Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

New content at Poetry Film Live and other websites

On 19 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - literary magazines and websites

The editors of Poetry Film Live have just released their second issue, which in practice means that four new videos and an interview have been linked from their front page, below an introduction which I’ll paste in here as an added inducement to go visit:

This issue features poetry films from the UK.

The interview this month is with Adam Steiner. We spoke to Adam on the day Disappear Here was being launched. We particularly wanted to find out about the Disappear Here Project, which involved 9 poets, 9 filmmakers and 27 poetry films. We also talked to Adam about his not-for-profit publishing company, his time working for the NHS and his new novel.

Antony Owen is the poet and performer of The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House. Samuel Vale House is next to the ring road in Coventry. It was directed by Adam Steiner and was the poetry film that led to the Disappear Here Project.

Act was written by Maggie Sawkins and was recorded for ‘Zones of Avoidance’, the live literature production which went on to win the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Act was filmed by Abigail Norris.

Rachel McGladdery’s poem My Dead Dad is a powerful and moving poem, filmed by Bryan Dickenson. The film gives space for the viewer to take in the words without distraction; Bryan’s aim was for the viewer to ‘defocus’ on the screen.

Martin Evans poetry film Numbers is intriguing – in the Welsh mountains is a numbers station broadcasting in Welsh. Martin explains how numbers stations were used in the Cold War to broadcast on short wave frequencies to spies out in the field. I’ll leave you to enjoy the film and ask the obvious questions ….

Next month there will be international poetry films by Cheryl Gross, Eduardo Yagüe and Lucy English, José Luis Ugarte and Patricia Killelea, plus an interview with Mab Jones who is one of the 9 poets who took part in Disappear Here.

I found the interview with Adam Steiner especially inspirational. Here’s a snippet:

PFL It was said that Disappear Here will ‘make people see the city of Coventry in a different light; whether they are new or have lived here for years. And will inspire others to write/read/experience poetry in its many forms; live and on the page, as well as sparking interest in the new and developing genre of poetry films’. To what extent have these aims been achieved so far?

AS Yes I do think we have done that, by working with great collaborators and the current audiences in Coventry and poets I know here in Coventry. And the people who run the monthly open mike nights are starting to get interesting guests from the midlands and beyond. It is a great way of having our poets working as ambassadors for the city and then poets from other places bringing their stuff here. It’s created whole new collaborations with people publishing other people. I don’t think it will bring loads of people putting pen to paper but I think it will shatter and reinvigorate some conceptions of poetry and what poetry can, or could be, in the future, especially with the films, which are a very accessible and immediate format. If you watch a poetry film, or see a great performance and it stays with you, if a line or two of poetry sticks, it has done its job – if your lines carry on through a person that’s all you can ask for as a poet.

I’ve been giving a lot of attention to Poetry Film Live because they’re new and deserve support, but be sure to keep an eye on other film/videopoetry-related sites, too, or you might miss developments such as:

  • The Haus für Poesie (formerly Literaturwerkstatt Berlin) website has added a new section of pages to its ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival section embedding all the winning films (or trailers) available on Vimeo or YouTube for the complete run of festivals they coordinated, 2002-2014. Start here.
  • So far the new website at zebrapoetryfilm.org has not followed suit. BUT the ZEBRA Poetry Film Club Vimeo channel continues to locate and add films from among all the films ever screened at ZEBRA, a huge undertaking that’s been going on for more than two years now (and which has made my own job as Moving Poems curator much easier).
  • And the ZEBRA Poetry Film Club group on Facebook remains the number one source for international news about the genre. (They’re also on Twitter for the Facebook-averse.)
  • The Vienna-based Art Visuals & Poetry website also regularly adds new content, especially in its Outstanding poetry films section, though it can be a little difficult to navigate. The easiest approach is to subscribe to their partial-content RSS feed for notification of new content, which seems to appear about two or three times a week.
  • Poetryfilmkanal (Poetryfilm Channel), the other major German and English-language website for the genre, is worth visiting at least once a month for their Film of the Month feature. (For those with no German, like me, Google Translate is more than adequate these days for conveying the gist of German prose.) They’re currently soliciting essays on Typography and Text as Image for the third issue of their magazine.
  • The website for the forthcoming VERSOGRAMAS documentary about videopoetry, directed by Belén Montero and Juan Lesta, recently added a page with links to all the videopoets who will be interviewed in the film. (At least, I think it was recent. Since it’s a static page, it didn’t show up in the feed.)

Here’s the latest VERSOGRAMAS teaser, for those who haven’t seen it. For a die-hard videopoetry fan like me, this is more exciting than the latest Star Wars movie trailer:

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TWIN by Brendan Bonsack

On 17 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new videopoem from Brendan Bonsack, who explained via email that

This one grew, organically if you like, from a short piece of discarded footage from another project.
Different from adapting a “page poem” to film, with this the music and poetry was written to follow the visuals.

If you still want the “page poem” experience, click through to Vimeo to read the text.

Exercise in the Face of Divorce by David Campos

On 16 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/205827531

California poet David Campos calls this “A narrative video poem about utilizing exercise to deal with the pain of divorce.” It was the first example of contemporary videopoetry examined by Ruben Quesada in his article in Ploughshares last week. As the quotes in the article make clear, however, Campos prefers to think of his work as part of the film tradition, and describes his composition process as follows:

Sound can carry an image…. In “Exercise in the Face of Divorce,” I focused on capturing sound in the shots—this enhanced the poem. All the film criticism I’ve read came into play while shooting and editing the video. I framed and composed shots from the beginning to add meaning. I was conscious of the color while shooting and editing. I edited the footage down to their essential parts. Most importantly, I added sound from the shots themselves. These projects are not “video poems.” They’re short films and they must be treated this way. It is why I use a story board and a rough script from the beginning. The same care I would exhibit in creating a poem on the page must be taken through its production into a film.

Read the rest of the article, if you haven’t already, and check out more of Campos’ work on Vimeo.

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX) by Edna St. Vincent Millay

On 15 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A recording of Millay reciting her poem is paired with a McCoy Tyner track to good effect in this new film by London-based filmmaker Sidney Sonnerberg. Daleya Marohn is the actor.

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Wasp’s Honey by Martha McCollough

On 14 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Martha McCollough’s latest animated poem appeared in Atticus Review on March 3, along with this artist’s statement:

Bees have many associations with death—they are sacred to Persephone and when there is a death in the beekeeper’s household they must be told and allowed to mourn. Through honey, they have associations with creativity—it is a Greek folk belief that if a bee touches the lips of a sleeping child, the child will be a singer or a poet. I wanted to keep this elegy simple and direct, so there is no voiceover, only visual text. The soundtrack was composed using the p22 text-to-music generator. Sections of the text were used to create a midi file, freely edited in Logic.

Click through for the bio, and watch more of McCollough’s stand-out poetry videos on Vimeo.

New essay on poetry videos and the evolution of language at Ploughshares

On 11 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - filmmaking, literary magazines and websites, opinions

Ploughshares, one of the most prestigious American print literary magazines, has a new essay about poetry videos up on their blog, authored by one of their regular bloggers, Ruben Quesada, himself a competent maker of poetry videos. But for this piece, he chose to look at the work of other video-making poets — David Campos, Vickie Vértiz, and Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. I’ve seen various survey articles about poetry film/video appear in journals over the years, but “American Poetry: Video and the Evolution of Language” is more historically grounded and philosophically reflective than most. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The moving image is the antithesis to a static image and therefore closer to poetry than painting. For millennia, poetry has been the sister art to painting, but poetry is not composed of “static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes” (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination). Poetry is dynamic and to understand the varied human experiences one must examine the stories it tells. It is moving images, film, video that brings us closer to the life that is lived than painting. Video complements and translates the written word.

Read the rest.

(Should we hold out hope that the Ploughshares blog or website will begin to feature poetry videos? Probably not. I keep hoping that other prestigious journals will follow TriQuarterly‘s lead, but instead the number of literary magazines carrying videos and other multimedia seems to be shrinking, I’m not sure why.)

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New York Shakespeare Exchange brings road show, 48-hour sonnet film contest to Texas

On 11 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - contests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8H9JfgXHko

The New York Shakespeare Exchange is the nonprofit organization behind the nearly complete (123 of 154 films released) Sonnet Project… which is now going global. Their mission is to “provide fresh points of entry to the work by intersecting contemporary culture with the poetry of Shakespearean words and themes in unexpected ways,” and to that end, they announced this week a 48-hour Shakespeare Shorts film contest next weekend in Texas.

This March, NY Shakespeare Exchange is bringing our community immersion event, INTERSECTIONS to Bryan/College Station. In just one week, we will engage as much of your community as we can with the words of William Shakespeare. If you love cinema and want to flex your muscle with a little iambic pentameter, then this contest is for you! In just 48 hours you will pick a Shakespeare Sonnet and turn it into an indie-style short film which we will screen at a special Sonnet Project party. Shakespeare Shorts is a perfect way to show your sense of cinematic artistry.

Click through for the details. If you’d like to bring NYSX to your town or city, check out their INTERSECTIONS page.

Combining the spectacle of the stage, energy of our pub crawls, and the multimedia approach of The Sonnet Project, INTERSECTIONS, the latest offering from NYSX, is a community immersion initiative for the world beyond NYC.

Working with community leaders and local institutions, our troupe of actors, directors, and teachers will create a direct-from-NYC, tailor-made series of events special to your town.

Wait. Did they say “pub crawls”? Yes they did:

The true spirit of Elizabethan London lives on.

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Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

On 11 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is To The Marriage Of True Minds, a 2010 narrative short about Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK directed by Andrew Steggall. Producer Sunny Midha describes it on Vimeo as an Arabic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. William El Gardi and Amir Boutrous are the two main actors; full credits are on the Motion Group Pictures website.

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The Robots Are Coming by Kyle Dargan

On 10 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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A film by Minneapolis-based animator Julia Iverson for Motionpoems — their latest episode, in partnership with Cave Canem. I love the poem by Kyle Dargan, from his 2015 collection Honest Engine.

Like Breath, Like Air by Mari Pack

On 8 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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From Quail Bell Magazine, here’s a video by Christine Stoddard and David Fuchs featuring a poem by poet, essayist, copywriter, and radio producer Mari Pack. According to a piece in the Huffington Post back in January,

The day after the women’s marches in Washington, D.C., New York, and other cities around the world, Brooklyn-based artist Christine Stoddard photographed feminist poet Mari Pack. She wanted to capture a strong woman caught in a vulnerable time. After Stoddard produced a set of photo collages from the shoot, Pack paired one of the collages with one of her poems. The rest of the photo collages will appear in a poetry film written and narrated by Pack and edited by David Fuchs.

This I presume is that film. Incidentally, in addition to their in-house productions, Quail Bell Magazine does appear to consider others’ multimedia productions as well — see their guidelines for submission. I rather like their mission statement.

1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim by Anida Yoeu Ali

On 7 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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Made seven years ago, this collaboration between Cambodian-American performance artist and poet Anida Yoeu Ali and Japanese-American filmmaker Masahiro Sugano is, sadly, more relevant than ever, with hate crimes against Muslims (and those erroneously assumed to be Muslim) escalating in the U.S. under an administration that has embraced a white Christian supremacist ideology. This was the Film of the Month for January at Poetryfilmkanal. See the 1700% Project website for much more information about the film, including bios of the collaborators and the text of the poem, a cento based on hate crimes committed shortly after 9/11. The video description reads:

In this video, narratives collide with music, poetry and politics to create a complex and layered experience. A poet, dancer, angel, prisoner converge with members of the Muslim community to speak, deflect, and intervene against racial profiling and hate crimes. This convergence exemplifies a spirit of defiance and resistance from communities of people who refuse to end in violence.

This spoken word video is a collaboration between artist Anida Yoeu Ali and filmmaker Masahiro Sugano with over 50 diverse volunteers, participants and community members in the Chicagoland area. It is part of an ongoing project that engages art as a form of intervention against the racial profiling of Muslims in a post 9/11 era. The larger project titled “The 1700% Project” uses a multi-faceted artistic approach to educate the wider public about the diversity within the Muslim community. The number 1700% refers to the exponential percentage increase of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims and those perceived to be Arab or Muslim since the events of September 11, 2001.

As the article in Poetryfilmkanal notes, the lack of didacticism makes this film more powerful and provocative than most political poetry. Ali says in her artist’s statement:

The project acknowledges that politically driven works are complex and layered thus often requiring a multitude of ways for expression and encounter. … My work continues to investigate the residual stain of performance and how the live body completes the experience for both audience and performer. Performing narratives is an act of social storytelling that contributes to collective healing. For me, performance and storytelling become ways of bridging the interior and exterior space of self as well as initiate critical dialogues between communities and institutions.

Max Wallis to make videopoems as poet in residence at Grindr

On 4 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - filmmaking, literary magazines and websites

Grindr has just hired its first poet in residence: British model and writer Max Wallis. Wallis broke the news himself via an article in The Guardian.

Poetry and sex have a long and venerable history, one often being used in the service of setting up the other. Catullus kicked things off, and Lord Byron, Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy, among others, have run with the ball since. The work of those poets is perhaps best thought of as the context for what I am doing now. Starting next week, I will be the gay social networking app Grindr’s first poet in residence, making a video poem each month to be flashed in the app and also on its new platform, Into. They will be directed by Ashley Joiner, whose documentary Pride? premieres at the BFI’s LGBT film festival in March.

The poems play on the essential themes of the app – relationships, our increasingly unsympathetic world and quite a lot of sex (topics that have been the subject of my last two books – Modern Love and Everything Everything). Each video threads into the next, telling a larger story about what is to be gay now (although I thought it best not to limit myself to what it means to be gay and on Grindr now – as that would mean a lot of requests to “send more pics” and any number of unsolicited anatomical images).

He goes on to describe the first poem in the series, which I hope to be able to blog here when it comes out, presuming it’s sharable on the open web. According to Mashable,

Grindr has yet to confirm a release date, stating “a few things are still in the works for the new platform.” Wallis plans to shoot the second and third films this Sunday.

This isn’t Wallis’ first poet-in-residence gig to involve videopoetry. In 2103 he made at least three videos as part of a residency with Harper’s Bazaar. Here’s one of them:

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