This Is Not a Fairytale by Laura Kasischke

On 10 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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A film by Laurent Barthelemy and Shizuka Kusayanagi for Motionpoems. Laura Kasischke is one of my favorite contemporary poets, so I was pleased to see this so well done.

Read the text on the Motionpoems website. They’ve also posted an interview with Kasischke conducted by Ethna McKiernan, though unfortunately it doesn’t make any mention of the film.

Ethics of the Mothers by Rachel Barenblat and Prayer by January Gill O’Neil

On 9 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A Moving Poems original. I got the idea of combining two poems about small children, and spent more than a week tinkering with the footage, trying to create enough echoes between the two parts of the film so it all hangs together. I’m not sure whether I succeeded or not, but it was an interesting experiment.

The texts came from The Poetry Storehouse: “Ethics of the Mothers” by Rachel Barenblat and “Prayer” by January Gill O’Neil, each read by the author. The music is by Serge Seletskyy, AKA GustoTune on SoundCloud, used in its entirety without alteration. I wanted to stay as far away from stereotypically “spiritual” music as possible, and suggest instead the boundless energy of childhood.

I shot some of this myself (the dodgy wildlife shots and the overlays) and filled it out with free footage from Beachfront B-Roll and Phil Fried. Yes, I really was that close to a mother bear with cubs! It seemed important to start out with a powerful image of motherhood that also might be seen to possess a kind of celestial resonance (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor). And over-all, the wildlife imagery and the closing shot of the night sky gave me a way to suggest something extra about the kind of felt connections with the larger-than-human world that seem to come naturally to most children, and the awe that that can inspire in them. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have dared to close with such a “cosmic” shot if O’Neil’s poem hadn’t focused so resolutely on small things.

Rachel Barenblat is an ordained rabbi who blogs at The Velveteen Rabbi, and January Gill O’Neil is also an active poet-blogger — see Poet Mom. Both are based in Massachusetts.

Him by Laura Mullen

On 8 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“This Valentine was created by running the hard sell of an on-line dating guru through ‘Dictation,'” says the Vimeo description by Laura Mullen, a practitioner of “hybrid poetics” with seven books under her belt. In an interview posted on her blog, afteriwas dead, she answered a question about the making of the video:

LG [Lola Gerber]: The video you showed at your reading at Naropa had both performance and writing in it. Can you tell me more about the process of creating this video? Did you write and then perform the writing? Or do you perform first and then write from that?

LM: Ah, you’re talking about “Him” (a play on Hymn), the Valentine’s day video (up on my Vimeo site, with other movies…). The text is the pitch of a famous dating guru, available on-line, full of promises (including that wonderful: “I will teach you how to speak the secret language of men”!)! I wrote it down, then read it into “Dictation,” which—as far as I can see—speaks “the secret language” of the pitchman, exposing the truth behind those promises made to lonely women. Then I recorded the result as a voice over—and attached it to the film (my friend Marthe Reed helped me make) of me peeing in a giant box of chocolates. But I led up to that with film work (with Afton Wilky) of Valentine’s Day merchandise, and also a Valentine’s Day performance (live) where I read from a journal entry about losing my virginity while smearing my face with Valentine’s day candy (actually, that didn’t work so well—it’s got too much wax in it, doesn’t really melt), while backed up by three brave women who (off-mic) described their loss of virginity experience…

It seemed like an apt follow-up to Monday’s posting of 15th February.

Take Me to the City by Lucy English

On 7 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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A film by Helen Dewbery, whose film and video poetry website with poet Chaucer Cameron is the latest addition to the Moving Poems links page: Elephant’s Footprint. Check it out. Dewbury’s bio there suggests why she might’ve been drawn to the imagery of the poem:

I grew up near Kingston Upon Thames and spent time living and working in London where I photographed urban and suburban landscapes and became fascinated by the juxtaposition of the green spaces in London’s Royal Parks, the dark muddy grey-brown waters of the Thames and the rolling chalk downs, flower rich grasslands, acid heaths and ancient woodlands of the Surrey hills.

I then moved to Pembrokeshire where I lived for 17 years spending time travelling through the Pembrokeshire countryside. It was these surroundings that inspired me to engage with the art of photography, drawn by the beautiful wild dramatic landscape with gorse strewn hedgerows, Campion covered coast paths and the moody moor land of the Preseli Mountains. These separate but interrelated landscapes played a significant role in my creative process.

The poet, Lucy English, is one of the co-founders of the Liberated Words festival. Visit her own website at lucyenglish.com. The reading is by Hebe Reilly. Megan Palmer is the actress.

15th February by Peter Reading

On 6 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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This 1995 poetry film classic won the main prize at the very first ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2002, as well as an Arts Council of England Animate Award and 1995 ICA Dick Award as “the most provocative, innovative and subversive short film of the year.” Director Tim Webb uploaded this version to Vimeo himself, and the description there is exhaustive. Click through for the full credits. Here’s a snippet:

15th February mixes live action and animation to describe a symbolic rejection and its sadistic outcome, as related in the poem by Peter Reading.

Love gone wrong in 294 cuts. From a poem by Peter Reading, symbolism and sadism meet live action and stop motion in this tale of rhythmic rejection and its aftermath. The 15th February is from Reading’s book Diplopic. In explaining the title, Reading wrote, ‘Diplopic means pertaining to double vision. Every subject is treated from two sides. The funny and the ghastly are symbiotic.’ The 15th February is from one side.
Technical information

The film mixes 16mm live action, stop-frame and drawn animation.

The late Peter Reading’s poetry was described by The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry as “strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical.”

I said yes by Luisa A. Igloria

On 3 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/107386171

Nic S.’s video remix of a poem by Luisa A. Igloria at The Poetry Storehouse. The text was a particular favorite of mine, so I was happy to see it made into a video. The music is by David Mackey.

Foreclosure by Tara Skurtu

On 2 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Another Moving Poems original. The poem is from The Poetry Storehouse, and originally appeared in B O D Y. I included Nic S.’s reading from the Storehouse in the soundtrack, mixed with a piece by an Austrian-based electronic composer who uses the handle strange day.

The dollhouse footage is mine. The rest comes from the free stock-footage site Beachfront B-Roll, whose proprietor continues to impress me with the non-generic, idiosyncratic quality of his clips. They also happen to look way more professional than mine, which is no wonder since I have crappy equipment and no training. I hope the footage I’ve chosen is oblique enough to avoid a feeling of redundancy.

Tara Skurtu is a poet and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University. Visit her website at taraskurtu.com. She also has a YouTube channel with some videos of her readings.

Harvest Moon by Erica Goss

On 1 October, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Part IX of the 12 Moons videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (words), Marc Neys/Swoon (concept and directing), Kathy McTavish (music) and Nic S. (voice). As usual, it debuted online at Atticus Review.

Neys described his editing process in a blog post:

I went back to the outstanding collection of IICADOM (‘International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories’) to look for the right footage. And I found some…

Kathy provided me with an alienating soundtrack, with Nic’s reading embedded, long enough to work with two parts in the visual storyline again.
Part one; a colourful look into the (safe &) settled world of an elderly couple in California. The outro is a black & white loop of two sisters walking down the stairs into their future. I like the contrast of these two lines and I love the way they react with the soundtrack.

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Situation 5 by Claudia Rankine

On 30 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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One of a series of “Situation” videos created by Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine in collaboration with her husband, the photographer John Lucas, for Rankine’s book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).

Note that Rankine refers to the Situation series as “video essays” on her website. But as she said in a 2009 interview at Poets.org, she thinks

less in terms of genre and just in terms of writing in general. My background, my education, has been in poetry, so I feel that many of the layers in whatever I’m doing are coming out of a world of allusions that are located in poets. So, no matter what I’m working on, I like to call it poetic in some way, because the poets that I’ve read and that I love, their work tends to infuse it.

In a more recent conversation with Lauren Berlant at BOMB Magazine, Rankine discusses her collaboration with Lucas on the Situation videos.

The scripts in chapter six seemed necessary to Citizen because one of the questions I often hear is “How did that happen?” as it relates to mind-numbing moments of injustice—the aftermath of Katrina, for example, or juries letting supremacists off with a slap on the wrist for killing black men. It seems obvious, but I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions that indicate the lack of recognition of the black body as a body to the creation and enforcement of laws. Everyone is cool with seeing micro-aggressions as misunderstandings until the same misunderstood person ends up on a jury or running national response teams after a hurricane.

The decision to exist within the events of the “Situation videos” came about because the use of video manipulation by John Lucas allowed me to slow down and enter the event, in moments, as if I were there in real time rather than as a spectator considering it in retrospect. As a writer working with someone with a different skill set, I was given access to a kind of seeing that is highly developed in the visual artist, and that I don’t rely on as intuitively. My search for meaning—“What do you think that means?”—is often countered with a “Did you see that?” from John. That kind of close looking, the ability to freeze the frame, challenges the language of the script to meet the moment literally second by second—in the Zidane World Cup piece, for example—to know as the moment knows, and not from outside. The indwelling of those Situation pieces becomes a performance of switching your body out with the body in the frame and moving methodically through pathways of thought and positionings.

The photographer Jeff Wall writes about moving into moments of eroding freedoms. He describes racism as “determined by social totality” that “has to come out of an individual body.” In his photographs he brings his lens to existing “unfreedoms.” I am interested in his decision to reenact, to stage moments that happen too fast for the camera to capture. On some level he can’t let what he saw go: “Did you see that?”

The difficult thing about this “immanence” or indwelling is that it holds and prolongs the violence of supremacist spectacle in a body and shuts it down in other participatory ways. The reality, moment, narrative, or photo locks down its players and gets read as a single gesture.

Read the rest.

One Stop by Robert Peake

On 29 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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We often, perhaps inevitably, envision history unfolding as a sort of cartoon, and our perceptions of combat these days are liable to be colored by video gaming. This new film-poem by Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier turns that on its head, with live-action footage of World War II glimpsed from a present-day machinima world, through the windows of a moving train. See Peake’s blog for the text of the poem. He adds:

Our recent film-poem collaboration “One Stop” was nominated for best music/sound at Liberated Words III in Bristol, where it premiered. The original soundtrack was composed and performed by Valerie Kampmeier. The film commemorates the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. […]

I sourced archival colour footage of WWII, and composited this into an animation that I created using Blender 3D. I recorded journeys on the tube with an X1 Zoom, and mixed this under Valerie’s music and my voice reading the poem.

There’s a decade-long tradition of using machinima in cinepoetry (the term usually preferred by filmmakers in that tradition), but it’s not well represented here at Moving Poems because I don’t often find the results terribly compelling. I’m not sure how much Peake was influenced by that tradition, but his use of machinima here was ingenious, I thought. Kudos also for finding a new twist on the footage-from-a-moving-train motif so prevalent in poetry films.

Incidentally, there’s a lovely interview with Robert Peake at Geosi Reads conducted by Ghanaian blogger Geosi Gyasi. In one exchange, Peake talks about the Transatlantic Poetry on Air series of live video readings he coordinates. Then he reflects on technology and poetry in general:

Geosi Gyasi: As a technology consultant, do you think technology has influenced poets and poetry in any particular way?

Robert Peake: I think it has influenced the audience for poetry by shortening our attention spans, and I think poetry is always influenced by its audiences. That said, technology may also be the saving grace of contemporary poetry, because even as the fan base has dwindled since the advent of rock-n-roll, the ability of poets and poetry-lovers to connect and engage all over the world has expanded. The global audience for poetry today is therefore many times the size of what many poets enjoyed as a regional audience one hundred years ago. I think it is therefore a kind of “Invisible Golden Age” for poetry–with more availability than ever, despite the perception of scarcity.

Read the rest.

Your Memory is My Freedom by Marie Silkeberg

On 26 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Another innovative, harrowing videopoetry collaboration between Palestinian-Syrian poet Ghayath Almadhoun and Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg. This time the text and reading are Silkeberg’s, but they are both credited with the editing (“montage”) and camera work. Agneta Falk-Hirschman supplied the English translation. The music was “stolen from the Internet,” according to the credits, and the footage of the Syrian revolution is also “from the Internet.”

A Day in Ohio by James Reiss

On 25 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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A one-minute videopoem that still somehow manages to seem very spacious. It’s the work of filmmaker Lori H. Ersolmaz, reader Michael Dickes, and poet James Reiss. The poem was first published in Esquire, and Dickes and Ersolmaz found it at The Poetry Storehouse.

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