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Your Super Bookstore Recommends by Dean Young

On 15 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Performance Poetry
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Another “teleportal reading“:

When Dean Young came to the East Austin warehouse where we film our videos, the sky was threatening. By the time he got started, a biblical downpour was underway. You can hear the rain on the tin roof as he reads. Of course, as these things tend to go, it cleared up the second the shoot was finished. Still, we like the way the atmospheric sound plays off of Scott Gelber’s animation, which alters live footage of Dean reading in front of a green screen and layers it with gorgeous hand-painted imagery. Dean’s most recent book, a work of prose on poetry titled The Art of Recklessness, is available from Graywolf Press.

This is one case where a literal interpretation of the poem really works!

Until Next Time by Nabila Jameel

On 14 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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Filmmaker Rachel Laine collaborated with poet Nabila Jameel in preparation for the Comma Press Film Poem Festival 2010. I found a bio of Jameel at the (UK) Poetry Society website:

Runner-up in the Manchester Cathedral International Religious Poetry Competition 2010. Published in anthologies, Stand Magazine and Poetry & Audience. … Currently writing a chapter on ‘Performance’ for an academic book.

Let Us Consider by Russell Edson

On 13 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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As long as I’ve been doing this site, I still haven’t posted quite all the videos from the “Poetry Everywhere” series of animations by students at docUWM, the documentary media center based in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department, produced under the aegis of the Poetry Foundation. As usual with this series, the poet himself is the reader here.

The Spider by Gabor Barabas

On 12 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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I’m not sure why I never posted this one before. The poem is based on the work of the late sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Juan Delcan, the animator, is an artist in his own right; his animation for Billy Collins’ poem “The Dead” is one of the most popular animated poems on the web. The poet, Gabor Barabas, doesn’t seem to have a website, but is a retired pediatrician with a flourishing second career in theatre and poetry.

Easy to Love a Beautiful Woman by Vanessa Plain

On 11 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Update: Video is no longer online.

Viral Verse marked the first anniversary of their launch with this videopoem, written, filmed and narrated by Vanessa Plain. Here’s what she wrote about the film over at VV and at Vimeo:

Easy to Love a Beautiful Woman is a dramatic narrative, a sci-fi poem. It was inspired by a worrying trend – I see a lot of love for the Earth but little faith.

They say we are here because of planetary accident. The intelligence of nature is dismissed as illusionary. We convince ourselves that it us vs. nature, yet we are here only by the Earth’s good grace.

We are dazzled by technology, believing any new discovery to be for our good. But all too often our choices have proved wrong.

The poem is a cautionary tale. It’s set in a future when Revelations become real and they tell us to pack…

Easy to love a new idea,
Fall deep in its charms.
Jump head first with a cursory look
blind to any harm.

-ed by Mairi Sharratt

On 8 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook’s latest filmpoem (and in my opinion his best to date). Here’s what he says about it at Vimeo:

-ed is my film of a poem by Mairi Sharratt, from her as yet unpublished (nudge) collection This is a Poem. You can read more of Mairi’s work on her excellent blog, alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com.

It took a long time for me to begin this filmpoem for two reasons: I have been busy with this summer’s solo film and photography show as part of the Edinburgh Festival; also the poem is dark and yet meditative, lifting to a powerful crescendo and as a result I felt that I needed to introduce a figurative element. So I ruminated…

Mairi says in a blog post that the film will be screened at Edingbugh’s Hidden Door Festival, which runs from October 22-24.

Natural Bitterness by Patrick Jones

On 7 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Australian artist Patrick Jones recently worked on a project called Food Forest with his family, and “Natural Bitterness” is another project in the same spirit of uniting art with gardening or gathering: it’s “a video-poem as field guide to some of the edible weeds and wild foods we’ve been eating lately in central Victoria, Australia,” according to the description on Vimeo. A brief blog post goes into a little more detail.

As high-concept as this is, it’s also a fine poem, and I love the name of his production company: Gift Ecology Films.

Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles

On 6 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 4 Comments - Animation, Book trailers, Performance Poetry
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The reading is evidently an excerpt from Myles’ new book. Update: this is not from Inferno, but a more recent piece (see comments). It takes a little while to get going, but stick with it: the hand-drawn, typographic animation on a green screen behind the reading is unique. It’s the work of Scott Gelber for Teleportal Readings, which includes some additional information:

This is the first of nine videos we shot in collaboration with Rattapallax at the Bowery Poetry Club this summer. That’s BPC founder Bob Holman you hear in the background during the beginning, before he gets whatevered by Eileen. We filmed with a green screen and Scott Gelber added animation after the fact (we’ve yet to perfect the magic of manifesting amazing, hand-drawn typefaces live, but believe us when we say we’re working on it). Eileen’s newest book, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is available from OR Books.

And here then is an excerpt from Inferno (via EileenMyles.com).

http://vimeo.com/14155318

Finally, here’s a book trailer for Inferno.

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The Watcher of Vowels by Robert Bly

On 5 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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One of the new batch of films from MotionPoems, read by Todd Boss and designed and animated by Matt Van Ekeren. If you can get to Minneapolis this Friday, October 8, it will be part of a screening of new motionpoems.

The Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf

On 3 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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The title poem of Rachel Zolf’s new book from Coach House Books, “a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs.” Poetry blogger Joshua Corey calls it “A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab.”

I like the cut-up approach to a live-reading video here. Poet Laura Mullen is the filmmaker. For more on Rachel Zolf, see her author page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

Poems for Santa Barbara by David Starkey

On 1 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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This half-hour show, produced by The Santa Barbara Channels community media network, includes 11 videopoems written and recited by the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, David Starkey. He calls this a cooperative endeavor with the people of Santa Barbara: all the poem topics were suggested by residents, and the music in the videos is all the original work of local musicians. Starkey also provides brief commentaries on the poems, kind of in the style of a poetry reading, except that they follow rather than precede the poems.

I love this project. Starkey really shows what it means to be a local poet, responsive to local concerns and helping people inhabit their landscape with imagination and grace. I hope other local arts commissions copy this. While of course I liked some of the constituent videopoems better than others, overall it’s one of the best made-for-TV poetry programs I’ve seen, not excluding the interviews and animations produced by the BBC.

Zucchini by Major Jackson

On 30 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Animator Allison Alexander Westbrook IV says in the notes at YouTube,

This is a commissioned animation I did for the poet Major Jackson. It was created by using a combination of Adobe photoshop and after effects. It first debuted at the exhibition titled “More Than Bilingual: Major Jackson & William Cordova.” at the Fleming Museum located on the campus of the University of Vermont on January 27th, 2009.