~ Atticus Review ~

Love’s River of Errors by Dave Richardson

On 25 May, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“The ocean, addiction, making a few collages to discover some kind of meaning…In memory…” Thus reads the description to this moving, personal video essay by artist Dave Richardson, which explores the collage-like nature of memory itself. It was featured at Atticus Review back on May 5, accompanied by an artist’s statement. Here’s a snippet:

For my own personal or collaborative creative work, I am always trying to lose a sense of control, to move beyond the expected visuals and to not overthink the final results, to leave some of the process evident, the rough edges. I agree with the graphic designer Paul Rand when he said, “To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”

Read the rest.

Wasp’s Honey by Martha McCollough

On 14 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough’s latest animated poem appeared in Atticus Review on March 3, along with this artist’s statement:

Bees have many associations with death—they are sacred to Persephone and when there is a death in the beekeeper’s household they must be told and allowed to mourn. Through honey, they have associations with creativity—it is a Greek folk belief that if a bee touches the lips of a sleeping child, the child will be a singer or a poet. I wanted to keep this elegy simple and direct, so there is no voiceover, only visual text. The soundtrack was composed using the p22 text-to-music generator. Sections of the text were used to create a midi file, freely edited in Logic.

Click through for the bio, and watch more of McCollough’s stand-out poetry videos on Vimeo.

หลงทางในประเทศของตัวเอง / Lost in Homeland by Rossanee Nurfarida

On 14 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 5 Comments - Videopoems
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Thai poet Rossanee Nurfarida recites her poem about the plight of Rohingya refugees in a video by German-American filmmaker Ryan Anderson for the OXLAEY multimedia project. Anderson’s English translation appears as text on screen.

Lost in Homeland was featured last week in Atticus Review‘s Mixed Media section, which is edited by videopoet Matt Mullins. Here’s how Anderson described the video there:

LOST IN HOMELAND is a video poem read by the author Ms. Rossanee Nurfarida while stranded on a boat perched at the top of a four-story, urban house. Ms. Nurfarida’s current collection of poetry, Far Away From Our Own Homes, is a Finalist for the 2016 South East Asian Writers Award. Lost in Homeland was written in 2015 during the Rohingya refugee crisis when thousands of stateless Rohingya from Myanmar set out on old fishing boats seeking a better future. The video’s visual references to Islam extend the poem’s metaphor, commenting on southern Thailand’s Muslim minority as a people stranded in the country of their birth.

Click through for more about the OXLAEY project and for bios of Nurfarida and Anderson. Additional credits are given in the YouTube description.

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Call for submissions: Atticus Review

On 27 August, 2016 by Matt Mullins with 0 Comments - calls for work, literary magazines and websites

The Mixed Media section of the Atticus Review seeks videopoems/filmpoems/cinepoems and short or experimental films of all lengths, shapes, sizes and types. We’re also interested in remixes, mashups and interactive/digital literature. Submissions can be sent via the submission manager at the Atticus Review.

Feel free to contact Mixed Media Editor Matt Mullins at m-mull@hotmail.com if you have any questions or queries.

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Break and Remake by Martha McCollough

On 6 November, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A new videopoem by artist and poet Martha McCollough always makes me do a little dance of pure delight. Break and Remake debuted on Atticus Review a week ago, and I’ve held off on sharing it till now (not wanting to steal their thunder) only with great difficulty. Here’s how McCollough introduced it:

Break and Remake came out of thinking about the recombined creatures in myths and in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The whole video is broken and reassembled, as are the griffins, chimeras, and other monsters within the video. The text is also a hybrid, combining overheard remarks, a line from a song by Son House and computer-generated text from spam.

Death is IN! by Tuija Välipakka

On 25 September, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Mikaela Välipakka directed this marvelous videopoem with cinematography and editing by Arttu Soilumo. The poem by Tuija Välipakka is from her 2014 collection Take Away (Paasilinna Publishing). Tuija and and her daughter Mikaela have co-authored a post at Atticus Review, where they describe the film as “the result of cooperation between two movie enthusiasts and a poet.”

Mikaela Välipakka and Arttu Soilumo wanted to create a poem film that is simultaneously dark and surrealistic, surprising and thought-provoking. The starting point was Mikaela’s vision of an empty movie theatre with a man sitting on the middle of the row. Man’s dreams start to stray around him, first slowly and eventually aggressively, trying to wake him up. The poem itself explores the absurdity and randomness of death.

The post continues with a quote from Mikaela Välipakka about her approach to filmmaking:

I start with a certain feeling and after that, scenes start to form in my head. I write them down and shoot these scenes one by one. I usually don’t make storyboards or any other plans, I go by intuition. On the set I get inspired by my model and model gets inspired by me. This creates something magical that can not be planned. Music is also really important to me. I love listening to classical music such as Mozart, Verdi and Gorécki. I put on headphones, close my eyes and my imagination starts to immediately fly. This is something I have been doing since I was a little girl, creating surrealistic and beautiful scenes in my head that I later implement them into ink drawings and short films.

Click through to read their biographies, and be sure to follow Atticus Review‘s Mixed Media section in your favorite feed reader for a steady stream of great poetry films.

Submit to the Atticus Review

On 20 August, 2015 by Matt Mullins with 1 Comments - calls for work, literary magazines and websites

The Atticus Review is looking for filmpoems/videopoems of between one and eight minutes in length. You can submit a bio and link to your work via Submittable (https://atticusbooks.submittable.com/Submit) or you can contact our Mixed Media Editor directly at m-mull@hotmail.com.

Call for videopoetry submissions: Atticus Review

On 27 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, literary magazines and websites

Writer and videopoet Matt Mullins asked me to share this call-out:

The Atticus Review, an online literary/mixed media magazine, seeks filmpoems/videopoems of between one and eight minutes in length for publication. You can submit via Submittable at the Atticus Review website, or you can email mixed media editor Matt Mullins directly at m-mull at hotmail dot com.

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Cold Moon by Erica Goss

On 8 December, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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We buy longing, our faces
aggressive and breakable

on the cusp of winter.

The perfect poetry film for the holiday season. This is the final part of the 12 Moons series, the year-long videopoetry collaboration between Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon (concept, camera and direction), Erica Goss (poetry), Kathy McTavish (music), and Nic S. (voice), presented by Atticus Review. Marc wrote:

As with the other 11, Kathy provided me with a great soundtrack. Moody and floating on ‘loneliness’. Perfect for Nic’s reading and the poem itself.
Reading and hearing the poem gave me the idea of using images of people shopping for the holidays. I filmed these for another project (Day is done), but this was a perfect match.

It’s like Erica said after viewing the video: “In “Cold Moon,” the young woman’s expression captures the essence of the poem: that holiday shopping is a poor excuse for spirituality, and that faith is still an unexplained phenomenon.”

So this was the last of the series. All of these were made over more than a year ago, but I still have great memories working on these. My gratitude also goes out to Atticus Review and Moving Poems for giving those videos an extra home.
Showing these 12 at Zebra Festival in Berlin this year was a highlight, but collaborating with those three was the best reward.

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Hunter’s Moon and Trapper’s Moon by Erica Goss

On 29 November, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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I’ve gotten a couple of months behind on the 12 Moons videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (words), Marc Neys/Swoon (concept and directing), Kathy McTavish (music) and Nic S. (voice), so here are parts X, “Hunter’s Moon” (above) and XI, “Trapper’s Moon” (below). About the former, Marc writes:

The wind in this poem led me to a film I used earlier; ‘Terror in the midnight sun’ (Virgil W. Vogel)

I created a ‘windy’ scape using blocks of sound Kathy provided me with, added Nic’s reading and started playing around with the footage. (Different grading, colours,…)

In the end I only used one sequence. Played with repetition… I added a light layer of flickering windows to emphasize the wind even more.

For “Trapper’s Moon,” Marc notes that

Kathy provided me with a beautiful soundtrack, full of nostalgia and melancholy. A perfect fit for Nic’s intense reading.

I wanted very simple and pure images to go with this music. Preferably nature. A forest. Solitude.

Ephemeral Rift filmed one of his winter walks, I edited out a few bits and played around with colouring and timing in a split screen.

As with the others in this year-long series, both films were featured in Atticus Review.

Ironically, one of the reasons I got behind on sharing them was because I took almost two weeks off to go to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in October… where one of the big draws was seeing all twelve films in order on the big screen, with both Marc and Erica in attendance to introduce them and answer questions afterwards. It was an utterly captivating experience; the films flowed really well one into another, which might not be obvious if you watch them individually on the web. I hope that won’t be the last time that the whole project gets shown in a theater.

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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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Corn Moon by Erica Goss

On 1 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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With all the vacations Moving Poems has been taking, I’ve fallen behind on the 12 Moons videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (words), Marc Neys/Swoon (concept, camera and directing), Kathy McTavish (music) and Nic S. (voice). As usual, it debuted online at Atticus Review. This is the 8th moon. Neys called Goss’ text

A powerful poem that needed enough room (I love the line ‘Give it your blood, one drop at the time’) to breathe.
One storyline of images (very close to the poem) in black and white was more than enough against the beautiful reading & soundtrack by Nic and Kathy.
I personally love this one and think it’s the perfect showcase of what the collaborative and creative powers of four individuals can lead up to.

Atticus Review doesn’t seem to have an archive for just the 12 Moons series (apart from its Mixed Media category, whose RSS feed I strongly recommend adding to one’s feed reader subscriptions). But click on the 12 Moons tag to view all eight posted so far at Moving Poems.

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