~ Nationality: United States ~

This is a traveling song by Kate Greenstreet

On 11 January, 2018 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Kate Greenstreet. As always, she was assisted by Max Greenstreet, listed in the credits as “right hand”. The text is poem #7 in her latest book from Ahsahta Press, The End of Something (where the poems rather than the pages are numbered), and the soundtrack incorporates the 7th track in Greenstreet’s EP drawn from the book, birds in the house. The video first appeared in Typo 28.

The End of Something is, by the way, a beautifully designed book which I read last month with great enjoyment, savoring the openness of the poems, full of imaginative leaps and half-unspoken truths that induce a kind of contemplative mood. This quality makes them ideal for multimedia adaptation, I think. Watch all four of the videopoems from the book, and download the EP, on the book’s website.

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inexhaustible wealths of feeling by Shabnam Piryaei

On 6 January, 2018 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/249761533

The latest “mediapoem” from poet and filmmaker Shabnam Piryaei. In lieu of any other description, Piryaei simply shares the text of the poem:

I can’t mark the first loneliness, the elongated pause, inkless and imagining magnolias. Or the first guilt, terrain of peaches overripe and trespassed with rigid fingers. Or the first haunt, a gas station bathroom swarmed with flies, slack spirits dangling from their mouths. Or the first love, tide of hyacinth, tide of red mud, chorus of elderly song. Or the first love, inebriated child wandering along snowy tracks. Or the first love, holding you by the wrists, shaking you like a bell.

This just appeared in my Vimeo feed yesterday, but I thought it was too good a companion for Friday’s and Thursday’s videos to hold it in the queue.

My Lover’s Pretty Mouth by Cindy St. Onge

On 5 January, 2018 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This author-made videopoem by the Oregon-based poet Cindy St. Onge is

the first in a series of Japanese/English poems that are part of process which is reflective and purgative. Soundtrack created with Garage Band, footage sourced from Videoblocks and Shutterstock, and edited with Movie Maker.

Read the text (in both languages) at St. Onge’s blog.

Intrigued, I contacted Cindy to ask if she’d like to say anything more about her process. She wrote:

These poems that are coming through are what I call ‘telegraphed,’ in that there is little contrivance involved until the revision happens. The meaning of “…Mouth” wasn’t clear to me until I had completed the video.

The poems are rooted in my difficult relationship with Japanese culture, after being married to a Japanese man many years ago. The mystery, to me, is the sudden and spontaneous telegraphing. Honestly, I don’t understand it. At this point, I’m just trying to be a good conduit for the poems, and if I get closure, even better.

As for the bilingual process, the poems were drafted in English with a smattering of Japanese, and I realized as I recited one of the poems that I loved how the Japanese sounded, how the word felt in my mouth, and determined to translate the whole poem — as an experiment. I haven’t spoken Japanese in 25 years, so I had to research most of it, relearning the language, really. As the translation got underway, the Japanese shaped the English revision of the poems, so there was this back-and-forth construction happening. It’s riling up memories, but it’s very satisfying at the same time.

Lowing by Jessica Rigney

On 4 January, 2018 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A poetry film directed and with music by the author, Jessica Rigney. The text was published in Salomé, a new “online literary magazine for emerging female writers,” as part of their Body issue (July 2017). It’s interesting seeing such perennial literary themes — sex, fertility, female body as landscape — treated from an entirely female point-of-view. When I watched this for the first time, it seemed at once very familiar and entirely new.

A Sonnet after Chopin’s Requiem by Monique-Adelle Callahan

On 2 January, 2018 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/189987473

A poem by Monique-Adelle Callahan turned into a film by the production company Timber (Jonah Hall and Kevin Lau), who note on Vimeo:

Every year the Motion Poems organization puts on a film festival where they pair a poet along with a filmmaker. The filmmaker is given nothing more than the words on the page to go off of for inspiration. The two never really meet and the result is a new visual interpretation of the poem that new and not influenced by the poet. Timber was lucky to be invited to the 2016 round and 7th season of the Motion Poems series. This year the theme was black poets and the poem we interrupted was Sonnet After Chopin’s Requiem by Monique-Adelle.

Enjoy the visual journey that we were taken on by the beautiful words of the author. Timber explored the ideas of visualizing sound and the experience of Synesthesia. We wanted to experiment with textures and feels and create worlds that evoked movement and ambiguity.

Click through for the credits, and visit Motionpoems to read the text.

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Peace-Prayer by Laura M Kaminski

On 24 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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Just in time for Christmas, an international collaboration between American poet Laura M Kaminski and Australian filmmaker Marie Craven, who shared it on Facebook:

Sending wishes for a peaceful time this season, to friends and family, near and far. Here is a video just completed. Poem by Laura M Kaminski. Music by Benjamin Dauer & Specta Ciera. My video concept and editing.

Cynic that I am, I found the video unexpectedly moving, so I guess it’s fitting that it be Moving Poems’ holiday selection this year. I join Marie and Laura in sending everyone wishes for peace, now and in the New Year.

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Our Lady Time by Meghan McDonald

On 20 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This author-made videopoem is the latest addition to Meghan McDonald’s playlist of poetry videos, where meditations on time have been a reoccurring theme.

I was trying to think of a concise way to characterize McDonald when I clicked on her website and saw the tagline: Sound experimenter, filmmaker and visual poet. That sounds about right. Here’s her bio.

The Impotence of Proofreading by Taylor Mali

On 19 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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How about some lighter fare to help relieve that pre-holiday stress? This is Missed Aches by director Joanna Priestley, based on a poem by Taylor Mali. It took First Prize at the Black Maria Film Festival, which called it “an uproarious animation by one of the nation’s iconic animation artists” and “a cascade of malapropisms.” Here are the full credits from the YouTube description:

Sound Design by Normand Roger and Pierre Yves Drapeau. Music by Pierre Yves Drapeau with Denis Chartrand and Normand Roger. Text Animation by Brian Kinkley. Character design and animation by Don Flores. Storyboards by Dan Schaeffer. Directed, produced and animated by Joanna Priestley. Supported by The Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Caldera Institute.

Living Image by Susie Welsh

On 16 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A mixed-media work by Los Angeles-based writer and artist Susie Welsh, which came to my attention when it was featured at the Atticus Review back in November. Welsh had written:

The Living Image project began as a call-and-response between my writing and the paintings of visual artist, Bill Atwood. These static elements were then brought to life on camera through my collaborations with video artists, Billy Hunt and Brian Wimer, as well as musician, Deke Shipp.

The video is in six numbered parts: “The Source,” “Inverted,” “In Echo,” “Out of Blindness,” “The Witness” and “The Sphinx.” The poet’s face forms part of the screen/surface onto which images are projected, which is always an interesting effect but works especially well here, drawing attention to the hermetic and spell-like quality of the text — a text which, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t like very much on its own, laden as it is with modifiers and abstractions. But it works well in a videopoem that’s truly greater than the sum of its parts. The Vimeo description reads:

Living Image is a poetry film exploring the frustration and alienation inherent in the assumption of selfhood, as well as the possibility of extricating the power of consciousness from our self-conscious preoccupation.

Click through to Atticus Review to read a fuller artist’s statement, which delves into ancient Egyptian cosmology, as well as a bio of Welsh. And while you’re there, check out the guidelines for submission — mixed media editor Matt Mullins is always looking for new material.

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“Aurora is the effort” by Emily Dickinson

On 14 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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A brand new videopoem by writer (and former film major) James Brush demonstrating one way to make an effective video with a very short, enigmatic text, marrying Dickinson’s cosmic lines with some footage that is literally out of this world. James put up a blog post about it, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting in full:

This is a video I made for Emily Dickinson’s “Aurora is the effort.” I stumbled on the Jupiter aurora footage at ESA/Hubble and wanted to do something with it. I had Dickinson on my mind since we share a birthday, and I often find myself turning to her work around this time of year, so I started searching for aurora-related Dickinson poems and liked this one for its simplicity and unusual syntax and wording. The sounds are radio static and me rubbing the strings and hitting the back of a bass guitar with some effects from garage band.

I’ve been wanting to do a Dickinson poem for years and even have a concept for another one that maybe someday will get done. Thanks for watching.

For an interesting perspective on what Dickinson might’ve been up to in this poem, see Jed Deppman’s Trying to Think With Emily Dickinson (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 129 ff. (via Google Books). Deppman finds that “Aurora is the effort”

features the kind of deconstructive paradox that both defines and destabilizes many of Dickinson’s definition poems: the category of “the natural” transforms into the others that philosophers have always used to define it by opposition: the “social,” “cultural” and “artificial.” The specific terms the speaker uses to transform cosmology into cosmetics and make heaven’s two-facedness the basis of a definition under erasure derive in part from the idea—circulating in Amherst thanks to Transcendentalism, Ruskin, Hitchcock, and the Hudson River school—that nature mirros God’s consciousness, that, as Barton Levi St. Armand puts it, “the sensuous veil of nature is but a protective covering over the naked creative spirit of the universe.”

It’s worth reading the analysis in full to realize just how much meaning Dickinson could pack into her gnomic verses.

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heyday by Shin Yu Pai

On 8 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A silent text animation by Michael Barakat, who worked closely with the poet, Shin Yu Pai. Shin Yu told me in an email last Sunday,

I created this piece with designer Michael Barakat for a civic festival for the City of Redmond, WA, where I am wrapping up a 2-year term as the city’s fourth poet laureate. We projected the piece on the side of City Hall at its annual Redmond Lights Festival which took place this past weekend.

Via Shin Yu’s blog, here’s a video (shot by Scott Keva James) showing what that looked like:

Blue Black Wet of Wood by Carmen Gillespie

On 7 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A film by Sundance Award-winning director Malik Vitthal for Motionpoems, based on the title poem from Carmen Gillespie‘s 2106 collection from Two Silvias Press. An adept juxtaposition of filmpoem lyricism with the kind of storytelling familiar to movie-goers conveys a powerful sense of the experience of loss within the African American community and beyond.

Motionpoems have also released a video interview with Gillespie, filmed and edited by Ramble Pictures, about the origin of the poem and the film:

Eric Doise, who conducted the interview, also put together a lesson plan for poetry teachers [PDF] based on the film and interview — the sort of thing I hope to see a lot more of in the coming years, both from Motionpoems and from other poetry-film makers as well.