~ Author-made videopoems ~

supervillain by Martha McCollough

On 6 September, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Another striking animated poem from artist and wordsmith Martha McCollough. “All the images in this video are collaged from paintings of mine,” she notes.

Yellow by Peter Stephens

On 3 September, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Poet, blogger, and high school English teacher Peter Stephens explained in a comment to his blog post:

Teachers return to school today. In celebration, I exercised the film rights to my last three tweets.

Follow Peter’s literary tweets @SlowReads.

Costa Rica by Zachary Schomburg

On 23 August, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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According to the Vimeo desciption, “Costa Rica” appears in Zachary Schomburg’s latest collection, Fjords (see the review by J.A. Taylor at The Nervous Breakdown). Not sure how I missed this when he uploaded it 8 months ago, but it’s as good as any poem-film he’s ever made, proving once again that Schomburg is not just a inventive poet but one of our most adept video interpreters of his own work.

the questions by Martha McCollough

On 7 August, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough notes that this is

A revision of my first video from the Grey Vacation project. Sinister girl detectives

McCollough has elsewhere described Grey Vacation as an erasure project, so this is essentially found poetry, I guess (though I would argue that to a certain extent all poetry is found poetry).

The way of immolation by Peter Stephens

On 6 August, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Peter Stephens says in a blog post introducing the video:

I had a nice day Monday hiking around the Appalachian Trail’s Roller Coaster off of Bears Den. I used my phone there to shoot this forty-second videopoem.

He added in a comment:

My first videopoem in over a year. Forty seconds long and a single shoot, so it’s not like it killed me or nothing.

To Mend Small Children by B.C. Edwards

On 31 July, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Book trailers
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This charming videopoem using (I presume) archival footage is a video trailer for a chapbook by B.C. Edwards, To Mend Small Children, from a new publisher called Augury Books.

The Polish Language by Alice Lyons

On 27 July, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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This is just about the most inventive typographic animation I’ve even seen — a gorgeous and moving tribute to the power of Polish poetry by American-Irish poet and artist Alice Lyons and Irish artist Orla Mc Hardy. The film has its own website at thepolishlanguage.com, whence the following description:

The Polish Language is an animated film-poem about the subversive force of art and the renewal of poetry in the whispery language of Polish.

Based on the poem of the same title, the film pays homage to the revitalization of poetry in the Polish language in the 20th century. Using hand-drawn, stop-motion and time-lapse animation techniques, the poem unfolds onscreen, with typography as a key visual element. It visual style is loosely based on underground publications in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, known as Bibula. A chorus of voices sampling poems in Polish, woven together with original music by sound designer Justin Spooner, combine to create a powerful score in a film of ’emotional depth and technical sophistication’ (Jury, Galway Film Fleadh 2009, award for Best Animation).

The Polish Language is at once a playful and solemn journey into the sensuality, beauty and power of language.

Lyons wrote the poem, while Mc Hardy took the lead on the animation. For full credits and a list of screenings, see the website’s About page. The poets sampled in the soundtrack are Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska.

there is about half a white moon tonight

On 24 July, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpwahVK9QCg

The poem by London writer Mikey Fatboy Delgado is performed by Foy Migado and Kemoe Hopscotch. See YouTube for the text of the poem.

The Disappearing Line (selections) by Mark G. Williams

On 18 July, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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http://vimeo.com/12127670

Thare are Chapters 6, 8, 11, 20 and 21 of Mark G. Williams‘ erasure-poetry project The Disappearing Line, which he described in an email as follows:

These evolved from using white-out to turn junk mail into found poetry; currently and with these I used popular novels, working backwards from two such novels, one word at a time and making sure plenty of space separates my choices to avoid ‘stealing’ phrases, and working until I get 100-word sentences. I count on short-term memory loss and the use of the text of others to force out phrases and sentences that I likely would never have heard or written otherwise.

Chapter 20 was part of a display at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art called Looking Forward: Ten Artists to Watch, from June 14–July 7, 2012. Watch all 30 chapters on Mark’s Vimeo channel.

I spy by Martha McCollough

On 28 June, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough writes: “A love poem in the voice of a surveillance satellite. Built in aftereffects, Sound design in Logic.”

Missing Parade Notes by Valerie LeBlanc

On 26 June, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/43368324

Canadian artist and videopoet Valerie LeBlanc‘s latest video. Here’s how she describes it at Vimeo:

A summer parade opening the Calgary Stampede celebrations, 2001 is presented in triplicate. The visuals provide a focus for reflection on events that only weeks later marked changed levels of social innocence.

Missing Parade Notes was assembled and edited into a short video documenting highlights of the parade. Slow motion and colour treatment were added to age the footage. The result is reminiscent of archived film footage from an earlier time. The video was then assembled in triplicate as a base to carry the poetry text. Recently composed, the text message appears to have been added using analogue typewriter technology. Overall, the intention is to span the time disconnect and the reaction to past events. The audio component is a mixed cacophony of music and cheering rising up to the spectator.

from The Inventor’s Last Breath by J. Hope Stein

On 18 June, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Irujr2nWI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R67JpJ76_04

Two excerpts from a 15-minute film called The Inventor’s Last Breath, which premiered at the 2011 CinePoetry Festival at the Henry Miller Library at Big Sur. The film, by J. Hope Stein, is based on her chapbook Talking Doll. Stein blogged this about the first excerpt, “Tiny Men”:

The audio and video are comprised of the some of the first wax cylinder and moving image recordings made by Thomas Edison in the late1880’s- early 1900’s including footage of an elephant Edison had publicly electrocuted as part of a scheme to drive one of his competitors out of business as well as the first kiss ever recorded in moving image.

As far as audio recordings, I used a recording of a man singing into his private phonogram which has a really personal quality, as if he is singing as he mows the lawn or in the shower. I also used an audio recording of Handel’s Israel in Egypt – labeled “ A choir of 4,000 voices over 100 yards away” which was recorded at the Crystal Palace in London in 1888 and has the eerie sound of a lost civilization trying to communicate specifically with us in this moment as their voices time travel through the distressed materials of the early phonograph cylinders.

And about the second excerpt, “The Insomniacs,” she wrote:

All of the music and moving image is sampled from early archived recordings by Thomas Edison. (Except for the song at the end by Broken Bells).

The footage in this clip is just slow motion of a windy city day at the foot of the Flatiron Building in New York City in 1903.