Posts By Dave Bonta

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

West of Dalabrog by Susannah Ramsay

On 20 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Poet and director Susannah Ramsay‘s description reads:

West of Dalabrog refers to the relationship between place, landscape, memory and subjective experience. It focuses on the return to a place of personal importance – a long stretch of white sand to the west of the town of Dalabrog, South Uist, which I first visited in 2001. The return represents a shift in perception and reflects how time can bear great change on a place, landscape and more crucially memory.

Catwalk by Bernard Dewulf

On 19 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Judith Dekker notes in the Vimeo description that this was the

Last poem Bernard Dewulf wrote as city poet of Antwerp Belgium. Music composed by Doug Keith, an american musician living in NewYork. And the cat was shot (without being hurt) in the town of Dunbar Scotland. Translation courtesy of Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren.

For those who know Dutch, there’s also a version without subtitles. The version above appears in the latest issue of Poetry Film Live, along with the text, some stills, and a bio of the filmmaker. Check it out. And for more of Dewulf’s work in English, visit Poetry International Web, as well as his page here on Moving Poems.

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Restriction Site Poetics by Jason Brennan

On 15 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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A wonderful, too-short animation by Australian artist and former research scientist Nicholas Kallincos. He says on Vimeo that it’s an “Experimental mixed media animation made in collaboration with UK spoke word poet, Jason Brennan in 2005. Soundtrack by Cornel Wilczek”.

It could be my Google-fu just isn’t very good today, but I’m not able to find anything about Brennan online aside from this.

A Shred of Identity by Dambudzo Marechera

On 14 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Based on the poem A Shred of Identity by Zimbabwean novelist and poet Dambudzo Marechera this film explores the notion of a double identity in two ways: the split between the self can be interpreted as a product of colonialism, migration and displacement, where the mother tongue mutates into a foreign language. Double consciousness, however, is also at the heart of the creative act; artistic practice could be seen as a constant exploration of the tension between inner and outer self.

Thus the description of this wonderfully disturbing 2009 film by the Ghanaian writer, art historian and filmmaker Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, pasted in from the website of the ANO arts institution founded by Oforiatta-Ayim. I also found the text of the poem by Dambudzo Marechera.

Everything sleeps but the night by Matt Hetherington

On 13 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Marie Craven‘s latest poetry film uses a text and voiceover from fellow Australian Matt Hetherington over a collage of images from hither and yon (see Vimeo for the credits).

What is a soul? by Luisa A. Igloria

On 12 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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I recently returned to Pennsylvania after a summer in London, and on my way out of Newark, New Jersey, I shot a brief cellphone video through the dusty window of a Greyhound bus, capturing some remarkable murals on a wall beneath a train line. After I got home and recovered from jet-lag a bit, it occurred to me that the footage might make an interesting pairing with a short poem by Luisa A. Igloria, which she’d just posted to the literary blog we share, Via Negativa. Footage shot from car, bus and (especially) train windows is of course exceedingly common in videopoetry, but I’m hoping my use of moving text saves this instance of it from cliché. I liked the juddering racket of the bus, preserving it as-is in the soundtrack even after I slowed the clip down.

When a Wiggly-Monster Was My World by David Olimpio

On 31 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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An animated poem with text and voiceover by David Olimpio and animation and direction by Efrat Dahan. It was made as part Moving Words, a project from the New Jersey-based organization ARTS By The People pairing American writers with animators from the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. The international premiere of the 2017 animations in Tel Aviv has already happened (August 11), but the US premiere is still up-coming on Sept. 9 at Drew University. (Reserve tickets.) Olimpio told me in an email:

What ABTP is trying to do with the “Moving Words” project is to not only make these stand-alone animation pieces, but also to integrate them with live performances. Here’s the video of me performing this piece live at the Animix Animation Festival in Tel Aviv, where this animation was one of many featured the day before.

Integrating multimedia with live readings is something poets don’t do nearly enough, in my view, and I’ve also long felt that there ought to be more efforts to get university film and animation students to collaborate with poets, so I was excited to learn about Moving Words. (I also really like their name, for some reason.)

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Fucking Him by C.O. Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez

On 30 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“Love and fucking may sometimes be the same. But not when it counts,” reads the synopsis for this 2015 poetry film directed jointly by Claire Olivia (C.O.) Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez.

Last year, Fucking Him won Best Experimental Film at the Manhattan Independent Film Festival and Curator’s Choice for Best Sound/Music at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, was the Grand Prix Winner for Found Footage at the 2015 Interference Festival in Gdansk, and has been screened in a number of other festivals as well.

Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second by Paul Farley

On 29 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A black-and-white poetry film from 2011 which somehow escaped my attention until now. Paul Farley recites his poem in the soundtrack. The film was edited by Sam Meech, one of four people who share the credit for making the film. The others are Tim Brunsden, Steve Clarkson and Markus Soukup.

This was actually the second film to be made with this poem. The first came out in 2009, a performance-style video imaginatively shot by Paul Beasely.

(Hat-tip: ZEBRA Poetry Film Club.)

Call for submissions: 2017 Button Poetry Video Contest

On 11 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - calls for work, contests

For the second year in a row, Button Poetry, producers of arguably the most popular English-language poetry channel on YouTube, are holding a video contest. Submissions opened on August 1, but I just got wind of it. You have until September 15 to submit. I’ll paste in the details from Submittable:

We are thrilled to announce our second annual open-submission video contest! Our chapbook contest will be happening in winter this year (opening November 15th).

Over the past years, we here at Button have realized the limited nature of filming at poetry tournaments and slams. There are so many other ways to record and present poetry beyond a slam setting, so we decided to give people around the world the chance to step up on the digital stage and share their work.

Submissions to the Video Contest will be open from August 1st to September 15th. All videos submitted will be considered for publication, not just the winner and runners-up.

We are looking for work that crosses borders or effaces them completely, work that enters into larger social conversations, work that lives in the world, work with a strong, unique voice and palpable energy.

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Open to EVERYONE age 16 and older!

Prize: The winner’s video along with the videos of 5 runners-up will be featured across Button’s social media. The winner will receive a $250 honorarium and the runners-up will each receive $100.

Entry Fee: $7 (or $12 for two videos)

Special Discount: Youth (ages 16-20) and international submitters can submit single video submissions for a discounted price of $5.

All entrants will receive 15% off any purchase from the Button Website.

Timeline: The contest will open on August 1st and close at 11:59 PM CST on September 15th.

Eligibility: The competition is open to poets worldwide age 16+ (NOTE: poets under 18 would need a signed parental/guardian release form before being run — this will be dealt with after videos have been selected for publication). We will accept any poetry performance or poetry short film in any language (as long as non-English videos come equipped with English subtitles). Videos that have been previously published elsewhere are eligible, with the understanding that any selected video may need to be taken down from other locations on the internet.

Guidelines: Submit one or more videos (1 to 5 minutes in length, <1GB) via the online submission manager on this page. Most common video file-types are accepted.

What We Like: We value energy and voice and force, work that crosses borders or effaces them completely, work that enters into larger social conversations, work that lives in the world, work with calloused hands and a half-empty stomach. We think poetry is and ought to be part of our everyday lives and culture.
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Note: You MUST own the complete, transferable rights to ALL elements of the submission, including text, audio, and video.

Tech: While video and audio quality will be one factor in the judging process, the quality of the poem and performance themselves will be weighted much more heavily. That said, if possible, please use high-quality audio and video. If you’re filming this yourself on a smartphone or similar, try to do it inside, somewhere well-lit, without background noise, etc. If you’re using a video of a live performance, for example from an open mic or slam, take care with audio.

Collaborative poems are fine.

Process: Members of the Button Poetry staff will review all submissions to determine the winner, runners up, and any other videos we may be interested in running!

For questions, email contest@buttonpoetry.com.

Click through to submit.

Cuerpos de Agua (Water Bodies) by Lilián Pallares

On 11 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Musical settings, Videopoems
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Half videopoem, half music video, this new film from antenablue — director Charles Olsen and poet Lilián Pallares — features Pallares acting and supplying the voiceover together with a musical arrangement of her poem by Nestor Paz and Manuel Madrid from Poesía Necesaria. Be sure to click the closed captioning (CC) icon to access Olsen’s English translation.

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Colour Poems by Margaret Tait

On 10 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A classic poetry film by the Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999). It’s one of “Five Filmpoems: Curated by Susannah Ramsay” in the first issue of an online journal dedicated to “exploring and showcasing the milieux, methods and madnesses of contemporary poetry in all its emergent myriad forms,” All These New Relations. Ramsay has this to say about Colour Poems:

Margaret Tait was known as a filmpoet and experimental filmmaker. Her approach to filmmaking was remarkably similar to the ethos of the avant-garde, generally self-funded, non-conformist, uncompromising, non-commercial, with distribution and exhibition being select. I think Colour Poems (1974) depicts some of the more thought provoking images within her oeuvre. There is a wonderful poetical moment, which begins with the poppy fields where Tait questions the true essence of the image through juxtaposing shots of the Scottish oil industry and related capitalist iconography and a sequence of images relating to a return to the earth. Nature is brought into being through spoken word. The narrator willing the viewer to look beyond what can be seen, to ‘look into all that is illuminated by the light’ […] ‘the own person’s own self perceiving the light and making the music’ suggesting that we are the beholders of (our) true vision.

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