Posts By Dave Bonta

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

Steel and Air: untitled prose poem by John Ashbery

On 2 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Motionpoems commissioned this film from the Minnesota-based documentary production company Sparky Stories (Chris and Nick Libbey), who describe it on Vimeo as follows:

Steel and Air. Space and time. In the heart of Minneapolis there is an iconic blue and yellow bridge that crosses interstate 394 and connects the Walker Art Museum sculpture garden with Loring Park. Beyond its physical utility, the bridge offers a perspective to its crossers. A perspective of the interstate traffic, of the city, and of the viewer itself.

Inscribed in its lintel is a poem commissioned by the highly-achieved poet, John Ashbery. This poem discusses, in typical Ashbery obscurity, one’s place in the movement of time. The film, Steel and Air, aims to capture and enhance Ashbery’s poem by chronicling a man’s journey through life and the wonderful, boring, and ultimately finite experiences that come with it. And then it got very cool.

The poem first appeared in Ashbery’s collection Hotel Lautréamont (Knopf, 1992).

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Submissions Open for the Third Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival

On 2 March, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Press release from 29 February. (I was on the road.) Dear other poetry film festival organizers: Please send me press releases like this one, OK? —Dave

WORCESTER, MA – Doublebunny Press announces today that submissions have opened for the third Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.

The Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is a competition meant to highlight poetry and visual art at the intersection of film. The festival, due to take place in Worcester in October of 2015 focuses on short films that illustrate original poems, all of which are non-performance based (read: no footage of the poems being performed).

As well as a $200 prize for Best Overall Production, Rabbit Heart will be awarding $100 prizes in six other categories: Best Animated, Best Music/Sound, Best Smartphone Production, Best Under 1 Minute, Best Valentine, and the Shoots! youth prize. The gala awards ceremony and viewing party will be at Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA on October 22nd.

About Doublebunny Press

Doublebunny Press is a small independent press that serves the New England area through poetry design, layout, and production of fine books and posters. Doublebunny also supported Omnivore Magazine, a poetry and arts monthly which, during its three-year run, published poetry and articles by over 150 authors, and carried a national subscription base.

Doublebunny has a history of great spoken word events in Worcester. They combined forces with The Worcester Poets’ Asylum to present V Day to the city in 2002 and 2003, and the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2005. In 2014, Doublebunny brought the inaugural Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival to the city, and in now for the third year’s festival, they plan an even more exciting show for Worcester, inviting the imagination of poets and filmmakers to once again take center stage.

About Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival

Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is one of very few outlets in the US for poetry on film, and the only festival that asks that the author of the poem participate in the making of the production. In 2014 and 2015 Rabbit Heart attracted international attention, including not only European submissions, but the honor of a showcase in the CYCLOP festival in Ukraine and showings in Barcelona, Spain at pro.l.e.

This year Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival has been recognized with a grant from the Worcester Arts Council. Here’s the official language: This program is administered by the Worcester Arts Council, for the Local Cultural Council – an agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Submissions are now open for the 2016 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, and will remain open through July 1st.

To learn more about this event, please go to:

www.doublebunnypress.com and click on the menu link to Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival

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Call for submissions: 20th anniversary Videobardo International Videopoetry Festival

On 21 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

VideoBardo, founded in 1996, calls on artists to participate in the VideoBardo 20 Years International Videopoetry Festival (VI), which is composed of preliminary events throughout 2016 in different cities and places, and by a central week in November in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We understand Videopoetry as all audiovisual work where verbal language (word, letter, speech, speaking, writing, and sign) is protagonist or has a special transformer treatment. Therefore these three fields: Image in movement, Sound and Verbal language, dialog with each other in order to create a fourth reality which is the Videopoetic Work. So in videopoetry the verbal language is experienced in visual, sound, corporal and physical dimensions.

The first paragraphs (lightly edited) from the English version of Videobardo‘s open call, which is unfortunately only available as a PDF. The deadline for submissions is August 30, 2016. Spanish subtitles must be provided for all films not in Spanish. Click through for the guidelines and a submission form.

Applications open for two-week Films as Poems workshop in London

On 21 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - workshops and courses

I was excited to hear about this upcoming course for aspiring poetry-film makers from filmmaker and poet Zillah Bowes.

Films As Poems is a 2 week workshop in film creativity structured around making a film poem, taking place in London 4-15 April 2016.

Participants develop, shoot and edit a 2-5 minute film poem on the course during 2 weeks. There are workshops in camera and sound as well as feedback during the various stages of the film process.

Previous participants have screened their films after the course, including selection at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival.

Participants are mainly factual filmmakers looking to develop poetic expression, but the course is open to all.

Full details and examples at www.filmsaspoems.com.

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Without War by Gerry King

On 12 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This author-made filmpoem by Gerry King in collaboration with videographer Gregory Rose is reminiscent of the most powerful political campaign ads, but with a more timeless message. The use of multiple readers, each situated in a particular place, lends additional veracity to the message—and I like the idea of a performance poet standing aside to let others take the mike. Here’s the YouTube description:

More than twenty years ago Gerry King wrote Without War and performed it to audiences across England. Now in a collaboration with his friend and Dartington College of Arts collaborator Gregory Rose the text is given a new life while the theme continues to steal lives all over the world….
Text © Gerry King, Images and soundtrack © King and Rose 2016.

Not My Home by José Orduña

On 11 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Mexican-American writer José Orduña from the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Triquarterly (where it’s described as a video essay). This is the first issue with videos chosen and introduced by the new video editor, nonfiction writer and illustrator Kristen Radtke. Here’s what she wrote about “Not My Home”:

In “Not My Home,” José Orduña explores negation. He invites us inside intimate images of a single home—shoes by the door, a stuffed animal on an unmade bed, pencil lines up the wall marking children’s growth. These images are repeated even as the narrator tells us over and over again that the home is not his, that the memories do not belong to him and neither does this story. Yet we as viewers get the feeling he knows this house better than anyone has ever known a home before, and that perhaps that knowledge is exactly why he needs to go about negating it—it is, in a sense, a haunting. Just the slight unease of a subtle breeze, or a motion in the corner of your field of vision, is the sense of a ghost. Orduña’s very short video clips create gorgeous moving snapshots of a disembodied life: Grass twitches. Light shimmers on a teapot. His slow, melancholic images make us ache for the space as much as his narrator seems to.

Click through to watch the other two video essays Radtke chose. I’m pleased to see that the magazine still leads off with its video selections, though I hope that the absence of videos identified as “cinepoetry” is only temporary. (Perhaps they just aren’t getting enough submissions.)

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Envoi by Hugo Claus

On 10 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Claus’s poem is adapted to film by his fellow Belgian Marc Neys AKA Swoon. The poet’s reading is courtesy of Lyrikline and the English translation is by John Irons. Marc used footage by Jan Earala, but everything else—concept, music, editing—are his own.

Marc told me recently that he’s moving away from writing process notes, preferring to let the films speak for themselves, as witnessed by his new, stripped-down, portfolio-style website. Last year, he made a pair of films for another Claus poem, “Halloween,” the second one also using footage from Jan Earala. Here’s hoping that more Hugo Claus filmpoems might be in the offing.

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The Meeting Ran Long by Eric Blanchard

On 5 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A new, text-on-screen-style videopoem by Australian artist Marie Craven using a text by American poet Eric Blanchard and sections of three hand-processed, experimental films. Craven recently shared some process notes as a part of a blog post about her recent videopoetry remixes.

After putting together a first videopoem last year based on the poetry of Eric Blanchard, I went exploring more of his writing to be found on the web. I was especially drawn to a prose poem called ‘The Meeting Ran Long‘, published in Literary Orphans. The piece created for me a sense of daydreaming in an empty room in a transitional moment of solitude, evoking a short stream from the unconscious mind. I started experimenting with how I might present this as text on screen and settled on simply deconstructing the written piece into component phrases that might reveal or give rise to new resonances in the unconscious spaces of the writing itself. Once I had transferred all the text to the screen, I cut the visual phrases to an experimental music piece by C.P. McDill, a sound artist whose work I have followed and admired since about 2008. The track, ‘Iced Coffee‘, was sourced from The Internet Archive, where it is freely available for remixing on a Creative Commons licence. For the images I went to Vimeo and did some searches on key words in their large pool of videos also available for remixing via Creative Commons. I discovered the work of the Mono No Aware group and selected three hand-processed films by Rachael Guma, Ashley Swinnerton and David Beard. Aside from being wonderful experimental film pieces in themselves, each flowed in a kinetic way that reminded me of the pace of thoughts, memories and images as they flow through a human brain. I put these together with a universal film leader from an old vaudeville show to come up with a first draft of the video. I then sent it to the poet to ask his permission to proceed with a final version. Eric kindly agreed. After a little reworking, this is the video that emerged.

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Pearls by Chaucer Cameron

On 3 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Chaucer Cameron that was sparked by an image in a Swoon videopoem. Pearls was recently featured at Atticus Review, accompanied by some process notes:

Symbolically, Pearls provides a vehicle for wisdom as well as providing a mirror in which to see ourselves, giving us insight into how we appear to others.

In a more literal sense, the “Mother” in the poem is on a mission to ‘find herself’ through some pearls that she thinks are hidden in the rocks. Her son, who is watching from down below, is trying desperately to communicate, to gain her attention, her love. In fact, he is trying to tell her that she already has pearls, if only she could see them.

The first line of the poem was inspired by a poetry-film on Moving Poems site, so it seemed appropriate to explore my text further through film. I sent the poem to Voiceover Artist and Broadcaster David Wartnaby. A few weeks later, I found exactly the right footage, music and sound and the poetry-film fell into place.

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A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

On 2 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Poe’s 1849 poem in a 2014 adaptation by Catalonian poet Josep Porcar with cinematography by Tomás Baltazar, a voiceover by Tom O’Bedlam and a Catalan translation by Txema Martínez Inglés in subtitles. The actor is Luis Carvalho.

Message4u by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch

On 1 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/153544328

Artists Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch have collaborated on a number of videos over the years, some of which — like this one — can be seen as videopoems. The soundtrack is by Halo Svevo, and Christa Hunter appears in the video along with footage from 1956 film On Guard! by IBM. There’s also a small folded book and CD.

Message4u is a video and folding book based on email conversations between myself and Jeff Crouch about knowledge, democracy, technology and the computer and oracle as repositories of knowledge and prediction.

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Call for entries: Weimar Poetry Film Prize

On 1 February, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, contests, festivals and other screening events

The Weimarer Poetryfilmpreis or Weimar Poetry Film Prize is a new venture associated with the same people who run the excellent, bilingual website and magazine Poetryfilmkanal (Poetryfilm Channel). The three-person jury consists of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, poet Nancy Hünger and experimental filmmaker Hubert Sielecki. Here’s the English portion of the call for entries:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Through the new Film Prize, backup_festival and Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. (LGT) are looking for innovative poetry films. Filmmakers from any nation and of any age are welcome to participate with up to three short films of up to 8:00 mins, which should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2013 will not be considered. From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main prize (1000 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.

The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen, Thüringer Staatskanzlei and the City of Weimar.

Entry deadline: March 15th, 2016.

Form for submissions [pdf] by mail or e-mail.

The »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« call for entries is international. For the submission send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.

Presentation of awards: May 21th, 2016.

More information about the program: www.backup-festival.de.

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