Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
Zombie Haiku
Yes, zombie haiku. There’s even a book, and a website that includes zombie haiku submitted by various contemporary authors. The twisted genius behind all this is Ryan Mecum.
Woman’s Constancy by John Donne
Here’s a film by John Le Brocq called One Night Stand – Perfect End, in which the John Donne poem serves as a (mostly) internal monologue for the protagonist.
Woman’s Constancy
by John DonneNOW thou hast loved me one whole day,
To-morrow when thou leavest, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons which we were?
Or that oaths made in reverential fear
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?
Or, as true deaths true marriages untie,
So lovers’ contracts, images of those,
Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose?
Or, your own end to justify,
For having purposed change and falsehood, you
Can have no way but falsehood to be true?
Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would;
Which I abstain to do,
For by to-morrow I may think so too.
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Simpsons read “The Raven” (with help from James Earl Jones) in the third episode of the show’s second season (1990), “Treehouse of Horror I.”
The Dead by Billy Collins
Billy Collins reads his poem “The Dead” with animation by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.
