Posts By Dave Bonta
Over Toast by Debris Stevenson
Like yesterday’s piece by Jade Anouka and last Wednesday’s piece by Max Wallis, this is a hybrid between a filmpoem and a performance poem in which the poet, Debris Stevenson, is also an actor (here joined by another actor, Lil Woods). Chris Keenan of Prime Objective directs.
A poetry film made in collaboration with poet Debris Stevenson for her piece ‘Over Toast’. Commissioned by Apples & Snakes for Architects of Our Republic. Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream speech’.
Synopsis:
‘Over Toast takes us on a philosophical journey, where a mother and daughter travel to a safe place to discover the importance of asking a question.’
According to the Architects of Our Republic site, “Apples and Snakes is the leading organisation for performance poetry in England, with a national reputation for producing exciting and innovative participation and performance work in spoken word.”
Forget by Jade Anouka
London-based actor and poet Jade Anouka in an understated performance of her work “Directed and edited by Sabrina Grant with assistance from Anneka Harry,” according to the note on YouTube.
The Ocean by Robert Krut
A videopoem in support of the forthcoming collection This is the Ocean by Robert Krut. Nick Paonessa of lowercase productions directs.
This is one of five poetry book trailers included in Erica Goss’s latest column for Connotation Press.
When is a video poem more than a video poem? When it’s a book trailer. Authors promote their books with book trailers, short films meant to entice a buyer, just like a movie trailer is meant to advertise a movie. Movie trailers show a condensed version of the film, including cuts of the most exciting parts without giving away the plot, while book trailers tend to focus on the author’s credentials first and the story second, especially if the author is well-known. A video poem meant to promote a book of poems, literary fiction or non-fiction, however, is often a complete work of art, its connection to the book somewhat tangential.
About Krut’s video, Goss writes:
Robert Krut’s second collection, This is the Ocean, due out this month from Bona Fide Books, was preceded by videos of two poems from the book. “The Ocean” shows a coastal city all but abandoned in the early morning light. Robert Krut told me that he and filmmaker Nick Paonessa shot scenes at Venice Beach, California. “It’s a completely different world at dawn,” Robert said. “This sounds impossible, but you can drive from Burbank to Venice in about twenty minutes” – a trip that normally takes at least an hour. The video for “The Ocean” shows an alternate Southern California in an Edward Hopper-esque mood: a skateboarder has the whole park to himself, a empty lifeguard tower faces the sea as the sky turns pink, and the smooth wide beach is alone with its secrets as we hear the last lines of the poem: “There may be nothing for miles and miles, / but I have come from the bottom of the ocean, / and I am here to tell you about it.” The Pacific Ocean is the unreliable narrator in this video, elemental, beautiful and dangerous.
Be sure to check out her other selections. And for more videopoems that do double duty as book trailers, browse the book trailer category here. (It’s relatively new, so it doesn’t necessarily include all of the book trailers on the site.)
Why bad poetry videos suck
https://vimeo.com/74755473
Watch on Vimeo
The fact that I love the Wendell Berry poem makes this unimaginative video all the more painful to watch. It adds nothing to my understanding of the poem, and instead works to reduce it to a few, too-pretty images. And since it will be seen by tens of thousands on PBS, it sets a very bad example. YouTube is already infested with home-made versions of this poetry video, I guess because too many poetry fans would rather put poems on a pedestal and worship them as idols than take the risk of engaging them in dialogue. Add in the redundant images of the poem’s text while the poet reads it to us, and the over-all effect is of a poetry video that talks down to its audience. In a misguided effort to make poetry accessible, it has pretty much destroyed the poem.
(Please note, however, that the Bill Moyers interview, taped to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the publication of Berry’s landmark collection of essays The Unsettling of America, and due to be broadcast beginning October 4, sounds very worthwhile indeed. All the more irritating, then, that they would promote it with such a lousy poetry video.)
L’éternité / Eternity by Arthur Rimbaud
A silent filmpoem with trilingual titling by the German filmmaker Patrick Müller. The film was shot in Dinard, Brittany, according to the credits. The description at Vimeo says: “Salutary breaks and changes are the topic of Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) autobiographical nature poem which is confronted with equally emotionally charged images.” A page at lomography.de goes into a bit more technical detail: “Shot on a Lomokino camera on 35mm film stock and scanned frame by frame with a Nikon Coolscan scanner. Edited with Final Cut Pro X.”
Surprisingly, this is the very first Rimbaud piece at Moving Poems.
Some thoughts on collage videopoetry
Over at Via Negativa, I shared a new videopoem I made on a whim last night. This morning I added some process notes, which led to a few further reflections of possible interest to writers and poetry teachers looking for an easy way to get into videopoeming. First, the video:
I made this videopoem entirely out of found text and footage from American television commercials of the late 1940s and early 50s. I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of collage in videopoetry ever since I saw what Matt Mullins did with a sermon by Oral Roberts in Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer). This doesn’t rise quite to that level, either technically or conceptually, but it was a fun experiment. Thanks to the Prelinger Archives for the material, all in the public domain.
Process notes: I’ve been downloading compilations of old television commercials for possible use in videos for poems from the new chapbook. While making poetry videos for pre-existing texts is fun, it’s easy to get sidetracked by a wealth of good material, and yesterday I decided to give in to the temptation. I went through one of the compilations, writing down all the good lines in a text document, in order as they appeared so I could re-find them easily. Then I wrote a rough draft with some of the most interesting lines, loaded the source material into Windows Movie Maker and began to cut and paste the snippets containing the lines I’d liked into the order I’d put them in the written draft. Once I had fully assembled the first rough draft of a videopoem, however, I found the words went by rather too quickly. I had the idea of using wordless or nearly wordless segments from a single ad both to give space to the lines of found poetry and to act as a sort of refrain.
At this stage, the working title was “Industry at Work” (taken from a clip that I subsequently removed). However, after a couple of hours of trimming and moving things around, it became clear that the refrain segments just weren’t gelling, and the video overall seemed too scattered and miscellaneous. I began looking at another compilation, and the very first ad in it — a commercial for Budweiser — had lots of wordless footage that I liked. It was only after pasting some of those segments into the draft project that I got the idea of using the first half of Budweiser’s then-slogan, “Where there’s life, there’s Bud,” as title and refrain.
I go into all this (hopefully not too boring) detail simply to show that the process of composition doesn’t differ all that wildly from the way regular poems are made. If I were teaching poetry, this is the sort of thing I’d make beginning students do. Of all the possible approaches to videopoetry, found-poem collage with public-domain (or otherwise free-to-use) footage has the lowest barrier to entry. All you really need is a computer with a DSL or faster connection and whatever video editing software the operating system came with. Moreover, this way of making videopoems comes much closer than the typical poetry video to Tom Konyves’ conception of videopoety as
the Duchampian “assisted readymade”. Consider the recorded image as the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover whether there exists something significant, yet still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface of the present moment.
New developments at Motionpoems
Some exciting news from our friends at Motionpoems, the Minneapolis-based arts organization responsible for a raft of well-made poetry films (especially animations) over the last few years.
Motionpoems will partner with Minneapolis-based Egg Creative as its production management team, and has engaged Jennifer David (formerly Executive Producer of Fallon Worldwide) to produce the coming season of 12 poetry films.
Egg Creative will provide production management assistance, and its music and sound division, Egg Music, will provide Motionpoems’ film projects with original scores, music supervision, audio production and finishing. Executive Producer Eric Fawcett says, “I’m inspired by how much raw talent exists in the ad industry, and we’re eager to connect those talents to Motionpoems’ film projects.”
Replacing Motionpoems co-founding producer Angella Kassube (who takes a seat on the board), freelancer Jennifer David brings 15 years of experience in agency work, including stints at Martin Williams and Carmichael Lynch before a 9-year run at Fallon serving as EP on Cadillac and Chrysler, and as Producer on accounts like Virgin Mobile, Travelers Insurance and Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. Her 5+ years on the board of the Weisman Art Museum acquaint her with the nonprofit arts sector.
Motionpoems’ annual season consists of 12 short films per year, adapted from poems cultivated in partnership with some of America’s most important poetry publishers. In recent years, Motionpoems has partnered with Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf Press, and Scribner’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. All will contribute poetry again this year, along with newcomers American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, FSG, Wave Books and others to be announced. Motionpoems has produced 40+ films over the past four years, working with Pulitzer Prize winners and early-career poets alike.
Read the rest. It’s good to see poetry videos continuing to gain mainstream acceptance in the American poetry establishment.
The Plow That Broke the Plains by Pare Lorentz
Though produced as a documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains may also be seen as an epic filmpoem. Consider: first-time filmmaker Pare Lorentz didn’t write the script until almost everything else was done — all the shooting, even Virgil Thomson’s magnificent score. Composer and filmmaker worked together to fit the film to the score, sometimes cutting one, sometimes the other, and Lorentz thought the music should be allowed to suggest separate and complementary story lines. And the script, when he finally wrote it, took the form of free verse — see for yourself. When the text of his second documentary, River, was published in book form, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Which is not to say that (in my opinion at least) the script of The Plow That Broke the Plains qualifies as great poetry on its own. Rather, the successful marriage of all three elements — text, soundtrack and film — creates a poetic whole greater than the sum of its parts, a filmpoem. The fascinating story behind the making of the film is adeptly recounted on this webpage from the University of Virginia’s American Studies program.
Because it was produced by the federal government, The Plow That Broke the Plains is in the public domain, and high-resolution versions may be downloaded from the Internet Archive for reuse and remix. It might be interesting to see what a contemporary videopoet could make with this material, whether by swapping in new text or cutting and splicing Lorentz’s. (If anyone does this, be sure to send me the link.)
Allow Yourself This One Day by Max Wallis
This is Alastair Cook‘s Filmpoem 33, and departs rather significantly from his other filmpoems in its unstinting focus on the poet/narrator.
Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar UK and poet/ model Max Wallis. Allow Yourself This One Day is the final poem in Max’s début pamphlet, Modern Love, where he traces the year-long course of a love affair and all its constituent parts: sex and sensuality, longing and loneliness, desire and disappointment, heady beginnings and inevitable endings; in a world dominated by high street brands, text messaging and social media.
Luca Nasciuti did both the photography and the music for this one.
According to Max Wallis’ website, “The Arts Council has funded Max’s new film project. He is currently Harper’s Bazaar’s ‘roaming poet’. He produces poetry videos which look at the world of modelling through a poetic lens.”
Mesostic (“Dancer/Suc/Hands…”) by John Cage
A compelling animation of a visual poem, one of John Cages’s mesostics, by Federica Cristiani. She writes:
In this video I try to create a perfect balance between music and video. The letters appear following the beat of the music. My purpose is to create a perfect synesthesia within sound and typography.
This particular text was also included in a musical composition for solo voice, Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham.
