~ Nationality: United States ~

Tryouts by Gary Jackson

On 19 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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Animation by Victor Newman of a poem from Gary Jackson‘s book Missing You, Metropolis, which “imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend,” according to the publisher’s description. Newman was assisted by animators Jonathan Djob Nkonbo and Jeff Chong, JD McMillin did the sound design, and the voiceover is by Chuck Johnson.

Tryouts was produced by Motionpoems as part of their Season 7, in partnership with Cave Canem. For the text of the poem, see the Motionpoems website.

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Thank You, Tree by Fatou M’Baye

On 11 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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Nathan Tranbarger filmed and edited this video for the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas project, which has been going on now as long as Moving Poems. I’m happy to see that they’re not only still around; they’ve expanded into a proper online magazine as well as maintaining the public poetry poster side of the project. Kent State Magazine also has a short piece about this video:

[Fatou] M’Baye wrote the poem “Thank You, Tree” last fall as a fifth-grader attending the Holden Elementary School Writer’s Club, an after-school program. David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center, held a workshop at the club as part of the center’s outreach efforts to the community. “In the first session, we started with the idea of being grateful for something in our lives,” says Hassler. “Fatou chose this tree.”

“I wanted to thank her for helping me and my friends,” says M’Baye. “I wanted to thank all the trees. Without them we wouldn’t have healthy, happy lives.” […]

Since 2009 illustrated poems have made their way across Northeast Ohio, displayed on buses and transit systems and printed on posters and postcards as a project of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Wick Poetry Center. Now these poetry illustrations are journeying around the world as part of an interactive website and traveling exhibit that launched this fall, with support from the Ohio Arts Council.

Traveling Stanzas—an award-winning collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center and the School of Visual Communication Design—aims to facilitate a global conversation through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. Featured poems are curated from global submissions and illustrated by Kent State students and alumni.

Click through to see the poster made for M’Baye’s poem.

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13 Ways of Looking at a Haiku + anagram mix by Jim Kacian

On 6 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Jim Kacian riffs on the famous Wallace Stevens poem, but in visual terms, featuring variants on an original theme. Filmed on Moosehead Lake, Maine, in 2016 and presented here during HaikuLife 2017, part of International Haiku Poetry Day, an initiative of The Haiku Foundation, held 17 April 2017.

That’s from the Haiku Foundation’s HaikuLife 2017 page, which also presents a companion video:

While creating 13 Ways of Looking at a Haiku for HaikuLife 2017, Jim Kacian became addicted to the anagrammatic possibilities of his “seed poem”. Here are 13 of what he feels are the best variations (he warns that many others are possible).

Jim Kacian is one of the most prominent practitioners and publishers in the modern (gendai) English-language haiku scene. It’s great to see him taking such an innovative approach to haiku videopoetry here. Most haiku videos on YouTube and Vimeo are intensely conservative and boring, in my opinion, featuring little of the creative disjunction for which modern haiku is known.

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In Darwin’s Dream by Matt Mullins

On 26 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A brand-new collaboration between two seasoned poetry-film pros, Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe and American writer Matt Mullins, who edits the mixed media section of Atticus Review. Although Matt’s own videopoems are often very effective, here he supplied just the text, voiceover and music, and Eduardo did the rest — the same division of labor as in their 2016 film The Hero is Light. The actress here is Rut Ayuso.

Daddy Dearest by Lissa Kiernan

On 22 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Marc Neys AKA Swoon‘s latest video for a poem by Lissa Kiernan incorporates footage by Grant Porter, Tim Williams and Mikeel Araña. Marc’s original composition features in the soundtrack alongside Lissa’s recitation.

Cathedral by Dave Richardson

On 21 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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My brother lost his virginity behind the barn, he says, but he says a lot of things… sometimes we want to hold on to sanctuaries and cathedrals even as they crumble.

A new, text-on-screen videopoem by artist and writer Dave Richardson, each of whose poetry films so far has been something of a masterpiece. This one has special resonance for me, since I also grew up playing in an old barn with my brothers, and love old barns in general. Cathedral strikes me as a quiet but powerful ode to this most iconic embodiment of rural life.

What is a soul? by Luisa A. Igloria

On 12 September, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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I recently returned to Pennsylvania after a summer in London, and on my way out of Newark, New Jersey, I shot a brief cellphone video through the dusty window of a Greyhound bus, capturing some remarkable murals on a wall beneath a train line. After I got home and recovered from jet-lag a bit, it occurred to me that the footage might make an interesting pairing with a short poem by Luisa A. Igloria, which she’d just posted to the literary blog we share, Via Negativa. Footage shot from car, bus and (especially) train windows is of course exceedingly common in videopoetry, but I’m hoping my use of moving text saves this instance of it from cliché. I liked the juddering racket of the bus, preserving it as-is in the soundtrack even after I slowed the clip down.

When a Wiggly-Monster Was My World by David Olimpio

On 31 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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An animated poem with text and voiceover by David Olimpio and animation and direction by Efrat Dahan. It was made as part Moving Words, a project from the New Jersey-based organization ARTS By The People pairing American writers with animators from the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. The international premiere of the 2017 animations in Tel Aviv has already happened (August 11), but the US premiere is still up-coming on Sept. 9 at Drew University. (Reserve tickets.) Olimpio told me in an email:

What ABTP is trying to do with the “Moving Words” project is to not only make these stand-alone animation pieces, but also to integrate them with live performances. Here’s the video of me performing this piece live at the Animix Animation Festival in Tel Aviv, where this animation was one of many featured the day before.

Integrating multimedia with live readings is something poets don’t do nearly enough, in my view, and I’ve also long felt that there ought to be more efforts to get university film and animation students to collaborate with poets, so I was excited to learn about Moving Words. (I also really like their name, for some reason.)

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Fucking Him by C.O. Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez

On 30 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“Love and fucking may sometimes be the same. But not when it counts,” reads the synopsis for this 2015 poetry film directed jointly by Claire Olivia (C.O.) Moed and Adrian Garcia Gomez.

Last year, Fucking Him won Best Experimental Film at the Manhattan Independent Film Festival and Curator’s Choice for Best Sound/Music at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, was the Grand Prix Winner for Found Footage at the 2015 Interference Festival in Gdansk, and has been screened in a number of other festivals as well.

What would you do? by PXVCE

On 9 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new video by YouTuber PXVCE, who writes in the description,

In this short piece i ask questions about the future of humanity, pointing out systematic oppression in today’s society! Encouraging listeners to wake up and reverse the cycle!

As noted in the video title, this was shot with the help of a small drone as well as a smartphone cinematography extension that sounds pretty amazing.

PXVCE describes himself as a “Cleveland born producer and artist” who “has a goal to create poetry for the culture.”

Subliminal messages embedded in his pieces often evoke medication and a state of chill. Implementing positive vibes and witty word play PXVCE offers a nostalgic style reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance Era. While the soul takes its aural banquet from the universal language, the conscious is awakened. A Third eye is no longer dormant in the listener’s senses creating change one piece at a time ushering in new thought.

Artist as change agent is nothing new. However, it’s the way that this artist manages to use his music artistry to motivate, initiate, and spark creativity in listeners so that unity and love find a place in their lives that makes him a top-of-mind poet for this generation.

5AM by Lissa Kiernan

On 8 August, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A new film by Marc Neys AKA Swoon using a text and reading by American poet Lissa Kiernan, his second collaboration with her (see Witness from 2013). Marc used footage by Finn Karstens and Graham Uhelski.

It is an Intensely Private Experience by Danica Depenhart

On 22 July, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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This brilliant, author-made stop-motion animation is featured in the latest issue of TriQuarterly. “Found materials do the heavy lifting of visual argument to demonstrate how repurposed materials might reveal something about the person who finds them,” as TriQuarterly‘s video editor Sarah Minor puts it.

It’s good to see that the 152nd issue of this venerable American literary magazine continues in the pattern set since its move to the web several years ago, leading off with a short video section introduced by its own essay. The fact that they seem to have dropped the term “cinepoetry” and call everything a “video essay” now is puzzling, but may simply reflect a shift in fashion among the MFA-led American literary establishment, where it must’ve gotten a huge boost by the bestseller status of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which includes the transcripts of several video essays from the ongoing “Situations” series filmed in collaboration with John Lucas. The rise of creative nonfiction as a component of MFA programs may also have played a role. But even outside high literary culture, the video essay has certainly become a fashionable genre on both sides of the Atlantic, even if there appears to be little agreement on what it means (that sounds familiar).

At any rate, be sure to visit Triquarterly Issue 152 to watch the other two, er, non-narrative videos by Annelyese Gelman and Spring Ulmer. To learn more about video essay as a genre, this video about essay films by film critic Kevin B. Lee, from a recent opinion piece in Sight&Sound magazine, seems like a good place to start:

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