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A Tree is Everything by Manasvi Bantawa

On 30 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Manasvi Bantawa was a 3rd Grade student, so 8 or 9 years old, when this animation was made two years ago by Alex McClelland, working from a poster design by Zack Montrunecs. It’s part of the Healing Stanzas project:

Healing Stanzas is a collaborative project between Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and Glyphix design studio. This series combines the creative talents of KSU Visual Communication Design students with student writers (grades 3–12), health care providers, medical students, patients, and veterans to encourage dialogue about the connection between art and medicine, writing and healing.

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Hearing Your Voice for the First Time by Raymond Luczak

On 24 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Book trailers, Performance Poetry
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Raymond Luczak has made a number of compelling poetry videos in American Sign Language, but this may be my favorite to date. It’s in support of his new book Mute. (See his YouTube channel for a few others.) Luczak writes:

In this clip, I recall what it was like to use my hearing aids when calling a prospective date for the first time. This happened back in the late 1980s, way before the Internet thing came along. The talented songwriter Seth Pennington performs his song “Want” as a guitar instrumental.

(As with the other Luczak videos I’ve posted, I’m putting this in the Spoken Word category even though that’s obviously not a perfect fit.)

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein

On 23 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance
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*

[Edited 10/19/17: The original upload has gone missing, so it’s been replaced with two excerpts.]

This is Shutters Shut, choreographed by the legendary duo Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, A.K.A. Lightfoot León, and premiered by the Nederlands Dans Theater II in 2003. Paul Lightfoot told Ballet magazine, “In a way Shutters is a study, it’s an exercise.”

This performance is by Gauthier Dance, the dance ensemble of Theaterhaus Stuttgart. The dancers are Armando Braswell and Rosario Guerra. The film was edited by Valerie Haaf-Seidel, with camera work by Fritz Moser and Werner Schmidtke. (There’s another performance on YouTube, by Nederlands Dans Theater II itself, but that’s only an excerpt and seems to have been uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder.)

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Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer) by Matt Mullins

On 16 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Brilliant video remix of an Oral Roberts sermon by Matt Mullins. (For the text, see the description at Vimeo.)

fugue: forget you by Martha McCollough

On 15 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough used footage by Kris Rodammer for this contrapuntal videopoem.

Of Shepherds by Ruah Edelstein

On 14 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Of all the inadvertent omissions from this site, my failure to share any of Ruah Edlestein‘s marvelous Oah & Harlam animations until now may be the most egregious. I love how the animation and the text each tell part of this odd and touching story — something that probably couldn’t have happened quite so seamlessly if the animator and the poet hadn’t been one and the same. Edelstein’s description at Vimeo reads:

This is a first episode from the series of “Oah & Harlam Episodes”.
The project is based on a poetic prose by Ruah Edelstein. At first glance the stories about two
weirdos Oah and Harlam may appear as senseless.
But when there is an overflow of senselessness, then appears deep philosophy.

Original music score by Yoon S. Lee
Sound and final mix by Diego Perez

for more: ruahedelstein.blogspot.com

Jayne Cortez live with Denardo Coleman: three poems

On 9 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Musical settings, Performance Poetry
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1. Find Your Own Voice

2. I’m Gonna Shake

3. She Got He Got

The recent death of Jayne Cortez prompted a post on Metafilter calling attention to her pioneering and musically compelling work with jazz musicians. Though most of the YouTube material is audio-only, the above videos were expertly filmed and recorded. They’re from a concert/reading in 2010 with Denardo Coleman accompanying his mother on drums. Andrew Lynn directed, with camera work by Elanor Goldsmith, Ira McKinley and Joshua Thorson. The description on YouTube reads:

“A Dialogue Between Voice and Drums,” live at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY on October 23, 2010. A firespitting evening with drummer Denardo Coleman, featuring a voice celebrated for her political, surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism, and visceral sound. Cortez’s literary work and impassioned activism, inspired by the ideals of human dignity and social justice, have been called blues poetics, part of the foundation of hip hop and performance poetry. Denardo Coleman is a musician, composer, producer and drummer with the Ornette Coleman Quartet.

Darkroom by Erica Goss

On 8 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Erica Goss should be familiar to regular readers of Moving Poems for her monthly column about videopoetry, The Third Form, but she is also a very good poet in her own right, as this new collaboration with Swoon (Marc Neys) demonstrates. This was actually a tri-national collaboration, because the cinematography was by Alastair Cook, re-edited by Marc. For the text of the poem, as well as some process notes, see Marc’s blog.

locating faraway objects by Kate Greenstreet

On 7 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This was made for The Volta: Medium, a weekly video column that often features poetry. Greenstreet also posted the text to her website.

I Want To Die While You Love Me by Georgia Douglas Johnson

On 3 January, 2013 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This mash-up by Othniel Smith is so wrong, it’s right: images from Red Detachment of Women accompany a Librivox reading of a classic poem from the Harlem Rennaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. I hope her heirs have a sense of humor.

Apocalypse Later by Michael Anthony Ricciardi

On 21 December, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XATMw6d8DMk

A great example of remix videopoetry from before the YouTube era. Michael Anthony Ricciardi, whose YouTube channel is called Video Poetry TV, says of this piece:

An alternative perspective on ‘the end of the world’. This video poem received a ‘top ten finalist’ award at the Cin(e)-Poetry Festival XXII (San Fran, 1998). It was made with original, found, and some appropriated footage (analog). Soundtrack composed of sampled radio, original moog, acoustic guitar riffing and vocal.

Mouth by Timothy David Orme

On 20 December, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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You’ve probably heard of erasure poetry, “a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem.” This is an erasure film with a poem in the soundtrack, as Timothy David Orme explains at CutBank, where “Mouth” is the December feature in their recently launched new media series, jərˈmān.

“Mouth” is a short erasure film that visually displays the remaining portions of a 35mm trailer that have not been scraped away, and aurally features the reading of a poem titled, simply, “Mouth.”