Posts By Dave Bonta
The Language is Pronounced “Dead” by Christian Peet
Christian Peet refers to his Big American Trip videos as postcards, but they’re videopoetry as far as I’m concerned. The info at YouTube seems worth quoting in full:
Performed by Kim Gek Lin Short, directed and edited by James Short, based on the book BIG AMERICAN TRIP by Christian Peet. A diverse group of activists, actors, artists, musicians, writers, and otherwise lovely & concerned individuals from all over the US have collaborated with the author to create a polyvocal series of video readings / interpretations based on the book. Assuming the form of postcards authored by an “alien” of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, et al), BIG AMERICAN TRIP is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice(s) behind these texts is/are at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.
Every Now is Everything by Rich Ferguson
The poem and music are both by Los Angeles spoken word performer Rich Ferguson. This is one of the more inspired riffs on the “I’m from…” meme I’ve heard, and the directing, by Eric Smith and Ersellia Ferron, is very good. (Thanks to Khadija Anderson for the tip.)
The “I’m from…” meme, by the way, appears to have originated in a poetry workshop manual by George Ella Lyon called Where I’m From, Where Poems Come From, published in 1999 — here’s the title poem that served as a template. It was turned into a blog meme in 2005 by Fred First at the place blog Fragments from Floyd (post no longer online).
Black Hole by Chris Woods
A piece by English poet Chris Woods, interpreted by Liam Dunlop for Comma Press’s “poem films.” It’s a little hard to understand on first listen, but you can read it at the Vimeo page.
Anne Sexton at home
I’m not sure of the original provenance of the footage, but these videos appear to have been taped from Spanish TV. According to the text at the beginning, the movie was made on March 10, 1966. Sexton reads “Menstruation at 40” in the first and “Wanting to Die” in the second, and talks about poetry reading styles, why music is better than poetry, and why death is harder to write about than sex.
Here’s another YouTube video incorporating rare footage of the poet:
The Country by Billy Collins
Another in the popular series of animated Billy Collins poems produced by JWT-NY. This one’s by Brady Baltezore. Purely as a cartoon, I think it might be the most satisfying of the lot.
For Poetry, this by Tony Curtis
Irish poet Tony Curtis reads his poem about the death of Delmore Schwartz in this animation by Tim Phelan.
Song to Belong by Nathan Jones
An innovative video by the Liverpool-based arts collective Mercy for a poem by their creative director, Nathan Jones.
Shiver & You Have Weather by Matthea Harvey
A piece by Matthea Harvey, delightfully illustrated by Joseph Kraemer for the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series.
The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski
I’m not a big Charles Bukowski fan, but this is a well-done animation and deserves to be included. It was evidently a collaborative effort: Stefano Internullo, Lorenzo Miglietta, Emanuele Roccucci, Enrico Tanno, and Giacomo Tessitore are the names given in the credits, and they are all evidently from a Rome- and London-based design firm called Digital Bathroom. About this film, they say:
The concept was to make the same feeling of dirt, disullusione and inevitability of events in a short film. The pencil was chosen to give an intimate tone in the project.The video was made in a week, from concept to dvd, and the illustrations have this inherent urgency that makes the tract nervous.
The Long Street by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Paul May says, “A little super8 movie I shot in college. It’s based on the Ferlinghetti poem The Long Street.” The poem appeared in A Coney Island of the Mind, and may be read via Google Books here.
Bombing of poems, Warsaw 2009
You never know what’s going to turn up on Vimeo. The instigators behind this event were a collective of Chilean poets called Casagrande. They explain,
We chose Warsaw due to its literary tradition and importance during relevant events in the XX century. It is the land of brilliant philosophers, musicians and poets. For the latter we consider it an important moment to claim the role of written word in life and human history. This year the city commemorates the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII and the 65th anniversary of Warsaw Uprising. We recognise the unquestionable and universal importance of these historical experiences, still formative of the inhabitants of Warsaw as well as for the identity of Europeans in general.
According to an article in a Chilean newspaper, the group, which consists of poets Julio Carrasco, José Joaquín Prieto and Cristóbal Bianchi, began its poem-bombing campaigns back in 2001, with an event designed to commemorate the 1973 Chilean coup. The 100,000 leaflets dropped over Warsaw included the works of 40 contemporary Polish poets and 40 contemporary Chilean poets translated into Polish. Carrasco assured the newspaper that they were not littering: based on his experience with previous poem-drops, he said that within five minutes after it was over, not a single poem would remain on the street.
There was also a public, bilingual poetry reading in Warsaw two days in advance of what I am beginning to think of as P-day.
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
“Perhaps one of Neruda’s more disturbing poems, Walking Around, comes to life through a mosaic of classic silent horror films featuring among others the great John Barrymore,” says Four Seasons Productions. Recitation and translation by Robert Bly.
There are a number of videos for this poem on YouTube, but I find all of them flawed in some way — it’s one of my favorite poems. The approach here is at least original.
Four Seasons are, by the way, mistaken about the date: it was published in 1935 in Residencia en Tierra II, not in 1971 as they claim. The title is in English in the original.
