~ Video Library ~

Arrival at Elsewhere (extract) by Karen Dennison, Carl Griffin et. al.

On 7 March, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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A filmpoem by Karen Dennison, who also supplied the voiceover. The text was written by Jemma Borg, Annie Butler, Kerry Darbishire, Catherine Fletcher, Bashabi Fraser, Carl Griffin, Philip Gross, Chrys Salt, and Alina Stefanescu. Here’s the YouTube description:

Arrival at Elsewhere is a book length long poem response to the pandemic, curated by one poet, Carl Griffin, but written by 97. This is an extract from the book. It’s published by Against the Grain poetry press and available to buy at https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere/

From the description at that link:

Poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere.

We Have Become Children by Al Rempel

On 5 January, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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so we too open our lips
to mouth our prayers
like water over stones

This recent videopoem by Erica Goss incorporates a text by Canadian poet Al Rempel, voiced by Annelyse Gelman, herself a videopoet. As Erica’s Vimeo description notes, “This is the second collaboration between poet Al Rempel and me. […] I used some of my photographs from years ago and video I took last summer.”

Their first collaboration came out last spring: I’ve in the Rain. This new one has a certain New Year’s flavor to it, I thought — a good way to kick off 2021 at Moving Poems.

To The End Of Things, Part 5: Mountains by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey

On 20 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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An excerpt from a unique collaboration between poet-filmmakers Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey, celebrating and evoking the spirits of place — or as they put it, “deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.”

In September 2019, writer and composer Martin Heslop and poet Helen Tookey spent a two-week residency in Great Village, Nova Scotia, in the house where Elizabeth Bishop lived as a child. They wrote poems and prose pieces, fragments, notes. And they collected field recordings and sounds: waterfalls, rivers, cave-drips; crickets under pylons, in blueberry fields, by the shafts of old mines; the creaking and cracking of a wooden church during a hurricane; the harmonium and all the bells in the house; the turning mechanism of a lighthouse beam, abandoned radio-sets. They were recording the present and searching for possible futures, but also looking to summon the buried histories of the place.

Back home they made films, visiting and revisiting the Durham and Northumberland coast, Parys Mountain on Anglesey, South Gare on Teesside – places similarly scarred by the presence and now the loss of industry. Over the past year, they have been weaving these sounds into the films, creating new conversations, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Using sound and film, their poems and their voices, entwined with early recordings of Nova Scotian Gaelic songs gathered from the archives of the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University, Helen and Martin are creating a series of audio-visual poems – a narrative sequence – weaving together the experiences of a woman trying to navigate an uncertain and unfamiliar landscape, and the voice of a man who is of this place, but of a different time. This man is the draegerman of the mines, the rescuer, and he tells of the underground world he remembers, recalls voices of those he rescued and those he could not. They are both deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.

Parts one to five were released in November 2020, with the second half of the story to follow in the New Year.

Watch all five November releases.

Welcome to the edge of your seat by Janet Lees

On 19 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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For David Ballantyne
Photography & animation by Janet Lees
Music by Henyao

Simple but brilliant. Reminds me of the minimalism that drew me to Janet’s filmpoems from the very beginning. The contrast between the music and the text really adds to the unsettling quality of the piece.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

On 18 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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The On Being Project — a 15-year-old American Public Media radio show/podcast that’s spawned a whole web empire — has recently started producing poetry films, each an animation with a different director. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s by the London-based animator Jocie Juritz, with sound by Galina Juritz. The YouTube description notes that “This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Elizabeth Alexander, Words That Shimmer,” which aired on January 6, 2011.

Juritz posted some process notes on her website:

I was struck by the line “emptying the proverbial pocketbook” which sparked imagery of my own creative process – scribbling into sketchbooks, accumulating paper and mementos. As a sort of homage to the pen and paper (and reference to the ideas making process) I decided to animate the frames of this film directly into the pages of Elizabeth Alexander’s book ‘Crave Radiance’ which contains “I Believe”. Kindly, she gave me the go ahead to do whatever I liked with the book!

I animated each frame in Photoshop first, to make sure I had a perfect reference to trace. Those frames were then printed out. Using a lightbox I hand painted each frame in gouache paint, directly onto the pages of the book. Once they were all coloured I scanned each page, then placed each frame in position in After Effects.

People may remember Alexander as President Obama’s first inaugural poet, but she’s much more than that. Here’s her page at the Poetry Foundation.

Needleminer by Gary Barwin

On 13 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Mooneyes mimic shiner for this, trifathead checkerspot for that. We call it opera. Or disease.

This videopoem by writer, composer, and “melted media” artist Gary Barwin reverses the usual balance between text and video in which the latter adds complexity to a relatively straightforward text. Here, the text—sections 5 and 3 from Barwin’s long poem “Needleminer” in No TV for Woodpeckers—is rather thicket-like, full of obscure words, neologisms, and unexpected turns of phrase in the best tradition of avant-garde ecopoetry. So the images are kept relatively simple and consistent throughout, while still reversing our ordinary perspective of nature as something outside. The soundtrack includes Barwin’s adaptation of Nisi Dominus by Vivaldi.

This joins three other videos made from texts in No TV for Woodpeckers; watch them all (and browse reviews) on Barwin’s website.

Fous de la bête (Crazy About the Beast) by Corrin Evans

On 12 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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An author-made filmpoem (or filmmaker-written poetry film) by Los Angeles-based actor and director Corrin Evans. Cedric Goddard is credited with translation (I’m assuming into French from an English original?) and the voiceover performance is by Keveen Baudouin.

Corrin was co-creator of an unreleased TV mini-series called Sex Parties, so I’m guessing this might be a spin-off from that.

Straw House, Straw Dog by Richard Siken

On 10 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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I wouldn’t have thought that this poem, from Richard Siken’s 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize-winning collection Crush, was especially amenable to film adaptation, but French filmmaker Thalia Lahsinat rose to the challenge admirably.

A Google Video search reveals a number of different adaptations of this poem, so I guess it must be a popular workshop assignment. Perhaps the difficulty is the point, then.

Raaga by Roseanne Walt

On 7 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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A Shetlandic filmpoem by poet, filmmaker and musician Roseanne Walt, one of a series of four filmpoems featuring masked beings and texts from Dr. Walt’s award-winning, bilingual collection Moder Dy (Mother Wave). Stoal // Raaga is

A series of filmpoems exploring themes of modern myth, memory and landscape. Exhibited at The Booth, Scalloway and Broadway Gallery, Letchworth in 2019. Made with the Kishie Wife Collective. Commissioned by Shetland Arts.

According to the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, raaga refers to wreckage or driftwood, and figuratively “anything useless or spoilt, rubbish, a poor broken-down person or animal.” A raaga-tree is “a tree or branch washed up as driftwood.”

swallow #8 by Kristy Bowen

On 6 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Kristy Bowen‘s most recent video is the eighth and possibly final installment in a collection called swallow. In a brief blog post debuting the series back on August 26, she wrote,

Over the course of the next month, I’ll be making a series of video poems of my swallow series. Think of it like a chapbook, but in video form! Enjoy!

In fact it took closer to two months, but that’s still damn impressive, given how many things Bowen seems to be working on at any given time, and the fact that she only starting learning how to make videopoems a few months ago. She’s organized all the swallow videos into a YouTube playlist, matter-of-factly described as “a video poem chapbook.”

Ottery Dragons by Marc Woodward

On 5 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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“This is the dark grieving of the year.”

A film by Danny Cooke with poem and narration by Marc Woodward. The YouTube description reads: “Heat, sweat, danger and ritual. A glimpse into an ancient Devon tradition.” I found an article about that tradition on Atlas Obscura:

In England, the tradition of lighting up bonfires and setting off fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day dates back over 400 years. In the East Devon village of Ottery St. Mary, on November 5th—also known as Bonfire Night—hundreds of people crowd the narrow streets for some particularly perilous revelry.

When Bonfire Night falls in Ottery, runners grab blazing barrels of tar, hoist them on their shoulders, and race them through the village streets. It’s no joke here—the flames are real, and chaos seems to be in charge. But they’ve been at it for hundreds of years, and only village veterans are given the honor of running the barrels.

The custom of using tar barrels to kick off Bonfire Night isn’t unique to Ottery. Other towns and villages light them up too, but typically roll them through the streets. It’s not clear exactly when, but at some point (villagers say it was at least a couple hundred years ago) someone thought rolling barrels of flaming tar was kind of a bore, and carrying them on your back was the way to go. It’s been an Ottery tradition, far outliving health and safety regulations, ever since.

This was the second of two poetry films made with the same footage. Cooke posted a call for poems last year, apparently. But I don’t think the poem he chose as winner is as interesting as this one. I’m glad he decided to make a remix with the runner-up.

Viniste a visitarme en sueños (You came to visit me in dreams) by Ernesto Cardenal

On 31 October, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe adapts a short poem by Nicaragua’s great poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal. Jean Morris provided an English translation for the subtitles.

One of the things I’ve noticed this week whilst looking at narrative-style films adapting lyric poetry is that there are (at least) two ways that the directors of such films can regard a poem: as a point of departure, or as the actual (if elusive) destination. But thinking about it further, I’m not sure these are mutually exclusive perspectives. After all — to extend the analogy — the true goal of a journey often turns out in retrospect to have been quite different from the supposed destination, which as it existed in the imagination of the traveler setting forth was indeed a mere jumping-off point. I think Eduardo’s films illustrate this paradox as well as any.

Be that as it may, no survey of narrative-style poetry filmmaking, however brief, would be complete without one of his films, which always feel so deep — as if they’ve emerged from an engagement with the text as intimate and sustained as that of any translator.