Posts By Dave Bonta
Rapprochement Crisis (If I say it was a dream, will you listen?) by Meg Tuite
Swoon’s first release of 2014 is a collaboration with the American poet and fiction writer Meg Tuite. In a recent blog post, he writes:
After “I’m sorry but I’ve witnessed what’s under your suburban bruises” it was clear for me I wanted to work with the words of Meg Tuite again .
Last summer we started another collaboration.
Soundscapes by my hand were sent to her, words came flying back to me.
Back and forth…Words got picked out, recordings were made.
[…]
The [sound]track not only give me a title, it also steered me in the right direction for the images. I didn’t want a ‘storyline’ or a strong narrative. They would stand in the way of the words.
On the other hand I wanted strong emotions, truthful. The whole thing needed a dreamlike feeling of alienation to. I decided on a combination of two different sources;
‘Ménilmontant’ (Markus David Sussmanovitch Kaplan, 1926) and ‘Max Fait de la Photo’ (Lucien Nonguet, 1913)
I added colour and some layers of light.
Read the rest. The video also appears along with the full text and a bio of the poet at Atticus Review.
How to Meditate by Jack Kerouac
Maia Porcaro writes,
This is a short piece shot on 8mm film. It explores the different aspects of meditation and finally finding yourself in such a surreal state. The poem is “How to Meditate” by Jack Kerouac, read by yours truly.
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
Roethke’s great poem is accompanied by found footage of aquatic organisms, which works surprisingly well. Video maker Paula Schneck writes,
“The Waking,” by Theodore Roethke is a poem about the unknowable, life, death, sleep and waking in the form of a villanelle. One of the most unknowable environments in the world is the ocean, especially the deepest parts with the heaviest pressure. Villanelles have a unique rhyme scheme, which is portrayed in jarring cuts between the clips of underwater life.
Brava!
Alice by Lydia Towsey
An interesting performance poem video “Created as a collection of spoken word pieces involving projecting images onto the artist,” according to the Leicester-based filmmaker, Keith Allott. For more about Lydia Towsey, see her website.
Steve Ronnie and Liam Owen: a conversation about poetry and animation
Poet Steve Ronnie and animator Liam Owen discuss their collaboration on the animated poem Four Years From Now, Walking With My Daughter (which we featured back in September) in a new post at the U.K. website The Writing Platform. Here’s how it begins:
SR: So Liam, you’re not a big reader of poetry. What made you think about making an animation from my poem?
LO: That is certainly true, I am in fact not a great reader of anything. I struggle with words but have a love affair with imagery.
When I heard your poem I could automatically visualise each line, each moment, I was walking in the same place. This is not common with me but your poem inspired me, and as soon as you had finished reading it I knew I HAD to make it into a animation, I had to bring it to life.
Growing up together in the same wonderful place and meeting your beautiful first baby daughter who inspired you to write the poem in the first place of course helped.
City Center by Evelyn Lau
https://vimeo.com/81470882
This section from a film called Take Me Home is a terrific meditation on gentrification and sense of place by Jenn Strom and Sherri Rogers, who says in the description at Vimeo:
In August, I collaborated with director Jenn Strom to paint a dreamy sequence for her short film, illustrating a poem called “City Center” by BC’s poet laureate, Evelyn Lau.
What does home mean to you? For each person, it’s different and so personal – in the backyard, on stage, in Tofino, in the kitchen, or wherever family is. In Take Me Home, Knowledge Network profiles 36 British Columbians on what “home” means to them today.
See more at knowledge.ca/program/take-me-home
For more on Evelyn Lau, see the Wikipedia.
(This is Moving Poems’ last post until after the New Year. Happy Holidays and safe journeys to all.)
Byland by Sophie Cooke
Fluid Eye Productions collaborated with author Sophie Cooke to make this poetry film, which was commissioned by Natural Scotland on Screen:
As well as looking back at past film and television, the Natural Scotland on Screen project also wanted to create something new as a lasting legacy beyond the 2013 Year of Natural Scotland.
Scottish poet and novelist Sophie Cooke was commissioned to write an original poem inspired by film from the Scottish Screen Archive and the themes of the Year of Natural Scotland. Sophie watched many hours of footage, then helped select the final clips that would be edited together in this single short film.
The result was Byland. Sophie hopes the poem – and accompanying film – will help to tell the story of our changing relationship with nature.
“the hours rise up putting off stars and it is” by e.e. cummings
https://vimeo.com/81516242
A novel approach to poetry-filmmaking, and one that fits the poem well: cycling through the text again and again, in different voices, the way a musical round is sung. Elizabeth Wilkins directs.
Deliquescence: A Meditation in Seven Parts by Elizabeth Bradfield
A film by Demet Taspinar with poem and voice-over by Elizabeth Bradfield. The fascinating back-story of their collaboration, as described on Vimeo, suggests that the images may have elicited the text to some extent:
A collaboration between video artist Demet Taspinar, who made this film, and me (Elizabeth Bradfield) who wrote a poem to it. Demet made the movie when working in Antarctica, which is where we met aboard an expedition ship. She was the ship’s doctor; I was a naturalist. We’ve made three of these collaborations so far. This one was published (in video and as a printed poem) in Alaska Quarterly Review.
For more on Demet Taspinar, see her website (but beware of video on autoplay). Elizabeth Bradfield is
the author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Audre Lorde Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2010), a book of poems about Arctic and Antarctic exploration that was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
New resource for videopoets: one million+ images from the British Library
Thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing for bringing to our attention this very welcome news: “British Library uploads one million public domain images to the net for remix and reuse.”
The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They’re embarking on an ambitious programme to crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!
Read the rest. I’ll be interested to see how poetry filmmakers make use of this new trove.
(Hat-tip: @jacsongs on Twitter)
