Posts By Dave Bonta
Introducing Silicon Valley to the world of videopoetry
In her “Third Form” column in Connotation Press this month, Erica Goss reports on her experience introducing an audience of book-lovers to videopoetry. A number of towns and cities around the United States now have community book clubs. Silicon Valley Reads is one such program, and their theme for 2014 is “Books & Technology: Friends or Foes?” So Goss, as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos as well as videopoetry critic and connoisseur, gave a presentation one evening last month called “Off the Page.”
I selected nine video poems that I felt represented the art form well, but kept in mind the fact that most, if not all of the audience had never seen anything like this before. I wanted videos that were accessible, not too challenging, visually stunning, and that showed a variety of approaches: animation, archival film, and documentary-style, to name a few.
Goss also created a kinestatic video using a crowd-sourced collage poem with 100 lines contributed by local residents describing the changes in the Santa Clara Valley/Silicon Valley landscape. She showed that first, followed by the nine videos:
Some were newer and some were old favorites. The album is on Vimeo. In selecting these videos, I wanted them to flow from familiar film style (The Barking Horse) through archival film (Need) to animation (The Trees) and end on a high note (Danatum Passu). I added brief commentary to each video.
Many of the audience members wanted more information about making their own video poems, and wondered if there was a class they could take. This made me think that there might be a need for instruction outside of video poetry festivals. (Anyone want to help me design a video poetry course?)
It was gratifying to hear how well this program was received. There is of course no such thing as a typical audience, and residents of Silicon Valley might be especially atypical in some respects, but I think one of the great promises of videopoetry and animated poetry has always been this perceived potential to reach literate audiences who are not necessarily hardcore fans of contemporary poetry. That seems to have have happened in at least one American community last month. Check it out.
New at Awkword Paper Cut: videopoetry contest and a feature on Melissa Diem
Belgian videopoet Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is behind two features this month at the online magazine Awkword Paper Cut. His monthly column “Swoon’s View” focuses on two films by Irish poet and filmmaker Melissa Diem (also a favorite here at Moving Poems), balancing his critiques with Diem’s own notes about the making of each. It’s always interesting to hear someone who has achieved mastery both as a poet and as a filmmaker describe their creative process. Here, for example, is Diem discussing the second of the two films:
The poem, Appraisal, came about by exploring ideas of alienation and personal identity in relation to others through testing the physical and social world we find ourselves in and by testing the limits within the self. And of course these worlds in turn test us, sometimes relentlessly. It was this aspect of the poem that I wanted to explore in the poetry film. The initial idea came about organically when I was doing a quick frame rate test and Cayley (the little girl in the film) happened to be dancing about the room. We were only half paying attention to each. When I played back the footage I was moved by her expressions, the concentration playing across her face at certain times, her earnestness and innocence as she focused on positioning her small limbs in certain movements. It was that innocence against the great expansiveness of life rushing towards us, with its many tests, that I wanted to capture.
Also this month at Awkword Paper Cut, submissions are open for a unique writing contest: they’re looking for “500 words or less of prose, poetry, or flash fiction to match the video by award winning filmmaker Marc Neys (aka Swoon).”
The submission that best suits the video by Swoon will be selected by a panel of seven judges to be recorded, added to the video and showcased on Awkword Paper Cut including airplay on our Podcast! In addition, the winning submission will also receive membership to The Film Movement’s Film of the Month Club – Offering some of the finest independent filmmaking available! ALSO…Top selection along with runner ups will be featured on the Awkword Paper Cut Podcast!
Here’s the video:
Who wouldn’t want a chance to collaborate on a new videopoem (or videoessay, etc.) with Swoon? Submit by March 31. Details here and complete guidelines here.
New at Moving Poems: related post links
I’m testing out a possibly permanent addition to the main site: related post links. These appear only on individual post pages, between the sharing icons and the comment form at the bottom of the post. Each link includes a still from the video, which darkens when you mouse over it. I’m hoping that this will be less of a distraction than an inducement to browse Moving Poems’ increasingly vast archives. The plugin I’m using (a new module for Jetpack, the Swiss army knife of WordPress plugins) seems to key in on videos for the same poet’s work, and to some extent by the same filmmaker. Beyond that it seems to use categories and the posts’ text to determine relatedness. Anyway, I’d appreciate feedback from regular users of the site: great addition or pointless distraction?
Self-Portrait as Beast by Frances Justine Post
I think the description on Vimeo kind of buries the lede for this one:
Video and animation by artist Cecelia Post. Cecelia (photographer and video artist) and Frances [Justine Post] (poet) are twins who have been collaborating since birth.
I love seeing collaborations like this. The sisters produced it as a trailer for Frances’s new book of poems, Beast (Augury Books, 2014). Here’s how they characterized the book at Vimeo:
In BEAST, Frances Justine Post explores the destruction and eventual reclaiming of the self following loss. Many of the poems make up a series of “Self-Portraits” that explore the psychological core of intimacy with its inherent devotion and betrayal, reward and punishment. In one, she is a wolf; in another, an equestrian and her horse; then a tornado, the dropped crumbs of a beloved, a pack of hounds, and finally a cannibal. The self changes form and species and switches from one voice to multiple voices. Each poem attempts to reinvent the self and alter it as a way of trying to understand what remains after devastation.
This Long Winter by Kristin LaTour
https://vimeo.com/86794324
Another simple-but-effective Nic S. video remix of a poem from The Poetry Storehouse, this time by Kristin LaTour. Nic posted some process notes at her blog. Especially interesting are her comments on blending multiple voices, and how she collaborated with the other reader, Jonathon Lu, for the voiceover heard here.
Like poem-making, videopoetry-making is a binding/weaving process, a deliberate or serendipitous blending of disparate things (words, images, sound) that were not linked before. Since voice is for me a hugely prominent element of the process, I continue to look for ways to create voice duets, voice dialogues, voice mosaics.
Happy Fifth Birthday to Moving Poems!
Five years ago today, I posted the first video to Moving Poems — a clay-on-glass animation by Lynn Tomlinson of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” — and the site was born. The brash site description, “The best poetry videos on the web,” was meant largely as a joke on self-serious websites obsessed with search-engine optimization. As best as I can recall, I anticipated spending a month or two posting all the cool poetry videos I was aware of, and letting it go at that. I really just wanted to get them all in one place, largely for my own convenience. Ha!
So here we are. I don’t have the stomach for a long, boastful list of accomplishments, because I am painfully aware of all the things I’ve done wrong or could be doing better. I will say that to the extent that this site has helped expand filmmakers’ and poets’ horizons and led them to create new multimedia works, to network more effectively, and even to create new videopoetry/filmpoetry/cinepoetry-related events that might not have happened otherwise, I am enormously gratified. I continue to be astonished by the breadth and quality of poetry videos that all you filmmakers, video artists, film students and remix geniuses are uploading to the web every day. Since the main site consists entirely of embedded media, it is literally the case, and not the usual bollocks you hear in these kinds of statements, that I couldn’t have done any of this without you. So thanks for sharing your work with the world, and please keep it coming.
Will “House of Cards” save poetry videos on the web?
The lion’s share of online poetry videos (in English, at any rate) are uploaded in the U.S. and, if Moving Poems’ site stats are any indication, their largest audience is also in the U.S. That’s to be expected, I suppose. But there’s a big problem: our internet infrastructure is terrible, among the worst in the developed world. It’s slow, it’s hideously expensive, and a significant portion of the rural population is still on dial-up. I personally have a slow DSL connection via Verizon, one of a handful of enormous, nearly monopolistic providers. Verizon, however, seems to have given up earlier plans to build out its fiber optic network in favor of concentrating on its mobile network, which needless to say is not a viable option for the regular consumption of video for anyone who isn’t pulling a six-figure salary. And the two biggest cable providers, Comcast and Time Warner, recently announced plans for a merger, further reducing competition and thus any fucking incentive whatsoever to improve U.S. internet service.
Against this background came last month’s decision by a federal appeals court to strike down parts of the Federal Communications Commission’s admittedly Byzantine “net neutrality” rules cobbled together in 2010. This means that ISPs could start throttling the bandwidth from any website they choose, for any reason — and what uses more bandwidth than streaming video? It doesn’t help if an ISP is also a significant content provider such as Time Warner and doesn’t fancy the competition. YouTube’s owner Google could easily afford to reach agreements with ISPs. But could Vimeo, and the welter of smaller video hosting companies? What about start-ups bringing us the Next Big Thing in online video?
And sure enough: within weeks, charges were flying that Verizon was deliberately slowing down Netflix. With the second season of the über-popular American version of House of Cards, a web-only Netflix original, released this month, the politicians in D.C. might actually be paying attention, because the show is all about corrupt congressmen — and as we all know, politicians are a supremely self-regarding lot. Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age, said in an excellent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that many if not most congressional representatives will admit in private that net neutrality is important, but may be afraid to say so publicly because of the power of the telecom industry. So let’s hope they and their aides are big House of Cards fans… and that their constituents keep up the pressure.
But the main action on net neutrality rules shifted from stop-gap measures in Congress back to the Federal Communications Commission this week, as FCC chair Tom Wheeler issued a statement recommending that the commission write new rules that the courts might find acceptable. Predictably, a telecom industry tool in the House of Representatives immediately proposed legislation that would block the FCC from doing this.
Comcast, meanwhile, announced that it had reached some sort of agreement with Netflix, as tens of thousands of people registered their discontent with the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger via online petition sites, emails to the FCC, etc. Comcast are desperate to portray themselves as reasonable players — and Netflix is surely eager to hedge their bets in case net neutrality isn’t restored. Or as GigaOm writer Stacey Higginbotham put it:
There are two ways of interpreting this news. The first is that Netflix, worried about the threat of the FCC dismantling network neutrality and allowing ISPs to start charging content providers for delivering their traffic, decided to make a deal early when it could get lower prices. The second is the opposite; that Comcast, trying to appear benevolent as it seeks to create the largest broadband provider in the country via a merger with Time Warner Cable, peered with Netflix to avoid regulators asking tough questions.
Let’s take the optimistic scenario and assume that the FCC approves new net neutrality rules, the courts uphold them, and Congress doesn’t fuck with them. We’re still left with craptastic internet in the country that invented it. According to Susan Crawford, it may be years before that will change, and it will probably happen city by city and region by region in a piecemeal fashion. But at least net neutrality would provide a level playing field for new innovators — and allow me to continue surfing Vimeo and YouTube for new poetry videos on my 1.5 mps “broadband” connection from Verizon.
The Fucking Titanic by Dave Lordan
Irish poet Dave Lordan’s stirring recitation is backed up by music from Sunn O))) and an inspired cut-up of a movie about the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1958). Though I post a lot of videos that remix old film footage here at Moving Poems, I thought it was pretty unusual to make such a lengthy poetry film all from a single source—and one on the same subject as the poem. So I asked the video editor, Eamonn Crudden, to comment. Here’s what he wrote.
I made the video for “The Fucking Titanic”in about 20 hours over two days. Dave knew that his book of prose experiments—First Book of Frags—was about to come out and asked me to get involved in making a video for one of the pieces.
He left the choice of piece up to me and I picked the Titanic one because, reading it online months earlier, I had been struck by the ‘voice’ of the poem—a proletarian female voice cursing her fellow passengers on the Titanic, and the world generally, from beyond a watery grave. I imagined her voice condemning those on the upper levels of the ship, to reliving the disaster over and over for all eternity.
That thought was the hard work in the process of making something for Dave! The rest was really just a mechanical process. I knew that with any dramatized reconstruction I could get my hands on I could capture that thought. It would be as simple as putting the ‘voice’ in the piece over footage of the disaster in progress.
I have made a number of quite experimental films in the last few years—constructing new stories using original monologues (of my own usually) and combining these with edits of my own footage and footage drawn from films that come to hand. Dave knew about my approach so I guessed, without ever directly asking him, that he’d be OK with a piece made through appropriation.
He made a rapid voice recording at my request and e-mailed it to me. I decided to work by having a look at A Night To Remember—an old black and white film about the Titanic. I downloaded and started to watch a just-OK rip of it ‘in’ Final Cut Pro. As I viewed it, sometimes at double and triple speed, I started to strip out all of the dialogue scenes, keeping the unfolding action sequences, and started to make a sub-selection of resonant images that would suit being looped. I knew the moment I first tried looping some of those more resonant shots over the reading and the soundtrack by Sunn O)) that I had a crescendo to build up to. I then started into editing a fast summary of what was left of the film when the dialogue was removed and immediately knew that the almost ‘nouvelle vague’ feel that resulted, combined with a crescendo based on loops, would work as an approach for the whole piece.
I don’t feel bad or guilty about this kind of appropriation at all. It is not as if I or Dave will profit from the venture. I think the quite compelling nature of the result justifies the approach. I am primarily an editor and editing to me is a creative activity. The creative part of my work on it was a simple choice of music and of an existing text to rifle for imagery. Maybe it is useful to compare this approach to VJing? I don’t think there is ‘originality’ in the video—but as a little machine to heighten the intensity of Dave’s piece I think it works. That’s enough for me. I heartily recommend this cheap and dirty approach to others who want to give their poetry and writing a visual element.
To order a copy of First Book of Frags, see the Wurm Press website.
Daffodils by William Wordsworth
Judging from YouTube, Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” must be one of the most popular poems to make into a video, but none of the versions I’ve seen quite made the cut — until now. Polly Zwolinski is a linguistics student at Kings College, London, planning to write her thesis on film poetry, and if this video is any indication, she really grasps what makes a good filmpoem work. Not only is the juxtaposition of film and text images nicely oblique and suggestive, but by transposing such a quintessentially pastoral poem to the urban sphere, Zwolinski has a good chance of expanding its audience.
