~ Filmmaker: Dave Bonta ~
Reprieve by Luisa A. Igloria
Luisa Igloria has been writing daily poems for my blog, Via Negativa since last November, but I didn’t get around to envideoing any of her poems until her 50th birthday last week — shameful, I know! Luisa is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and eight other books, and grew up in Baguio City, the Philippines. I blogged about the making of the video here, and Luisa’s poem first appeared on the blog in text form here.
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier
Portland, Oregon-based poet Dale Favier has been blogging at mole since 2003. His first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out this month just out from Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. A subsequent sighting of a mole in the yard resulted in this video. (See Via Negativa for a more detailed description of the process.)
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
we were ten by Nic S.
A new Moving Poems production, once again using not just the voice but also the poetry of Nic S.. This is the opening poem of her nanopress collection Forever Will End On Thursday. Nic was kind enough to record a new audio version of the poem especially for this video, since I took an opposite tack from my usual approach and tried to reproduce something of the feel of the text on the page, going line by line and using a different shot for each stanza, with a repeating shot for the spaces in between. I blogged about the process at Via Negativa, as usual.
Cuba and Coltrane by Nicelle Davis
A new Moving Poems production in support of the Whale Sound audio chapbook Studies in Monogamy: Poems by Nicelle Davis. For more about Nicelle, see her bio on the site. The reading is by Nic S., and the music is a cover of John Coltrane’s “Naima” by The VIG Quartet, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license and uploaded to SoundCloud. I blogged about the making of the video at Via Negativa.
homesteader by Nic S.
Another Moving Poems production for a poem by Nic S., read by the author, from her book Forever Will End On Thursday (text here). I blogged about the making of the video at Via Negativa the other day.
“Heaven is so far of the Mind” by Emily Dickinson
A new Moving Poems production. This is from 1862, #413 in the R. W. Franklin edition, and while not one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, it does encapsulate, I think, one of her core beliefs, and is therefore a useful key to understanding her work as a whole. I couldn’t resist adding an ironic visual reference to one of her most famous poems.
on being constantly civil towards death by Nic S.
A new Moving Poems production in support of Nic S.’s chapbook Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, which is available in a variety of media: online text with audio players; free downloads in MP3, PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats; audio CD and print-on-demand.
For links to more of Nic S.’s work, see her blog Very Like a Whale. Nic’s other online projects include the audio poetry journal Whale Sound and Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks. I blogged about the making of this video last night at Via Negativa, for anyone who’s interested in the process.
the wanderer’s blessing by Nic S.
This new Moving Poems production features a poem and reading by Nic S. from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday. She blogged her reaction to the video here. “The wanderer’s blessing” originally appeared in the online journal Escape Into Life.
For more about Nic, including links to a number of her poems online, see the bio page at her blog.
The Green Man by Dick Jones
A Moving Poems production by yours truly. The text and reading are by the English poet and blogger Dick Jones. Thanks are also due to the blog carnival The Festival of the Trees, edition #60, which reprinted Dick’s poem, and featured as well a number of videos, helping to inspire this effort.
hollow by Peter Stephens
A Moving Poems production, with the cooperation of Nic S. at Whale Sound, who agreed to let me use her reading for the soundtrack, and the author, who perhaps unwisely gave his permission without any constraints whatsoever. Read Peter’s original text at his blog, Slow Reads. I think it’s a spectacular poem, and I hope my video does it justice — or at least excites interest in the poet and the reader.
I found the rest of the soundtrack at ccMixter, and a public-domain film to poach footage from at the Prelinger Archives (just two of the many online resources I’ve found for videopoem makers — check out the whole list).
What is to Give Light by Yahia Lababidi
Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, a Facebook contact, shared the text of his poem at The Idler just after I discovered that Al Jazeera has a cache of Creative Commons-licensed videos available for remix. So with Lababidi’s blessing I pulled this videopoem together, using some of that Egyptian street poetry for a soundtrack. I did the reading myself because he was having internet-connection problems and wasn’t able to send me his own reading.
Videos in the film/animation category at YouTube don’t seem to attract too many views, so I identified it as “News & Politics” instead. We’ll see if that makes a difference. In any case, it needs to be watched by people with an interest in the uprising.
