Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Uncommon Ideals by Daniel Crockett

On 27 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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This short film about surfing in the North Sea proves that a television-friendly filmpoem need not be literal or simplistic. The gorgeous scenery, imaginative shooting and subtle interplay between voiced text and images are evidently working for many viewers. A staff pick on Vimeo, it has so far garnered 143,000 views on the web, was broadcast on the U.K.’s Channel 4, “has won a variety of awards at film festivals, and was shown at SXSW,” according to the poet, Daniel Crockett.

Perhaps it resonates with so many viewers because it’s more than just a film about surfing; it shows how a members of a surfing community understand their relationship with a wild place. Chris McClean (producer and director) and Mark Waters (cinematographer and editor) are associated with the blog Doggerland:

The North Sea is a source of food, a source of fuel – oil and gas, a playground for catching waves or simply a mass of water that needs to be navigated. Few are aware its these cold grey waters that cover a prehistoric landscape that once joined England to Europe. Yet between 18000 and 5500 BC, global warming raised sea levels to the extent that this area known as Doggerland was engulfed by water and the area that had been home to mankind disappeared. This entire land sank beneath the North Sea. Is it this former land that we North Sea surfers now surf.

We are the Doggerland groms, heavies, hippies and kooks.

The surfers in the film are Gabe Davies, Pete Eyre, John John Florence, Nathan Florence, Dylan Graves, Chris ‘Guts’ Griffiths, Ritchie Sills, and Balaram Stack. Lewis Arnold and Chris McClean supplied additional footage. William Evans was the sound engineer, and they used a song by UNKLE in the soundtrack. Crockett’s poem was read by Jeff Hordley.

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Is, Ain’t by Douglas Kearney

On 26 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney made and uploaded this to Vimeo two years ago, noting:

A quick and dirty performance of a poem from my new chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps). It’s a projection that accompanies live readings.

For more videos of Kearney’s dynamic live performances, see the Media page on his website.

The Moon by Claudia Serea

On 25 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/96438005

I’m told that in some MFA poetry classes, budding poets are discouraged from writing about the moon. Are they also discouraged from writing about love and death, I wonder? The moon is a touchstone in almost every culture, and according to the latest science, not only was it birthed by our own planet after a fiery collision with an asteroid, but it’s known to have played an essential role in stabilizing the earth’s rotation enough to allow the evolution of life, despite its own utter lifelessness. So it seems clearer than ever that banishing the moon from poetry would be a sad and solipsistic exercise.

The fact remains, however, that modern poets need to “make it new.” Claudia Serea‘s poem at The Poetry Storehouse works precisely because it challenges the powers we have traditionally imputed to the moon, including the way we out-source our longings to it. (Read the text.)

Videopoets working with Serea’s text have a further problem, it seems to me, inasmuch as the moon — especially an unnaturally close/large one — is such a stock image in the movies, freighted with associations that may or may play well with the poem. Nic S. was the first to attempt a video remix (above), using her own reading and a soundtrack by Jarred Gibb. Then Lori H. Ersolmaz made this:

And finally, here’s Jutta Pryor’s take:

Pryor’s soundtrack — my favorite of the three — uses a soundscape by Neal Ager as well as the poet’s own reading, which I prefer to Sebastian’s mainly because of her accent, which to my WASPy ears sounds more “foreign” and thus better suited to a poem in the moon’s voice. None of the filmmakers managed to avoid using footage of the moon, though Ersolmaz came the closest by turning her moon into a screen for other, earthly footage. And I liked the way Pryor made an almost Wizard of Oz-like switch from pale, seemingly moonlight images to saturated colors, extending her film into a wordless montage that serves to expand the poem outwards, suggesting possible connections between artificial light and nighttime violence.

I don’t think any of these films constitutes a definitive interpretation of the poem (if there can be such a thing), but each has something in it that I like, and after watching all three, I find myself wanting to try to write yet another poem about the moon.

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Poetry film festival news: Liberated Words program reveals unprecedented international focus, and more

On 24 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events

September and October are the best months for seeing poetry films on the big screen, from the UK to Germany, Argentina, Canada, and Ireland.

The third annual Liberated Words poetry film festival, scheduled for September 13th, 19th and 20th in Bristol, sounds very interesting indeed. The program is described in detail on the front page of their website, which I like — no hunting about. I’m especially impressed by the number of exchanges they’ve initiated with other poetry film festivals from around the world. On the 19th,

Sarah Tremlett, poetry filmmaker and theorist has curated a screening looking at different poetry films forms, including films not only from VideoBardo in Buenos Aires and Visible Verse in Vancouver, but exciting new collaborators Zebra, Oslo and Tarp, Lithuania, Poetry Film Festivals. In conjunction she is hosting a discussion on ‘What exactly are poetry films?’ with: Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Adele Myers, Martin Sexton, Penny Florence, Marc Neys and Lucy English.

On the following day, one can take a day-long masterclass in poetry filmmaking with Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon. And the events the week before, on the 13th, reflect some highly imaginative programming as well. The day’s theme is Memory:

Showcasing Memory competition finalists, commemorating the anniversary of the 1914-18 war, and entries based on Ivor Gurney’s poem The High Hills Have a Bitterness. A very warm welcome to returning best music judges from L.A. –Rich Ferguson (mesmerising spoken word with music poet) and Mark Wilkinson (top music video and feature director), and judges for best editing –last year’s brilliant finalists and this year’s workshop leaders poet Helen Moore and filmmaker Howard Vause. See the premiere of Marc Tiley’s edited version of the extraordinary poem Dart by poet Alice Oswald; workshopped films: the groundbreaking Golden Bird Project made in conjunction with older patients from The Royal United Hospital, Bath, and Art at the Heart, with resident artist Edwina Bridgeman and art from young patients and musician in residence Frankie Simpkins; three stunning films from years 7–10 at St Gregory’s Catholic College based on the arresting poem Mametz Wood by award-winning poet Owen Sheers; and two thought-provoking films from St Brendan’s Sixth Form College, Bristol.

In other news, the aforementioned VideoBardo festival is set for September 8 in Buenos Aires, and Berlin’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will take place on October 16-19, overlapping with Visible Verse — Vancouver, October 18 — and Ó Bhéal/IndieCork on October 12-19. And incidentally, the film competition for Ó Bhéal is still open until the end of September — click the preceding link for details.

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Singularity by Eric Burke

On 22 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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This interpretation of an Eric Burke poem by Jutta Pryor is one of the most satisfying ultra-short videopoems I’ve seen. It started out as a 15-second film, then was expanded to 20 seconds to incorporate more credits at the end. Somehow, it manages not to seem rushed, and the images are allusive enough to reward multiple viewings. Pryor used music by Masonik and a recording of Burke reading his poem, the text of which originally appeared in THRUSH Poetry Journal. She also credits the POOL group, a Facebook-based (and very international) creative community.

Extermination by Donna Vorreyer

On 21 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This should be played in HD on the largest screen available.

Rarely a week goes by when I don’t post another video by the Belgian filmmaker Swoon, A.K.A. Marc Neys, but even still I barely keep up with all he’s doing. What’s even more surprising is that despite his great rate of production his poetry films continue to feel fresh, and he doesn’t cut corners in their production, sitting on each project for at least a couple of weeks before releasing it. This film is a case in point. It was already almost in the can (Do filmmakers still say that?) when I visited him back in early July, but he continued to sit with it for another month before releasing it. And he’s taking plenty of risks here. This represents, I think, his most ambitious attempt yet to develop text-on-screen as a compelling alternative to the tried-and-true voiceover approach.

Marc blogged his process notes. Some snippets:

Another episode in my explorations in combining film compositions with text on screen (see my other efforts)
This time it was a poem by Donna Vorreyer I used.
It’s not the first time I work with Donna’s words. She’s a fantastic poet with a very inspiring choice of words. Her work is perfect for these kind of works.

I picked out ‘Extermination’ from her collection ‘a house of many windows’, Sundress Publications, 2013.

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Once I was sure this was going to be the poem I started searching for, filming and selecting suitable visuals. When I had about 10 minutes of material I created a soundscape with the visuals and the poem in mind:

[…]

Then came the puzzling part. Matching lines from the poem with the right footage, trying out different fonts ans sizes, placement of words… It’s a completely different way of editing.
You’re not only editing film, you’re carefully trying to blend sound, image and text in one cut. It feels more like composing.  It makes me rethink the way I worked (and still work) with audible videopoems.

Click through for the text of the poem and the audio file from SoundCloud. Donna Vorreyer may be found at her website, or more often at her blog.

The First Hour of Being Buried Alive in the Walls of a Half-Built Cathedral by Nicelle Davis

On 20 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/106138708

Like Betsy Newman’s video for Ed Madden’s “Red Star”, or film interpretations of Jade Anouka’s poems by Mickael Dickes and Sabrina Grant, this collaborative effort from filmmaker Anita Clearfield and poet Nicelle Davis shows how to include the poet as an actor while still keeping the main focus on the poem. I was alerted to its existence by a post at Davis’ blog, The Bee’s Knees: “Collaboration: The Walled Wife.”

The Walled Wife is a project that has haunted me for the past six years; it is my retelling of a story about a woman who is buried alive in hopes that her soul will hold up the walls of a church. “The Ballad of the Walled-Up Wife” is a folk song at least 1,000 years old; it is one of the most famous in the world, according to folklorist Alan Dundes. In an interview Dundes explains, “the song has inspired more than 700 versions — mainly throughout eastern Europe and India — as well as countless essays by scholars.”

Countless, he says.

Countless, I questioned, and so began exploring the many cases of women being buried alive. I compared variations of a song sung across the globe. The lyrics go: a wife is buried so a structure can rise—it implies a room is worth more than a woman, and as a place she approximates value.

I started to wonder if the architecture of intimacy is dependent on violence—if art is the ultimate form of violence—if women, especially in the role of wife, are worth anything (or nothing) at all? Countless being the inverse of priceless, it would seem that this ballad proves that we are not worth much at all. It shows that the easiest thing in the world to replace is a wife—it says a woman is a thing.

Read the rest to learn how Davis attempted over the years to re-create the experience of being walled up or buried alive, what she learned from it, and how she came to collaborate with Clearfield and composer Silke Matzpohl. The post also includes the text of the poem, which first appeared in Manor House Quarterly.

The Gun by Vicki Feaver

On 19 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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A terrific poem and film that should appeal to gun-toting meat-eaters and vegan gun-control advocates alike. (And what else but art or poetry could bridge such a chasm?) Director Alastair Cook writes,

I have admired Vicki Feaver and her words for some time. I recorded this in 2011 and kept it safe, finally entrusting the sound to Luca Nasciuti and the cinematography to James William Norton, our core Filmpoem team. I’ve worked with Vicki on the amazing community arts project in Greenock, Absent Voices and also Empire Cafe, Louise Welsh and Jude Barber’s Commonwealth 2014 project, looking at the unbearable links between slavery and Scotland.

So, the Gun. I may stop now, because (forgive the immodesty) I love this one. Love it. The timbre in Vicki’s voice is dry, broken, words delivered with such a punch. I enjoyed editing this one, it’s why I do this, it was so very difficult to get right, but I do hope you enjoy it. The Gun has now screened at Felix (Antwerp), Poetry International (London) and will screen at ZEBRA (Berlin). [links added]

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Red Star by Ed Madden

On 18 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Betsy Newman explains how she came to make this film in the YouTube description:

This video was created for the event “Saint Sebastian: From Martyr to Gay Starlet,” which was on display in fall 2011 at Friday Cottage Art Space in Columbia, South Carolina. Those who collaborated on the show, which was part of a series of events leading up to Gay Pride week in Columbia, included visual artists Leslie Pierce and Alejandro Garcia-Lemos, the poet Ed Madden, Florida-based video artist Santiago Echeverry and me, Betsy Newman. The text and inspiration for this video come from South Carolina poet Ed Madden and his poem “Red Star,” which in turn was based on [a] print by Garcia-Lemos that can be seen in the video. I think Ed described the video well when he called it “a feverish meditation on penetration” in his essay on the show in the January-February 2012 issue of The Gay and Lesbian Review.

For more about Madden, visit his page on the University of South Carolina website, and see also his Wikipedia page (which needs a bit of updating, I think).

Dark City by Howie Good

On 8 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Marc Neys, AKA Swoon, has turned a quintessential Howie Good poem, dark and surreal, into a noirish film with two narrators, one male and one female. Neys writes:

It’s been a while since I last made a video for a Howie Good poem. When I made  ‘The Killing’ last year I worked with Michael Dickes for voicing the poem. This time I wanted to work with 2 voices, so I asked Michael again and I also knocked on Nic Sebastian’s virtual door for a reading. Both of them were willing to do a reading. Both delivered a great one.

The poem(s) I picked out for this project come from Howie Good’s book ‘The complete absence of twilight’ (MadHat Press, 2014)

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I had this footage (by cinetrove) lying around for months waiting for the right words to come by. A sequence of repeated actions… You see a guy running around, being busy and mysterious but without purpose. Senseless actions, repetition, paranoia… It’s Dark City.

I combined parts of this footage (that I turned blue for a darker feel) with more colourful footage to chafe along the blue footage. I think the combination of the 2 voices and the 2 ‘storylines’ work well together.

Read the rest.

For more about The Complete Absence of Twilight, or to order, see the publisher’s page.

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Miss Flora Looks in Her Mirror by Martha McCollough

On 6 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new film from Massachusetts-based videopoet Martha McCollough, one of three she’s placed so far in TriQuarterly. This one appears in their Summer/Fall 2014 issue. Kudos to their editors for changing their policy and allowing their videos to be embedded elsewhere.

McCollough continues to chart an independent course. Her work is like nobody else’s, mesmerizing and disturbing in equal measures — and always gorgeous.

Buttons by Robert Peake

On 5 August, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Husband-and-wife team Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier won the children’s prize in Southbank Centre’s inaugural Shot Through the Heart Poetry Film Competition with this film. Peake wrote about the composition process on his writer’s blog:

When Valerie and I read the call-out for a film-poem competition with a children’s category happening here in London, we had to give it a try.

I wrote and recorded the poem, and then began playing with stop-motion animation. I used Christmas ornaments made of teasel, blue tack, coloured paper, a Raspberry Pi with LEGO-mounted camera arm (my own creation, at right), and of course lots of buttons. Valerie wrote and recorded the music at the end.

After more than forty hours of painstaking animation work, it was so gratifying to discover that the judges–a group of London school children–really liked the result.

Peake has also created a free storybook from the poem, available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

While it may seem surprising that someone could meet with such success on their first foray into the world of children’s poetry film, Peake appears to have thoroughly immersed himself in the genre, judging from his survey at the Huffington Post, “Combining Film and Poetry Is Child’s Play.”

The film-poem genre is a slim but highly enthusiastic and truly international one. It is largely comprised of serious filmmakers and equally serious musicians and poets. As a result, the sub-genre of film-poems made specifically for children is something of a subset within a subset. Yet this kind of thing has been going on successfully for some time, from cartoons of Dr. Seuss books made in the 1970s to the recent Emmy-Award-winning “A Child’s Garden of Poetry” produced by HBO in cooperation with the US Poetry Foundation. There are also many fine examples from all over the world, in different languages, of filmmakers setting poetry to film with children in mind.

Click through to watch the selection of seven films that Peake also screened at a live event in the Southbank Centre’s festival in mid-July. He includes some real gems.

Last and probably least, I see from Facebook that Robert Peake has just gotten British citizenship, in case anyone is wondering why there are now two nationalities identified with his poems here. Like T.S. Eliot, he has now become a major headache for book catalogers using the Library of Congress system. Fortunately, the same post can appear on multiple virtual shelves on a website, thanks to the wonders of modern content management systems (WordPress, in Moving Poems’ case). At any rate, congratulations to Robert for coming out of the closet as fully bi-national.

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