Posts By Dave Bonta
Misc. Church Sermon #6 by Malcolm Friend
Malcolm Friend‘s poem was turned into a film by Matthew Ericson for the Visible Poetry Project.
Call for submissions: 5th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition
The Cork, Ireland-based Ó Bhéal reading series have just announced on Facebook that
Submissions are now open for the 5th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, in association with the IndieCork Film Festival AND we are thrilled to announce that esteemed Cork filmmaker Shaun O Connor will take part as one of this year’s judges (the other being a poet, TBC v soon!). Follow the link for submission guidelines & to view previous winners’ poetry-films.
The deadline for submissions is August 31, and the screening will be during the IndieCork festival (October 8-15). Past winners have hailed from Australia, the U.S., the Netherlands and Portugal. Check it out.
As a Child of Immigrants by Homa Zarghamee
This remix videopoem by Christina Ellsberg for the Visible Poetry Project incorporates a text and recitation by poet and economist Homa Zarghamee and historic footage from the Library of Congress.
Strangers (Die Fremden) by Rose Ausländer
A film interpretation of a Rose Auslander poem by the documentary filmmaker Lisa Seidenberg. I’ll be traveling to Europe soon myself, and this videopoem is helping me psych myself up for it.
Reading the English Wikipedia entry on Ausländer, I was struck by this factoid:
In the spring of 1943 Ausländer met poet Paul Celan in the Cernauti ghetto. He later used Ausländer’s image of “black milk” of a 1939 poem in his well-known poem Todesfuge published in 1948. Ausländer herself is recorded as saying that Celan’s usage was “self-explanatory, as the poet may take all material to transmute in his own poetry. It’s an honour to me that a great poet found a stimulus in my own modest work”.
Without the image, Celan’s poem wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful. Quite a “borrowing.”
Hate for Sale by Neil Gaiman
Buy my hate. You’ll come right back for more.
Hate for sale. Enough to start a war.
Hate the rich, the brown, the black, the poor.
Hate is clean. And hate will make you sure.
The Visible Poetry Project‘s final video for National Poetry Month was a real corker: a topical, satirical poem by the great Neil Gaiman recited by Peter Kenny in the soundtrack for a beautifully done stop-motion animation by Anna Eijsbouts.
Lament For Graham Parkinson by Karl Parkinson
An intense, affecting videopoem from Irish poets Karl Parkinson (text, voiceover) and Dave Lordan (video), along with musicians Conor O’Connor, Claus Jensen and Charlotte Hamel from The King Mob. Parkinson wrote about the making of the videopoem for The Irish Times. The poem came first, arising from his grief at the death of his nephew Graham from cancer at the age of 21.
Graham was my sister Elaine’s only child, and he grew up living alongside me in the same flat in O’Devaney Gardens, on Dublin’s northside. With him being an only child, and me having no brothers, we formed a very special bond during his short life. After his death, I wanted, as a writer, to create something beautiful and lasting in his memory, and eventually wrote a long elegiac poem about his fight with cancer, and also my own grief for his passing.
He studied the canon, re-reading the great “poem[s] of elegy and mourning, especially from one male on the death of another male.” The resulting poem
was first broadcast on RTÉ’s Arena arts show, on the first anniversary of Graham’s death, and recently published in my collection Butterflies Of A Bad Summer (Salmon Poetry). But I felt that the best way to honour Graham’s memory was to make a video poem, to take it to a larger audience, particularly those in my own community, the Dublin council estates, and inner-city working class, where to be honest poetry books are not big sellers.
[…]
The video draws on new technology and on the history of avant-garde cinema/film, especially modernist experiments of the 1920s and ’30s. It’s a 16-minute long piece in which we tried to push the video-poem tradition at least a small bit in the way of serious artistic expression. We hoped to merge the old poetic tradition of elegy and lament with the new and very exciting medium of indie video art, now open to almost any artist in the western world, at a relatively small expense, compared to what it would have cost 20 years ago. I feel, and hope, that we have done justice to Graham’s life, struggle and memory with something that may have a lasting appeal for others that have been affected by cancer, or any other life-stealing disease, or by the loss of someone young and dear to them.
THESAURUS dot COM by Kassy Lee
Narrative poetry film done right: Kassy Lee‘s quiet, devastating poem, which originally appeared in Apogee Journal, has been turned into a film by Michelle Cheripka for the Visible Poetry Project.
VERSOGRAMAS launches crowdfunding campaign to make a documentary about videopoetry
VERSOGRAMAS is “a transmedia project about videopoetry.” This brainchild of Galician writer and film producer Celia Parra Díaz, with directors Belén Montero and Juan Lesta, involves making the world’s first full-length documentary about videopoetry, but they need additional funds to cover the remaining 20 percent of their budget. So this past week they launched a crowdfunding appeal through Verkami. Here’s the appeal in video form:
Their page on Verkami answers all the obvious questions, such as what they’ll use the money for, when the work is likely to be completed, and which videopoets are included. Here’s the synopsis:
A woman remembers the past and writes some words on a film projected on the wall, while a voice over narrates the origins of videopoetry. She then walks through a broken line, surrounded by a dreamlike, abstract setting. She finds differently shaped and coloured boxes along the way, each one metaphorizing a concept. In the first one she finds fragments of videopoems related to Language. A voice over explains the beginnings of the genre. Then we see interviews of videopoets speaking about the importance of languages in written literature and explaining how they are transmitted via image and sound. Videopoems are screened behind them while they speak. The woman keeps walking and finds other little boxes corresponding to the Body, Love, Solitude, Society, Evil and Change. These are also metaphors of concepts such as: the evolution of videopoetry, the adaptation of written text, graphics and design, the communication with the audience, the place videopoetry takes, its continuous innovation and change, the problems with the definition of the genre and its future perspectives. A journey that provides answers to what videopoetry is.
This is a really exciting project and I think it deserves our full support. In just six days they’re raised €1,610 toward their €6,500 goal, with 34 days remaining, and the most popular pledge level appears to be €55, which gets you the opportunity to contribute a verse on the theme of love for a collective videopoem. What’s not to love? Here’s the link again.
