~ site news ~
New additions to the web resources page: video effects, videos from space, and Soundcloud
UPDATE (9/1): I’ve added close to a dozen more links in the past three days, courtesy of Nic.
- I’ve updated the list of Web resources for videopoem makers to add some new links. I discovered last month that SoundCloud, the online audio-sharing site for musicians (and sometimes spoken-word artists), encourages members to apply Creative Commons licenses to their works and make them available for download (though frustratingly, some do the former and neglect to do that latter). Adding to the site’s utility for remixers and filmmakers is a very useful advanced search function, even better than ccMixter, so if for example you want to find a piece of electronica with French horns that’s licensed CC non-commercial, you can do that. The site overall is very comparable to Jamendo, but I think may have even more users.
A couple weeks ago, Diane Lockward let me know about a whole new category of free resources: prekeyed footage, brief stock clips and other video effects. I have so far included just the two sites she recommended, Footage Crate and Movietools.info; others I looked at seemed pretty spammy.
The most recent addition comes from Nic S., who has just made her first videopoem after being so heavily exploited often called upon to provide audio for videos by me and Swoon. In addition to the Prelinger Archives, Nic got the bright idea of using footage from the NASA Video Gallery, which, as I say on the resource list, looks like the go-to site site for videos of the earth from space and other cool spacey stuff. The site’s very easy to navigate, and every video has a download link.
Thanks, Nic and Diane! And if anyone else has a discovery to share, please don’t be shy.
New directories: poetry film festivals, and free-to-use audio and video
I’ve just posted two new pages of resources for videopoem and poetry-film makers.
The Poetry film festival list includes websites and, where available, Facebook pages for regularly occurring poetry film festivals. Left off the list, at least for now, are all the more general film festivals to which poetry films might be submitted.
Web resources for videopoem makers includes information on determining what’s free to use, as well as links to free and Creative Commons-licensed film and video, spoken word, sound and music collections. I also include a link to the software I use for downloading videos from the web, but I welcome other suggestions.
Please use the comments here or at the respective pages to alert me about other links I should include. I would also encourage people who regularly use Creative Commons-licensed material to follow the Golden Rule and apply a “copyleft” license to your own work, as well. (I don’t always remember to do this myself, but I should.)
Nominations of exemplary videopoems wanted for a new section of the site
I’ve now shared close to 500 videos on Moving Poems, more than 400 of them in the Video Poems category. It occurs to me that the site would be a lot more useful to students, poets and filmmakers if I created a new, top-level page to display a small number of exemplary videopoems (filmpoems, cinepoems — I’m not hung up on the terminology). Of course I have my own ideas of what should go on this page, but I’d really like input from people who know the genre well. Please email me: bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com with suggestions of videos to include, or leave a link in the comments. Obviously they have to be embeddable, if you’re thinking of things I haven’t yet posted. (And please don’t send me links to your own work. Who among us is capable of being truly objective about the work of our own hands?)
I’m thinking no more than 20 videos, illustrating a range of styles, and including inspired amateurs with cheaper equipment and software as well as those with professional-level tools and experience. I wouldn’t want them all to be so technically perfect that neophytes would be discouraged from getting into it, but I also would like to show some examples of what ace filmmakers have done in the genre so people already making videopoems will have something to aspire to.
Alex Cigale becomes Moving Poems’ Russian-language editor
This week, Ukranian-American poet and translator Alex Cigale became the first foreign-language editor at Moving Poems, contributing translations and analysis of videopoems for works by Alexander Vvedensky and Anna Akhmatova — see Alex’s author archive to view both posts.
I know Alex from his work as an author and now issue editor at qarrtsiluni, and I’ve come to appreciate his enthusiasm for poetry of all kinds and passion for bringing it to ordinary readers. In addition to qarrtsiluni, he’s placed poems in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n and McSweeney’s, among others. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
I’m excited by this sudden broadening of the site’s horizons, and I’d welcome volunteers for other languages, as well (Dutch? German? Spanish?) presuming that we could agree on the quality of the videopoems in need of explication. Contributions could be as regular or as occasional as you like — I have an aversion to schedules. Contact me via email, bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, if you’re interested.
I just updated this site (along with the main Moving Poems site) to WordPress 3.0. As soon as I did so, a new update of this theme became available, so I updated to that as well. Let me know if you notice anything funny.
Great to see all the discussion here this morning (well, afternoon for some of you). Minor housekeeping note: You’ll probably notice I just switched the default setting to show rather than hide comment threads. Though this might make the site initially more confusing to navigate for first-time visitors until they discover the global toggle button, I found I was getting annoyed by the fact that I had to toggle-on comments even on single-post views, and decided it would make for better usability if comment links in the sidebar worked by default. If you prefer things the way they were, though, let me know — I’m not wedded to this.
Self-registration off
An obvious spammer registered this morning, so unfortunately I’ve had to turn off self-registration already. I’ve deleted that contributor, plus one other I wasn’t sure of — if you are that other person, and you’re not in fact a spammer, please accept my apologies and email me to have your status reinstated. For anyone else who who would like to join — and the more, the merrier! — please do email me as well: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. (Contact pages are more hassle than they’re worth, in my experience.)
Minor site-usability note: those Recent Comments links don’t always work, I find — the AJAX is a little screwy or something. When that happens, refresh the page, and hit “Toggle Comment Threads.” Then the links should work.
What this is for and how to use it
Rather than standard forum software, which can be clunky to use, I’m trying a special kind of WordPress theme where logged-in authors can post directly on the front page, and see comments updated in real time as on Twitter. My hope is that it will have the ease of use of Twitter or Tumblr but the power of WordPress, without the hassles attending a full-fledged social networking site. (We’re mostly artists and poets here. How much more sociable can we stand to be?)
I am so excited that you are doing this. It seems much more appropriate that this discussion group grow from moving poems (no offense intended to the folks at We Write Poems).
I am new to wordpress, so it will take me a little while to understand it all. But it looks manageable. I think Nic’s series of 10 questions on technology. . .
Did you send David Moolten the link?
(It’s nearly 11 pm now and I am closing down for the night). Back in the am.
How to get an avatar
Whether you’re a contributor or just a commenter here, you can get an avatar by going to Gravatar.com. (If you’ve ever registered for a site at WordPress.com, you already have a gravatar and it should show up if you use the same email to sign in here.)
