~ Author-made videopoems ~

Flowers by Tim Cumming

On 7 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Tim Cumming‘s description at Vimeo is worth quoting in full:

A new film poem by Tim Cumming written on a walk from Hampstead Heath station to the Steeles in Belsize Park where he was offered snuff laced with cocaine and heard the story of Moll King, good mixer of Georgian London, a famous bawd and the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Includes footage of witch dolls, amulets, mandrakes and more from the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, birds on the wire at Bodmin, Lord Byron and the waters of the Thames from Woolwich Dockyard, the paintings of Austin Osman Spare from the 2010 exhibition at the Cuming Museum in south London, 8mm archive film of The Towers in Corfe Mullen in the 1960s and wooden figurines carved in the 1980s by the hand of Peter Cumming.

La Ferita (The Cut) by Elena Chiesa

On 4 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Another brilliant animation by Elena Chiesa, this one with her own text.

Right Through the Earth by Al Rempel

On 1 March, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An intriguing, experimental videopoem filmed and directed by the author, Canadian poet Al Rempel. From the description on YouTube:

Right Through the Earth is a video-poem taken from the poem in my book, This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For. Steph St. Laurent of VideoNexus helped with post-production work & Isaac Smeele composed the original music for the sound-track.

This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For is due to be published this month by Caitlin Press.

What I Say Sometimes But Then Stop Myself by Peter Davis

On 21 February, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Featured at The Volta: Medium, Issue #56,. Peter Davis “writes, draws, and makes music in Muncie, Indiana,” according to his bio. This poem is from his third book of poems, TINA, forthcoming from Bloof Books. Author-made poetry animations are a relative rarity for obvious reasons: animation is hard. But when poets do possess the skills to animate their own poems, very interesting things can happen, as this video demonstrates.

Traversate by Elena Chiesa

On 4 February, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Italian videoartist Elena Chiesa says about her videopoetry:

These animations are the result of many metamorphosis of frames worked one by one “melting the pixels” as oil paint. The sum of many transformations creates this fluid…

Listening to poetry, as to a mantra or a song, always brings our mind to create a flow of images, stimulating the creation of visions provoked in our mind and memory by the words or sounds. What I try to produce is this flow. My personal flow. In animation.

Though she sometimes animates others’ poems, she doesn’t credit anyone else for “Traversate,” so I’m assuming she’s the author of both the poem and the translation.

Hearing Your Voice for the First Time by Raymond Luczak

On 24 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Book trailers, Performance Poetry
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Raymond Luczak has made a number of compelling poetry videos in American Sign Language, but this may be my favorite to date. It’s in support of his new book Mute. (See his YouTube channel for a few others.) Luczak writes:

In this clip, I recall what it was like to use my hearing aids when calling a prospective date for the first time. This happened back in the late 1980s, way before the Internet thing came along. The talented songwriter Seth Pennington performs his song “Want” as a guitar instrumental.

(As with the other Luczak videos I’ve posted, I’m putting this in the Spoken Word category even though that’s obviously not a perfect fit.)

Danebury Ring by Tim Cumming

On 22 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Another video from U.K. poet-filmmaker Tim Cumming, this one uploaded to YouTube, whence the following description:

A film poem shot by poet Tim Cumming at Danebury Ring on the Hampshire-Wiltshire-Dorset borders. Danebury Ring is a stunning Iron Age hill fort where sheep graze in the centre of the rings, and the rings are circled by huge old trees. Tim Cumming’s poem, Danebury Ring, appears in the forthcoming anthology of British and Irish poetry, Identity Parade from Bloodaxe Books.

That anthology is now available (scroll down for a well-produced video of the launch reading).

Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer) by Matt Mullins

On 16 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Brilliant video remix of an Oral Roberts sermon by Matt Mullins. (For the text, see the description at Vimeo.)

fugue: forget you by Martha McCollough

On 15 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough used footage by Kris Rodammer for this contrapuntal videopoem.

Of Shepherds by Ruah Edelstein

On 14 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Of all the inadvertent omissions from this site, my failure to share any of Ruah Edlestein‘s marvelous Oah & Harlam animations until now may be the most egregious. I love how the animation and the text each tell part of this odd and touching story — something that probably couldn’t have happened quite so seamlessly if the animator and the poet hadn’t been one and the same. Edelstein’s description at Vimeo reads:

This is a first episode from the series of “Oah & Harlam Episodes”.
The project is based on a poetic prose by Ruah Edelstein. At first glance the stories about two
weirdos Oah and Harlam may appear as senseless.
But when there is an overflow of senselessness, then appears deep philosophy.

Original music score by Yoon S. Lee
Sound and final mix by Diego Perez

for more: ruahedelstein.blogspot.com

locating faraway objects by Kate Greenstreet

On 7 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This was made for The Volta: Medium, a weekly video column that often features poetry. Greenstreet also posted the text to her website.

Radio Carbon by Tim Cumming

On 4 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Tim Cumming is a major British poet-filmmaker whose work I’ve just recently learned about. Radio Carbon was especially interesting to me since I’ve been watching a lot of archaeological documentaries in which radiocarbon dating features heavily. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

When cosmic rays strike the atmosphere they create the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which can be detected in living matter and decays at a fixed rate over many millennia. Radiocarbon dating is the method by which we measure prehistoric time, and with which our own detritus will one day be measured.
The filmpoem Radio Carbon takes this transient yet permanent record of time as a personal metaphor, fashioning a hypnotic journey into the human past, from the neolithic to the present moment.
It’s a film with eternity at its centre, the vastness of space at its core, and a reverie of images clustering to the lens like the flashing in a stranger’s eye.

This is in 24 numbered sections, and may be viewed as a sequence of separate, interlocking filmpoems with recurring motifs. Cummings shot the film’s 8mm footage in addition to doing all the editing — a major undertaking for a film of this length. His profile at Salt Publications says that Radio Carbon “was premiered at the Renoir cinema in 2009 and at Port Eliot Festival in 2010.”