Posts By Dave Bonta
Anyone Can Buy a Seat in the Cinema by Laura Seymour
Maggie Clark’s film of a poem by Laura Seymour, part of a collaboration between Magma Poetry and the University of Edinburgh to make poetry films for Magma 71, The Film Issue. I attended the launch on Friday night at London’s wonderful (and threatened) Cinema Museum, and this was the stand-out film to me. You can find all the films linked from this article. Here’s what they have for Anyone Can Buy a Seat in the Cinema:
Maggie Clark: As my focus is primarily in documentary, the film poem has been an opportunity for me to expand my creative practice and be a little bit more playful with the way I film. It’s pushed me to use visual metaphor as a storytelling device, which is a challenge I’ve really enjoyed! Laura’s poem is about love in the face of prejudice. It carries a sincere and important message, which I hope to do justice in my film.
Laura Seymour: When Maggie and I were talking at the start of the project, I saw that one or two images in the poem stuck out visually from the rest, and also that the images that stuck out visually were perhaps the most ambiguous. The idea that readers or watchers might be more affected by ambivalent imagery was really interesting to me.
The Shadow by Lucy English
A meditation on belonging and place from filmmakers Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg of Outlier Moving Pictures and poet Lucy English — the February afternoon film for her Book of Hours Project.
Two poems by Liu Xia
To celebrate yesterday’s release of Liu Xia from detention, here’s a video of her reading two poems while in captivity, “Untitled” (translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern) and “Drinking” (translated by Yu Zhang). A 2015 post on the PEN America website has the text of both translations, as well as the back-story:
October 8, 2015, will mark five years that Liu Xia, the wife of imprisoned Chinese writer and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been under extralegal house arrest in her Beijing apartment. It was on this date in 2010 that Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjørn Jagland announced from Oslo that her husband was to receive the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize “for his long and nonviolent struggle for human rights in China.” Within hours, police descended on her apartment complex, cut her phone lines, and barred friends and family from entry.
In this rare video, shot in December 2013 after friends ripped past the guards to her apartment, Liu Xia is seen reading two of her own poems in her apartment. Liu casually sits at her desk just outside the soft glow of a reading lamp, smoking a cigarette and reading from her notebook. After she finishes reading the second poem, “Drinking,” she gives a hasty thumbs up to the unidentified camera operator heard whistling in approval.
On December 1, 2015, PEN will host a reading of Liu Xia’s poems from a new translation of her poetry, Empty Chairs—forthcoming on November 3 from Graywolf Press—at Book Court in New York City. Stay tuned for details to come.
Threshold by Ocean Vuong
A poem by the justly celebrated young writer Ocean Vuong, translated to film by Michelle Cheripka for the Visible Poetry Project, which released it back on April 23rd. Cheripka is, as they note,
the founder and Executive Producer of Visible Poetry Project. Michelle is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, where she writes screenplays, essays, and poetry. She directs and produces both short and long-form films and web series. She graduated from Columbia University, where she studied English.
“Threshold” is the opening poem in Vuong’s debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, among other honors.
Misery by Sarah Sloat
I’ve been following Sarah J. Sloat’s erasure poetry project using Stephen King’s Misery ever since it began, on a subsequently deleted Tumblr site, as a poem-a-day project in 2016, and thereafter in various online magazines (such as Tupelo Quarterly and Escape Into Life) as Sloat’s erasures have become ever more visually arresting and imaginative. Just last week there was this interview and feature in Neon Pajamas.
So I was delighted to see a video collaboration between Sarah Sloat and Marie Craven, incorporating images from the erasures in a montage of Marie’s own invention. Here’s how Marie describes it in a just-published blog post:
Sarah Sloat creates hand-made visual art pieces that are also poems. She does this by using various techniques to ‘erase’ most of the words from pages of Stephen King’s novel, ‘Misery’. Her ‘erasures’ leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that might recall surrealism. With Sarah’s permission and ongoing feedback, I have here selected a number of the visual poetry pieces and adapted them. The video of ‘Misery’ attempts to construct a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected visual poetry pieces. It focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah’s ‘Misery’ pages and creates a new form in motion with them. Not a strict ‘presentation’ of Sarah’s visual poetry, the video is my response to their inspiration. Music is by Gurdonark, whose Creative Commons music I have been following for about eight years. Other videos I have made from Sarah Sloat’s poetry are Dictionary Illustrations and Nightlight Ghazal.
The Bird by Matt Dennison
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Two interpretations of a Matt Dennison poem by Jutta Pryor, the first incorporating a flute improvisation by Bruno Gussoni. For the text of the poem (voiced by the author in both films), click through to Vimeo.
An Antelope’s Eyes by Sophia Buchanan Bannister
This complex, multi-faceted videopoem was the April 26 offering from the Visible Poetry Project, and was directed by one of the project’s executive producers, Christina Ellsberg, about whom the website notes:
She graduated from Barnard College in 2016, where she studied medical anthropology and poetry writing. Christina is currently working on an upcoming horror/comedy web series, and will be attending divinity school in the fall.
As for the poet,
Sophia Buchanan Bannister is currently studying English as an undergraduate at Barnard College. In addition to poetry, her interests include baking, comedy, and vintage shoes. She was drawn to the Visible Poetry Project for the opportunity to share a vision, a sentiment, and an urgency across artistic mediums.
Call for work: 2nd Newlyn International Film Festival
Submissions are open for the second annual Newlyn Film Festival, to be held at the southwestern tip of Cornwall in April 2019. Once again, poetry films under six minutes long are solicited, with poetry film scholar-practitioners Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett acting as judges. During the festival, I’m told, they’ll also be giving a talk about the genre. Which is great, because this is one of the few general film festivals to include a poetry film category. We get to break out of the poetry-film ghetto and mingle with other fimmakers! Maybe even make a few converts.
Please visit FilmFreeway for the complete details on how to submit. Note that all films must be in English or have English subtitles; there is a submission fee: £15 or $20; the deadline is January 31; and “Newlyn Film Festival does not require any premiere status, but notes that this may come into consideration during the selection process”. And as a fairly, um, basic filmmaker myself (who—full disclosure—had a poetry film chosen for last year’s screening), this is my favorite bit:
A film’s success is dependent not on its budget or length, but on its core vision and the creativity/efficiency with which it communicates that vision. Programs consist of these diverse visions assembled in an order and rhythm so that even in contrast each is mutually complimentary.
Poem in which we hear the word ‘drone’ by Josephine Corcoran
This is the latest in a series of videos by Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron for collections of poetry from Nine Arches Press, which just celebrated its tenth birthday with the publication of the book excerpted here: What Are You After? by Josephine Corcoran. (It’s a lovely collection, incidentally; I just bought a copy and began reading it yesterday. Always good to support a fellow blogger and late bloomer!)
Cities, This City by Joel Oppenheimer
This latest and I think most ambitious of Daniel Cantagallo’s remix-style cinepoems is accompanied by a thoughtful essay on Medium, “Don’t Touch the Poet | Joel Oppenheimer’s New York“. It begins:
Joel Oppenheimer knew cities…actually one in particular…New York City…and to be more specific “New York City below 14th Street”, in that once bohemian enclave of the 60s and 70s where he could do what he did best: be there when it happens and write it down.
Despite his relative obscurity today, Oppenheimer was a legendary figure of the West Village art scene, a Black Mountain College attendee, a regular columnist for the Village Voice, the first director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project on the Lower East Side, and yet still, he never quite received the recognition he felt he deserved in his time, let alone ours.
I came across the off-the-cuff, propulsive energy of Oppenheimer’s “Cities, This City” on UbuWeb from a 1976 reading at St. Mark’s Church. His elegiac affection and tough-talking ambivalence about urban life spoke to my feelings about New York after too many years sprinting a marathon on its hamster wheels with over 8 million other hamsters.
Solstice Sol Invictus by Lucy English
Hush. Even in the dark days, there is hope.
Think beyond the light failing on this grubby afternoon…
A film by Sarah Tremlett for Lucy English‘s massive, multi-filmmaker collabortive project The Book of Hours.
