Posts By Dave Bonta
Poetry + dance
Today’s post at Moving Poems, The Lovers by Dorianne Laux, is equally a testament to the imagination of the director, Bob Lockwood, as to the performers: great care has obviously been expended on both the filming and choreography. Lockwood says that the video is “an amalgam of takes of two rehearsal runs.” Having three female dancers take turns reciting the poem worked brilliantly to universalize the very personal, intimate subject-matter of the poem, I thought. The only way it might’ve been improved would have been to have made them wear masks.
“The Lovers” joins a small number of other very impressive offerings in Moving Poem’s Dance category, which several people have told me includes some of their favorite videos on the site. Perhaps the best-known of these poetry-dance videos are the ones for Anne Carson’s series of lectures in the form of sonnets, filmed by Sadie Wilcox, but the approaches to filming, choreography, and integration of text are diverse and also very multicultural, including Iranian, Burmese, Indian and Swedish poets. Together, these videos should serve to remind us that poetry has been a part of multi-media productions for millennia, as dance, drama, and/or musical performance. From this perspective, the merging of poetry with film or video is simply the latest manifestation of a very ancient impulse.
The Lovers by Dorianne Laux
A wonderful interpretation of the Laux poem that takes one, crucial liberty with the text, turning it from a third-person into a first-person poem in the woman’s voice. Here’s the director’s description on Vimeo:
The Lovers is performance piece based on the poem by Dorianne Laux. It examines the ecstasy, complexity and contradiction of female sexual experience.
This performance was developed as a collaboration between The Kelman Group (UK) and The Tuesday Group (Portland, OR, USA) in July and August 2009.
Performers : Juli Gun, Anet Ris-Kelman and Taru Sinclair
Director : Bob LockwoodThis edit is an amalgam of takes of two rehearsal runs of the piece at Hipbone Studio on E.Burnside, Portland.
Self-registration off
An obvious spammer registered this morning, so unfortunately I’ve had to turn off self-registration already. I’ve deleted that contributor, plus one other I wasn’t sure of — if you are that other person, and you’re not in fact a spammer, please accept my apologies and email me to have your status reinstated. For anyone else who who would like to join — and the more, the merrier! — please do email me as well: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. (Contact pages are more hassle than they’re worth, in my experience.)
Stadt-Fisch (City-Fish) by Jan Kummer
A 16 mm film by Patrizia Monzani, who describes herself on her blog as “a film director and editor. Author of videopoems in collaboration with contemporary poets, she is currently involved in the videoart world also as a curator (cooperations with LOOP festival, Visualcontainer.org and Videoartworld.com).” Of this film, she says on Vimeo:
Three characters cross each other – without really affecting one another, thoughts and voices overlap, strophes are repeated… Actually they are not alone and lonely, they just don’t see what they are surrounded by.
Jan Kummer, the poet here, is an artist and author from Chemnitz, Germany.
Minor site-usability note: those Recent Comments links don’t always work, I find — the AJAX is a little screwy or something. When that happens, refresh the page, and hit “Toggle Comment Threads.” Then the links should work.
She is Overheard Singing by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A music-video-style film titled Overheard by composer Briareus (Clayton Corrello). Millay’s poetry doesn’t do much for me by itself, but put to music and envideoed, it’s really quite compelling, I think.
What this is for and how to use it
Rather than standard forum software, which can be clunky to use, I’m trying a special kind of WordPress theme where logged-in authors can post directly on the front page, and see comments updated in real time as on Twitter. My hope is that it will have the ease of use of Twitter or Tumblr but the power of WordPress, without the hassles attending a full-fledged social networking site. (We’re mostly artists and poets here. How much more sociable can we stand to be?)
How to get an avatar
Whether you’re a contributor or just a commenter here, you can get an avatar by going to Gravatar.com. (If you’ve ever registered for a site at WordPress.com, you already have a gravatar and it should show up if you use the same email to sign in here.)
I believe we are witnessing the evolutio…
I believe we are witnessing the evolution of a unique form of poetry, a form which was barely recognizable 50 years ago, a new form of “visual poetry” which has survived the leap from the page to the screen, a form that is so intriguing and new that its definition, its features, characteristics, categories, its very NAME is being questioned — videopoetry.
Tom Konyves (forum thread at Read Write Poem, now offline)
The electric kool-aid Collins test
This is a test of the auto-embed video posting feature from the front page of the blog. I’m simply posting the URL of a video on YouTube to its own line, separated by spaces before and after, as detailed in the WordPress codex. (I think this will work in all browsers, with the possible exception of mobile devices. Please leave a comment if you are only seeing links and not the videos themselves.)
Sometimes I feel as if Billy Collins is looking down on me, and he’s not even dead yet!
That was the authorized video, an animation by Juan Delcan, part of a series of animated poems produced by JWT New York. It has been viewed 756,604 times on YouTube. But I much preferred the following unauthorized video montage by Lauren Adolfsen:
The Delcan animation is a very fine illustration of the poem, but with Adolfsen’s video, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not merely a poem video; it’s a videopoem.
Which do you you prefer?
“I am” machine-poem by Brion Gysin
http://www.vimeo.com/90415
I couldn’t resist following Steven Nichol Smith’s “I Am” with this audio experiment from 1960 by Brion Gysin:
Permutation is a technique commonly used by avant-gardes and above all, and systematically, by the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is possible to permute sentences, words within a sentence, syllables and phonemes within a word. Permutation is a typically modern device and considerable use was made of it in the plastic arts by the constructivists. In fact it permits the complete exhaustion of all the possible combinations within a given choice of material, without limit of number. The Englishman Brion Gysin, one of the founders of the beatnik movement and inventor of such new formulas as the collage-novel, has composed his phonic texts on this principle. “I am” is a classic of the genre. Composed exclusively of permutations of the biblical words “I am that I am”, with ever more marked accelerations, he succeeds in rendering, from the initial nucleus, a crowd of “I am”s, the creation of the world in geometrical progression until it fades away in the sidereal silence.
The video by Alex Itin is titled “hotdog,” and is one of the very first videopoems posted to Vimeo four years ago. The god/dog pun is an old one, but the twitching of the animal in its sleep is a great way way to suggest dreaming and delusion while remaining entirely objective. And you certainly wouldn’t want anything less minimalist for a poem like this.
