~ Filmmaker: Dave Bonta ~
When nights are longest by Luisa A. Igloria
Happy Holidays to all Moving Poems readers/viewers. This is a joint production of Moving Poems and Via Negativa, where Luisa A. Igloria and I blog daily poems. Via Negativa began in mid-December 2003, and this time of year “when nights are longest” has always seemed full of creative possibilities to me. So I found a mysterious, dark but light-filled home move at the Prelinger Archives, selected and arranged some of the images into a composition that made sense to me, emailed the link to Luisa and asked her if she thought she could find a poem in it. Indeed she could! After a little back-and-forth about the title and opening lines, she settled on a final form for the text and sent me a reading that she recorded with her mobile phone. I found a Creative Commons-licensed sound recording on SoundCloud through my usual method of clicking on random links and trusting in serendipity: it’s a field recording by Marc Weidenbaum of Phil Kline’s “Unsilent Night” boombox procession passing a certain point in the streets of San Francisco on December 18, 2010.
Moving Poems will be taking the rest of the week off, but will be back on the 29th.
Foreclosure by Tara Skurtu
Another Moving Poems original. The poem is from The Poetry Storehouse, and originally appeared in B O D Y. I included Nic S.’s reading from the Storehouse in the soundtrack, mixed with a piece by an Austrian-based electronic composer who uses the handle strange day.
The dollhouse footage is mine. The rest comes from the free stock-footage site Beachfront B-Roll, whose proprietor continues to impress me with the non-generic, idiosyncratic quality of his clips. They also happen to look way more professional than mine, which is no wonder since I have crappy equipment and no training. I hope the footage I’ve chosen is oblique enough to avoid a feeling of redundancy.
Tara Skurtu is a poet and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. Visit her website at taraskurtu.com. She also has a YouTube channel with some videos of her readings.
Jubilee by Traci Brimhall
A Moving Poems original, made with a text from The Poetry Storehouse, my own reading, some gorgeous free footage by Jeff at Beachfront B-Roll, and Creative Commons-licensed music by SonicSpiral*Selections s on SoundCloud. I must admit that this was a case of my falling in love with the footage first and then hunting for a poem to fit it (and the Poetry Storehouse archives are large enough now for that to work). But Traci Brimhall is a first-rate poet, and I’m very pleased I was able to work with one of her poems. Thanks also to Poets & Writers for sharing it on their video blog last week.
Like the other videopoems I’ve made lately, this has closed captioning, which can be turned on via the button on the bottom right. To see how Brimhall arranged it on the page, though, please refer to her page at the Storehouse.
White Birches by Jennifer Martelli
A new Moving Poems production. I was browsing recent clips at the Beachfront B-Roll blog and was taken by a plume of rising smoke, which struck me as just the right sort of image for a poem I’d just read at the Poetry Storehouse that features a small forest of white birches. The author is Massachusetts-based poet Jennifer Martelli. After searching SoundCloud and the Free Music Archive in vain, I finally found a track on ccMixter that seemed to fit. I was going for a Tom Waits kind of vibe, and I’m delighted to report that Martelli (with whom I’d never previously communicated) liked the video, and said some kind things about my reading as well. It really does take a leap of faith to submit one’s poems to the Poetry Storehouse and let random strangers mess around with them.
A few technical process notes: I’m now using MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, following a recommendation by Marc Neys, and am finding it to be a better fit for my needs and abilities as an amateur filmmaker than what I’d been using before, Adobe Premiere Elements. After uploading the finished video to Vimeo, I decided to add closed captioning, inputting the poem line-by-line as it appears in the published text so that even people with normal hearing can still benefit from turning on the captions (CC button, lower right) and seeing how the poet chose to arrange her words. I also discovered that the WebVTT file generated by Amara can be subsequently tweaked in a simple text editor (I used Notepad) to correct typos or finesse start and stop times before uploading it to Vimeo. While I like the results, this is a poem with a lot of enjambment, so I’m not sure whether my desire to display original line breaks should have trumped the need of viewers for a potentially smoother read. I welcome feedback on that point.
¿Las oyes cómo piden realidades…? (Do you hear how they beg for realities?) by Pedro Salinas
Poem and voice by the great Spanish poet Pedro Salinas (1891-1951), one of the Generation of ’27 along with Lorca, Aleixandre, Alberti, and so many other wonderful writers. Click on the CC icon to read the English subtitles (my own translation).
I made an earlier version of this five years ago with the subtitles baked into the video, and when someone recently asked me for a version without them, I realized I’d have to completely redo it, both because I no longer have the software I used then, and also because the earlier version was too low-resolution. I found and used the same soundtrack, but unfortunately I don’t remember who’s responsible for the music, only that it had been released to the public domain on archive.org. The audio of Salinas comes from palabravirtual.com. The footage of amorous garter snakes is my own, filmed in April 2009.
In the subtitles, the short phrase in brackets appears in Salinas’s published text but not in his recitation. Since the line means “which is the nothing,” or “which is nothingness,” I guess he decided to make it literal by reading nothing.
Incidentally, for other Vimeo users who might be wondering about the subtitles, I used Amara (it’s free and easy to use) and followed their instructions for uploading the file to Vimeo. For those of us with fairly basic video editing software, I think it’s actually easier to add subtitles in this way, and I’m thinking it might be a good idea to start adding closed captioning to English-language videopoems as well, and quit discriminating against the hearing-impaired.
Giacometti’s Pears by Donna Vorreyer
I couldn’t resist making a video for one of Donna Vorreyer‘s poems at The Poetry Storehouse myself. “Giacometti’s Pears” was originally published in Weave magazine. I blogged about my process a bit at Via Negativa last week.
Parler seul / Speech Alone
A poem by the great Jean Follain, read by Nic S. for Pizzicati of Hosanna. The translation by W.S. Merwin is from his book-length selection of Follain poems, Transparence of the World, which belongs on every poetry lover’s bookshelf.
I don’t make any great claims for this video; I just wanted some Follain here at Moving Poems and no one else was envideoing him in English.
Riqueza (Riches) by Gabriela Mistral
After all my web hosting woes of late, I think it’s safe to say that this site, at least, is back on an even keel. To celebrate, I made a video for one of my favorite poems, and Nic S. was gracious enough to upload a reading I could use to Pizzicati of Hosanna. I found the music on SoundCloud: “The Foggy Dew” on tin whistle by Chris Kent. I blogged a bit more about this at Via Negativa just now.
Fábula de la Sirena y los Borrachos (Fable of the Siren and the Drunks) by Pablo Neruda
Moving Poems’ latest production takes advantage of a new free-audio site that other filmmakers might be interested in, too: pizzicati of hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. The footage is from Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia. I blogged all about it at Via Negativa.
Sonnet 65 by William Shakespeare
A timeless meditation on time gets the film noir treatment. Moving Poems’ latest production uses footage from two films in the public domain at the Prelinger Archives and a Creative Commons-licenced William Byrd piece by Vicente Parrilla and company.
“Wild nights…” by Emily Dickinson
Thanks to CreatureCast for licensing this wonderful undersea footage under a Creative Commons license, permitting this repurposing. I blogged about the making of it at Via Negativa. Due to the format of the original film, I was forced to learn how to make a widescreen (16:9) video, which turned out not be difficult at all (thought the standardized dimensions of videos here at Moving Poems give it an extra-wide top and bottom border).
For a very different audio interpretation of the poem, listen to videopoet Brenda Clews‘ reading on the Woodrat Podcast, Episode 31: Emily Dickinson at 180. Brenda’s reading starts just past the four-minute mark.
