~ Nationality: United States ~

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings

On 21 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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“People and places from a recent trip to San Diego, CA,” says documentary photojournalist and filmmaker Kristyn Ulanday in the description at Vimeo. I think she rather understates the awesomeness of this videopoem. (For the text of the poem, see Poets.org.)

“Subcutaneous”: Three poems by Dan Godston

On 19 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/38687396

Three poems in one video by the indefatigible Swoon. The poems are: “Spread Out,” “Trash” and “A Sonnet for Edgar Allan Poe.” For the texts, see Swoon’s blog post about the video.

Becoming Judas: five poems by Nicelle Davis

On 16 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Book trailers
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These poems are from Becoming Judas by Nicelle Davis, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. The wonderfully whimsical drawings by Cheryl Gross are animated in a fairly basic style which the description at YouTube dubs “motion graphics.”

Epithalamium by Timothy David Orme

On 15 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An interesting experimental piece by filmmaker and poet Timothy David Orme, who describes it at Vimeo as follows:

Epithalamium is a hybrid work of “poetry” and altered, erased, and intentionally damaged 16mm film–an odd marriage poem to an ex-wife, the first part being a poem for the speaker’s marriage day, the second part being a poem to the divorced wife’s future marriage, a sort of ‘future memory.’

Epithalamium is a silent project.

For more examples of Orme’s filmmaking, see his online portfolio.

Voices from Haiti: Boy in Blue by Kwame Dawes

On 12 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Kinestasis
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This is the English version of the “visual poem” Boy in Blue with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by photographer Andre Lambertson, editing by Robin Bell and music by Kevin Simmonds. See YouTube for the text.

I’ve decided to change course here and begin occasionally posting films that consist entirely of still images so I can feature projects like this. The technical term for a film montage of still images (often found in documentary films) is kinestasis, so that’s the name of this newest category at Moving Poems.

I previously shared Dawes’ kinestases with photographer Joshua Cogan, Live Hope Love, which was about living with HIV in Jamaica. Voices from Haiti is a newer series, also produced by the Pulitzer Center, which explores life after the earthquake in Haiti, focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS.

At the AWP conference in Chicago the week before last, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Dawes speak about the collaborative process involved in making these videos, and was impressed by the extent to which he and the other artists involved in these projects seem to have stumbled upon some of the same principles that make regular videopoems or filmpoems work: the importance of the soundtrack and the need for juxtaposition rather than simple illustration to created multiple narratives in the listener’s head — “reportages in dialogue,” as he put it. These visual poems are creations in their own right, different from purely textual poems, and would not have happened without collaboration between poet, photographer and composer, he said.

War Rug by Francesco Levato

On 8 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Francesco Levato is one of the most ambitious filmmakers in the American cinepoetry tradition. Here’s his description of War Rug at Vimeo:

The film is based on a work of documentary poetics in the form of a book length poem. Multiple interwoven narratives explore life within zones of conflict as viewed through the lens of current warfare. The narratives range from passages inspired by journal entries, firsthand accounts, and news reports to poetic constructs collaged from military doctrine, Freedom of Information Act released government documents (like CIA interrogation manuals, and detainee autopsy reports), and numerous other sources. The film collages and juxtaposes archival source material with U.S. Military footage in an exploration of alternative narrative interpretations of the source text.

A Game of Sevens by Robert Peake

On 7 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A film-poem by Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier — their fourth. For the text, see Robert’s blog.

Monarchs by Carlin M. Wragg

On 1 March, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This is a section from a longer poem, “Found Letters: Jack and Matilda.” The video is not the final product, but a documentation video of a sculpture, as Carlin M. Wragg explains in her description at Vimeo:

As part of my thesis for ITP, I’d like to create a system of expressive techniques that bring poems off the page in a way that is not quite theater, not quite art installation, and not quite public reading, but which incorporate elements of all of these. With this in mind, I’m collaborating with Kevin Bleich to identify and customize adaptive technologies that bring visual, aural, and environmental experiences together with poetry. As we iterate through a sequence of video sculptures that interpret elements of my novel-in-verse, Found Letters: Jack & Matilda, we are documenting our discoveries on a Tumblr called the Creative Tech Toolkit (creativetechtoolkit.tumblr.com). We hope this shared body of knowledge will serve as the technical foundation for our individual thesis projects.

For our first piece, Kevin and I extended the work we did in April and May of 2011 when we used a Kinect sensor, projection mapping, sound and video to animate a collection of fictional letters through readers’ interactions with an antique rolltop desk. This time we wanted to work on a smaller scale, so we projected video into a Kosta Boda snowball candleholder designed by Ann Warff. We hoped the candleholder’s rippled glass would diffuse the video imagery into the kind of flickering light one might find on a table set for a romantic dinner, as it is in the poem at the core of this piece.

(ITP, by the way, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.)

Bells of Atlantis by Anaïs Nin

On 28 February, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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I just discovered that someone had uploaded a copy of this landmark film from 1952. Anaïs Nin’s husband Ian Hugo directed, with text from Nin’s novella House of Incest recited by the author over an electronic score by Louise and Bebe Barron. While the text may not be poetry per se, the form and style of the film anticipates modern filmpoetry/videopoetry by decades.

The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins

On 27 February, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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One of the 11 Billy Collins animations produced by New York TV station JWT in 2007. This one was directed by Will Hyde with animation by David Vaio.

Vocation by Sandra Beasley

On 24 February, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Video and poem by Sandra Beasley, using a text from I Was the Jukebox.

Baggage Claim by Regis McKenna

On 23 February, 2012 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This jazzy “video poem of New York City” by Jarrett Robertson, with music by Gaeland McKenna, has racked up more than 19,000 views on YouTube and close to 14,000 views on Dailymotion. I’m guessing that the Regis McKenna credited with the text is not the same as the Silicon Valley marketing expert.