Posts By Dave Bonta
Listen and Before the Flood by W. S. Merwin
This is one section of a production by the San Francisco-based Deborah Slater Dance Theatre called Men Think They Are Better Than Grass, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. (I’ll post other excerpts in the coming weeks.) Here’s the description from Vimeo:
This section features the entire company followed by a duet featuring Kerry Mehling and Kelly Kemp. The poems are LISTEN read by Arwen Anderson and BEFORE THE FLOOD read by Peter Coyote, both written by W.S. Merwin. The music is by Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi, video by Elaine Buckholtz, lights by Allen Willner, set by Mikiko Uesugi and costumes by Laura Hazlett.
Adrift by Juliet Wilson
It’s not often I get to see a new videopoem for the work of a poet whose blog I’ve been reading for years. This is a poem from Juliet Wilson’s debut collection, Unthinkable Skies, from the Scottish Calder Wood Press. The film is by the indefatigible Alastair Cook, who adds that this is the “the first of a series of films with Juliet, which will be premiered at my upcoming solo show at the Drill Hall in Leith on 29th July this year: outoftheblue.org.uk“
Father’s Day videopoem by Chris Eyre and Dick Lourie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QutfN2wb1wc
I don’t tend to post things to the main site which were uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, but I don’t mind sharing this here. It’s making the rounds on Facebook today, and it’s been viewed 84,515 times, which makes it one of the most popular videopoems on YouTube. It’s a clip from the end of the movie Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre. Sherman Alexie wrote the novel and screenplay, but the poem voiced here is by Dick Lourie, according to the YouTube notes. A little web searching turned up the text of the poem, which is titled Forgiving our Fathers.
I just updated this site (along with the main Moving Poems site) to WordPress 3.0. As soon as I did so, a new update of this theme became available, so I updated to that as well. Let me know if you notice anything funny.
Puritan Black by Kate Ruse
According to J. P. Dougan’s description on Vimeo, this is one of a series of poems entitled “Poetry of Colours” by English writer Kate Ruse. “It is concerned with the use of campeachy wood in the production of black during the 18th Century.”
A Poem for A, by Harold Pinter
I like the silent-movie style of interrupting the action with text. I wonder why more videopoems don’t adopt this style?
This is the work of independent filmmaker Justin Anderson, and is dedicated to Roksanda Ilincic. The Vimeo page contains complete credits as well as the following artist’s statement:
This film takes its structure from a short love poem by Harold Pinter written in 1974 about Lady Antonia Fraser his then lover and subsequent wife. She is and was the ‘Light of his Life’. In making this film I was trying evoke some of the feeling of the mid-seventies YSL, a beautiful girl with a rich dark skin wearing a dress that seems to emit light, she is hit by cracks of sunlight. This a very formal film about colour, form and minimal movement. Roksanda Ilincic is designer I greatly admire; her work is very sculptural, feminine and has a real filmic quality.
Paraguas (Umbrella) by Alfredo Boni de la Vega
A jazzy illustration by Barcelona-based L’esstudi of a haiku by Mexican writer Alfredo Boni de la Vega (1914-1965). I like the video better than the poem itself, which strikes me as being too metaphor-laden to qualify as a real haiku:
Flower of sadness
that opens when tears start falling
from the sky.
Sometimes a Man, by Rainer Maria Rilke
The joint reading by Zach and Larry Grossberg is especially charming here, but the animation by Francesca Talenti is nice, too. The translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
Ballad of the Skeletons by Allen Ginsberg
This is basically a glorified music video from 1997, directed by Gus Van Sant — but with music by Philip Glass and Paul McCartney, and spoken word by none other than Allen Ginsberg. I got a charge out of seeing him dressed as Uncle Sam, though by the end of the video I was beginning to tire of the poet-as-prophet schtick.
Incidentally, Howl, the movie, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is set for release in September. That should breathe some new life into the Ginsberg cult.
Found videopoem?
A reporter tries to get out a simple report in what I presume is Urdu. The result struck me as an inadvertent videopoem. (Many thanks to Arvind for locating this for me on YouTube, based on a version that had been uploaded to Facebook.)
Hotel by Guillaume Apollinaire
The filmmaker is Ahmet Tigli, about whom I was able to discover nothing in English. I’m not sure who authored the translation, but here’s the original:
Hôtel
Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage,
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre.
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages
J’allume au feu du jour ma cigarette.
Je ne veux pas travailler — je veux fumer.
Morgan Downie on videopoetry and surrendering to time vampires
Scottish poet Morgan Downie shared some of his thoughts about videopoetry and his collaboration with Alastair Cook (see their two videos) in “time vampires,” a blog post from April 28 which I only just discovered. He includes some kind words about Moving Poems, which I appreciated, but I particularly liked his conclusion:
in computerland you can pretty much do what you want, pick a sound, an image, a stream of words and run with it. when alastair did the scene video he just picked it up and ran with it. what a surprise, what a treasure! not only that by indulging yourself in these collaborative efforts you get to meet new people who do things differently to you, who come from different and interesting backgrounds, countries, cultures and, more or less, there’s no publisher, deadline, competition, brief etc etc other than what you want there to be. so all of that is rendered superfluous. and that can only be a good thing.
so, time vampires. yes, staring at a screen can be a bad thing, but as a means to some form of creative expression, some interaction, something new you hadn’t even thought of? that’s a monkey on my back i’ll welcome. i could write more but i’m off to practise some guitar noise i want to use. i have no idea how to record it, what to do with it when i have done, but that’s all part of the joy.
i recommend it.
