the possible combinations within a given choice of material, without limit of number. The Englishman Brion Gysin, one of the founders of the beatnik movement and inventor of such new formulas as the collage-novel, has composed his phonic texts on this principle. “I am” is a classic of the genre. Composed exclusively of permutations of the biblical words “I am that I am”, with ever more marked accelerations, he succeeds in rendering, from the initial nucleus, a crowd of “I am”s, the creation of the world in geometrical progression until it fades away in the sidereal silence.
The video by Alex Itin is titled “hotdog,” and is one of the very first videopoems posted to Vimeo four years ago. The god/dog pun is an old one, but the twitching of the animal in its sleep is a great way way to suggest dreaming and delusion while remaining entirely objective. And you certainly wouldn’t want anything less minimalist for a poem like this.
Lunch Poem by Tracey K. Smith
Andrew Kamp claims this is the first video he ever made — seems hard to believe. Tracey K. Smith appears to have let her website’s domain expire, but there’s a good selection of her poems at the audio poetry site From the Fishouse. (Hat-tip: Cloudy Day Art)
Poem by e. e. cummings (“Buffalo Bill’s defunct”)
“An e.e. cummings poem I interpreted for my film production class. Shot on a dvx100b. Cut on Final Cut Pro,” says Jean-Paul Huang. Somewhat melodramatic, but so’s the poem. (An animation of the same poem by a different filmmaker that I posted a couple months ago has been removed from Vimeo.)
Lullaby by Anne Sexton
http://www.vimeo.com/8540818
Filmmaker TJ ODonnell says, “I added some effects to the soundtrack (whales) to further the feeling that one was slipping slowly under water.” I like the classical piano here, too, which is unusual — many times I’ve decided not to post an otherwise pretty good videopoem because of just such a soundtrack.
Hunter’s Green by Lauren Eddy
Though I’ve seen online documentaries about erasure poetry, this is the first videopoem I’ve seen that actually uses the technique as part of a stop-motion animation. It’s the result of a collaboration between the poet, Lauren Eddy and the animator and sound editor, Anne Duquennois, which Eddy clarified via email:
We came up with the concept and various visual aspects of the film together, and the animation was a collaborative process, so we credited the film with both of us as “co-creators.” The idea was to use film as a medium for commentary on the processual nature of erasure poetry and collage. We were inspired by the ways that one medium can re-interpret and re-invent another.
Anne’s production company is Broken Bike Productions — no website yet, but the address is brokenbikeproductions [at] gmail [dot] com.
La Plage by Jane McKie
Another film by Alastair Cook for the This Collection project of 100 videopoems about Edinburgh. I found the soundtrack particularly effective.
Old Astronauts by Tim Nolan
Emma Burghardt is the animator; the voice is the poet’s. Another fine production from MotionPoems.com.
Bujías/Lightbulbs by Pedro Salinas
A charming interpretation, directed and produced by Mike Movido and Hannah Kultgen in the fullest sense: Kultgen also did the translation, Movido did the music, and it’s their voices reading the poem in the soundtrack. Molvido says,
This is quite possibly my favorite video project that I did in college. The assignment was to choose a poem to interpret visually, but not literally. BREC 4275 – Advanced Production and Direction class at Marquette University.
The Threatened One, by Jorge Luis Borges
A nicely non-literal animation of the poem by Latvian filmaker Signe Baumane, from 1999. It won Silver at Worldfest – Houston Film Festival 2000, the Robbie Burns Award at Cin(e) Poetry Festival 2000, and a Jury Award at the 34th New York Exposition of Short Film and Video 2000, according to Baumane’s website. Here’s the Spanish text.
