Posts By Dave Bonta
Destination by Carol Novack
A poem by the late American poet Carol Novack in a film adaptation by the Belgian-Canadian filmmaker Jean Detheux, who notes on Vimeo that
This is the second film I made based on a text written and recited by Carol Novack (1948-2011).
The first one, “Civil War,” is here vimeo.com/26869484.
The text of “Destination” (and “Civil War”) can be found in the book “Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack.” (tinyurl.com/d93v9lv)
Music by Don Meyer.
The images dialog with the narrative while following their own logic.
The images were made from a series of photos taken by my son Georges (he was 15 at the time of writing these lines) during a trip to Belgium, photos he then assembled in beautiful panoramas (used here as well).
Here’s an example: tinyurl.com/9q5l7j2 (other movies made with his help are here: vimeo.com/tag:georgesdetheux)I processed his images in a variety of applications (Still Life, Studio Artist and especially, Final Cut Pro).
Carol Novack died of cancer on December 29, 2011. She had so much left to live, to share, to write!
May she have found her town!
There’s a good bio of Jean Detheux online in Madhat 15, accompanying another film made with a Carol Novack poem, Refuge. I particularly like this bit:
[Detheux] focuses on the importance of the hand gesture in image making (“le geste révélateur”), and especially, on the exploration of “inherent animation” (that which is done/found “by accident”), avoids “smarts” like the plague, believes that the conceptual approach is at a dead-end.
Timeline: a poetry film event in Manchester on 29 March
Tickets are now available for an evening of poetry films in Manchester next Tuesday, March 29, presented by the filmmaking group Bokeh Yeah!.
Bokeh Yeah! the Manchester based filmmaking group presents an evening of poetry film produced for the Timeline Poetry Film Challenge in association with Manchester Literature Festival and local publishers Carcanet Press, Flapjack and Commonword. The project helps Bokeh Yeah! members adapt poems provided by the publishers into short films using DSLR cameras. Publishers and filmmakers from across the region were invited to take part in the 2016 challenge, widening the opportunity for creative collaboration. This screening includes all of the films created for the challenge.
Event details
This screening will be accompanied by live poetry readings from Dave Viney and Helen Tookey.
An award will also be presented for the best poem film. The independent judging panel will include Zata Banks, poem filmmaker and founder of the PoetryFilm project, poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, Vona Groarke, and Michael Symmons Roberts, poet and Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Book tickets here, or see the event listing on Facebook for more information. This isn’t the first “Timeline” event that Bokeh Yeah! has sponsored, though I notice that the list of co-sponsors no longer includes Comma Press, which used to be a major player in the Manchester poetry-film scene ten years ago. It’s good to see other local publishers also taking an interest in poetry film.
Balliwamta by Velimir Lobsang
On this day of international solidarity with Belgium, I’m sharing the most Belgian videopoem I could find. Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon is the filmmaker, credited on Vimeo with “concept, add. mouthsounds & music, editing & grading,” and his fellow countryman Velimir Lobsang contributed the reading and the soundpoem. In an old blog post about an earlier collaboration, Marc explained the poet’s pseudonym:
‘Velimir’ is de voornaam van de Russische futurist ‘Chlebnikov’ en ‘Lobsang’ is een Tibetaanse naam die zoiets betekent als ‘positieve, heilzame studie’, aldus J.V. een ex-collega die onder het wonderlijke pseudoniem Velimir Lobsang gedichten schrijft.
(“Velimir” is the [first] name of the Russian futurist Khlebnikov and “Lobsang” is a Tibetan name that means something like “positive, wholesome study,” says JV, a former colleague who writes poems under the strange pseudonym Velimir Lobsang.)
Chikome Xochitl by Juan Hernández Ramírez
For World Poetry Day, here’s a poem in Huastecan Nahuatl by Juan Hernández Ramírez.
Veracruz poet Juan Hernández Ramírez reads the first section of his prizewinning poem “Chikome Xochitl” in the Huastecan Nahuatl. Translated by Adam Coon with David Shook from both Huastecan Nahuatl and Spanish—Hernández’s creative process employs both in dialogue with one another—this poem and an accompanying note will appear in the print edition of World Literature Today (Jan. – Feb. 2014). […]
Video shot in Veracruz by Adam Coon. Subtitled in Los Angeles by David Shook. Poem © Juan Hernández Ramírez, 2013. Translation © Adam Coon and David Shook, 2013.
The complete poem appears in the anthology Like A New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, edited by Víctor Terán and David Shook (Phoneme Media, 2015). It may also be read online in World Literature Today, which includes a lengthier description of Ramírez’ writing and the translation process.
See Vimeo for more of David Shook’s videos of indigenous and other poets.
Multimedia-related panels at AWP 2016
The annual AWP conference is the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America, with more than 12,000 attendees and some 550 on-site panel discussions, readings and other events, to say nothing of the numerous off-site events. This year, it will be held in Los Angeles, so you’d think there might be at least one panel on poetry film, but I couldn’t find any in the online program. As with AWP 2015, however, there are a number of panels with at least some bearing on multimedia, cross-genre collaborations, and the like. Here are some I spotted (click through to read about the presenters):
R185. The Poetry of Comics
Room 411, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
12:00 pm to 1:15 pmThe combination of text and image holds the power to create indivisible meaning on the page. Just as poets ground their work in the arrangement of words, ordered by such elements as sound or sense, most cartoonist-poets gravitate toward comics’ foundational device of juxtaposition. The tradition of comics has created generous, exciting spaces for the poetic, lyric, and hybrid. In this panel, artists showcase and read from works that live at the intersection of the visual and the poetic.
(The above is one of at least three poetry comics-related panels on the schedule.)
R227. Visual Arts in Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition Classrooms
Room 510, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmWriters and teachers of poetry, fiction, plays, and screenplays discuss their use of visual arts in creative writing, literature, and composition classrooms. Moving beyond ekphrasis, these educators and writers describe assignments that promote parallel thinking, metacognition, and creative problem-solving via various mediums and games at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
R204. Poetry, Politics, and Place: A Reading and Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Luis J. Rodriguez, Sponsored by Poets House
Petree Hall, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmThese leading poets read their poems and discuss their poetry-activism in New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and around the country. Each engages poetic practice and community building with projects that expand poetry’s place in our lives and culture: Griffiths through photography, Nye through writing for children, and Rodriguez through publishing projects and political organizing. The transformative power of poetry brings these three together to talk about how we can make a better world.
(Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an accomplished videopoet.)
F119. Necessary Hybridity: The Politics & Performance of Making Multigenre, Multimedia, Multiethnic Literature Visible
Room 502 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 amHybridity in literature is often thought of as a kind of cross-pollination that leads to “vigor.” But what happens when hybridity is considered through the lens of political and aesthetic necessity? From queer politics to POC feminism to postcoloniality, hybrid forms have been a critical part of making visible otherwise illegible experiences. Join five writers as they explore the significance of hybridity to queerness, trans culture, black bodies, mixed-race narratives, and erased histories.
F249. Comics, Films, Songs, and More: Multimodality in Creative Writing and Composition Courses
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pmOur students function as visually literate composers, engaging with writing and reading across multiple modes of communication. Hear from a panel of instructors that embrace their students’ comfort with multimodality by teaching in multimodal formats and assigning both composition and creative writing assignments that push students outside their comfort zones and into the types of writing they’re most likely to encounter on the job.
S125. Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Beyond Mere Description
Room 505, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 amContemporary ekphrasis has been described as a form of critical meditation that mixes commentary, homage, resistance, argument, and self-criticism, but what does it look like in practice, especially given digital tools? And how does one push beyond mere description or instrumentalization of the work of art? These panelists present examples from their own work and offer practical exercises, with an emphasis on digital technology, for community, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms.
S215. Why We Innovate: The Case for Hybrid Genres
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmEditors of and contributors to Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres discuss writing and teaching hybrid literature as innovative acts of artistic, social, and cultural criticism, and as radical self-creation. Panelists discuss why writers mix forms and provide ideas and examples for crafting and teaching hybrid genres, focusing on blendings of visual, performative, lyrical, and narrative techniques.
S253. From Page to Screen: Exploring Successful Adaptation with Industry Insiders
Room 501, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pmAuthors have more opportunities than ever to bring their works to the screen, but the complexity of that process has increased exponentially. This panel, presented by the Authors Guild, explains film and television adaptation through the insights of those best equipped to reveal its secrets: authors whose works have been adapted; producers and agents who select, sell, and develop books for Hollywood; and industry executives (HBO, Lionsgate) who oversee that lucky, and laborious, journey.
Incidentally, the AWP website does have a videos section, with “Videos of select featured presentations from the more than 550 events offered at the AWP Conference & Bookfair.”
One Dream Opening Into Many by Kallie Falandays
American poet Kallie Falandays’ text is superimposed onto mirrored images in a new videopoem by Australian artist Marie Craven. The soundtrack is by SK123. This approach to video imagery is one that Craven has used before, in her videos Transmission and Double Life, but One Dream Opening Into Many is in my view even more effective in its sleight-of-hand gestures toward the text:
[…] This bird,
which is also not a bird, is still dyingbut at times, when my mother hobbles
past the window to get water,
the sunlight clouds it like tiny peoplemade of light stepping over the ocean
and it is set free.
Perhaps it’s an inversion of our usual way of thinking about poetry to have the text-on-screen in this videopoem seem more stable, less evanescent than the folding and unfolding elements of the world to which it alludes.
Hotelsituation, langes Liegen / Hotel Situation, Long Recumbency by Steffen Popp
A film by Marc Neys (AKA Swoon) using a poem by the contemporary German poet Steffen Popp. The poet’s recitation and the English translation by Christian Hawkey were sourced from Lyrikline. The choice to have the untranslated audio version first, followed by the translation as text-on-screen, is unusual, but I think it works, echoed as it is by the vertically split screen. It does mean, however, that more than two-thirds of the film is devoted to the slower-moving English version.
The house and the surrounding fields by Ed Madden
One of three short videopoems from the South Carolina-based filmmaking duo Allen Wheeler in support of Ed Madden‘s new poetry collection Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press), ahead of the launch on Sunday. Quoting the publisher’s description:
In a spring of floods, a son returns to rural Arkansas to help care for his dying father. Ark is a book about family, about old wounds and new rituals, about the extraordinary importance of ordinary things at the end of life, about the gifts of healing to be found in the care of the dying. At once a memoir in verse about hospice care and a son’s book-length lament for his father, Ark is a book about the things that can be fixed, and those that can’t. Ed Madden is originally from Arkansas and is currently the Poet Laureate of Columbia, South Carolina.
Wheeler and Madden have also made an exemplary book trailer, incorporating the above poem as well as some blurbs:
Creased Map of the Underworld by Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio‘s poem was adapted to film by Thomas Bryan Michurski for Motionpoems, where one can also read interviews with the poet and filmmaker. Addonizio’s reaction to the film was very positive:
I (naively) thought there’d be some images from the poem. But like how the words are set against the simple actions & the mood it all creates.
Michurski talks about the attraction of working mostly in advertising, then describes his approach to filming:
I like to prepare, but I don’t like to plan. I have shots in my head that I want, but experimentation is essential for me. I always have my fingers crossed for that surprising moment or happy accident. It’s like carving a marble statue–something good is already in the scene, I just need to chip away and find it.
Can you describe the creative process behind the film for Creased Map of the Underworld?
It was the first poem I read and knew immediately I wanted to work with it. I was drawn to the “innocence of death” idea. At first I struggled with how I could visually play along with the vivid imagery in the poem. The treatment I created was much different, using high contrast black and white, with a much more diverse scene and shot list, more like a music video. I realized as I was in first edit that I didn’t need to illustrate the poem because it was powerful enough. I wanted to add to the idea and not distract from it.
Did you find it more difficult to create a “poetry in motion” as compared to your other films?
The difficulty was removing myself from the need to “make a film about a poem”. I had to separate myself from belief that it had to follow a style, thus becoming a parody of another film. Once I decided that I didn’t care if anyone liked it, it was much easier to let all of the expectations go and just let it be.
What prompted you to use a specific animal to symbolize death?
It was between the girl viewing the body of an older self or discovering an animal. I even entertained a version where those visuals alternated, but the idea of how death sees death gets too twisted and meta in that scenario. The deer works well because its size and innocence matches the girl’s.
What do you hope that the audience will take from watching this film?I hope they pay attention to an amazing poem told from an alternate perspective. As humans we have an adverse, and sometimes unhealthy reaction to death and we don’t appreciate the necessity and fascinating beauty of it.
Annabel Hess is the young actress, the narration is by Jan Pettit, and David Schnack is credited with cinematography.
