Posts By Dave Bonta

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

what we don’t put into words by Dean Pasch

On 31 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Dean Pasch, a British artist and poet living in Germany who’s been uploading a number of short films, with and without poetry. The Vimeo description for this one includes some process notes:

This film started its life as a piece of music composed on an iPad using Garageband. Then I chose one of my poems I felt appropriate and rapped the poem to the music (in Garageband). Next up were the first round of pictures – a series of my own artworks – edited on the ipad in iMovie.

Then there was a break of a year (or so) and I took the film into final cut pro and explored the material further – resulting in the current version.

The challenge is always to transcend the technology while at the same time enjoying it. To embrace the words and the pictures with equal care … exploring both illustration and interpretation – each feeding both picture and word – or at least striving towards that organic flow.

A New Day Dawns by Nikky Finney

On 30 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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It’s heartening to see South Carolina newspaper editors taking what poets have to say so seriously—an example of the general high regard in which writers are held in the South, I think. Yesterday I shared the video made from Ed Madden’s poem, which was reprinted in the Free Times and State newspapers. This poem by Nikky Finney appeared in The State on July 9, in text form as well as in the video by Matt Walsh, which incorporates footage of the previous days’ events.

[Finney] wrote the poem in the early morning hours of July 9, after House members voted to send Gov. Nikki Haley a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, realizing “I have been writing these 230 words all my life.”

For more on Nikky Finney, see her website. She’s also been featured in at least 11 other videos.

When we’re told we’ll never understand by Ed Madden

On 29 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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It took me a couple of viewings to appreciate the genius of this deceptively simple videopoem, which hinges on the last, sung line of Ed Madden‘s poem. (For folks outside the US who might not recognize the line, it’s from the chorus of the South’s unofficial anthem, “Dixie.”) Brian Harmon is the filmmaker, and the description at Vimeo explains the circumstances:

The City of Columbia’s Poet Laureate, Ed Madden, reading his poem “When we’re told we’ll never understand” from “Hercules and the Wagoner: Reflections, South Carolina, June 17-22, 2015” written June 20, 2015. This poem was written in response to the tragedy at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC and in conjunction with the efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the SC Statehouse grounds.

The poem was originally read as part of the Take It Down rally at the Statehouse on June 20, 2015 and reprinted in both the Free Times and State newspapers.

For the full text of this selection of the poem or the full longer version “Hercules and the Wagoner: Reflections, South Carolina, June 17-22, 2015,” visit the City of Columbia Poet Laureate website at columbiapoet.org.

IT’S ALIVE! Visible Verse Festival announces new director, issues call for entries

On 28 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Visible Verse image - eyeball in mouth

Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival is the longest-running poetry film and videopoetry festival in North America, and last April we shared the sad news that its founder and long-time director Heather Haley had reluctantly decided that she couldn’t do it anymore. Today on their Facebook group page, however, writer and entrepreneur Ray Hsu posted:

Just wanted to give y’all a heads up that Visible Verse is on for this October. Longtime Artistic Director Heather Haley will continue to offer her wealth of knowledge as an Advisor while I will step in as Artistic Director. I will try my absolute best to fill her shoes. :)

And he shared this Call for Entries:

VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2015

Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:

We seek videopoems and poetry films with a 7 minute maximum duration.

Works will be judged by their aesthetic interest, innovation and the integration/interplay between film and poetry.

The ideal video poem plays with image and word, whether the words are seen, heard or otherwise approached in the context of the piece.

Please do not send documentaries as they are beyond the scope of this genre.

Entries in any language are accepted, though if the video is not in English, then an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is preferred. Videopoems may come from any part of the world.

Please submit by sending the URL to your videopoem for previewing, along with a brief bio and contact information to Ray Hsu (Artistic Director) at drrayhsu@gmail.com.

If selected, you will receive notification and further instructions. Selected artists will be paid a standard screening fee.

VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2015 is scheduled to take place in October at the Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada, in October.

DEADLINE: August 15, 2015

This is such great news. A huge thanks to Ray Hsu for stepping up and to Heather Haley for agreeing to stay on in an advisory capacity. Please join me in wishing them every success in this transition period, and do consider sending your best work.

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Call for submissions: poetry films about love

On 28 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

The UK-based PoetryFilm art project welcomes general submissions throughout the year, but director Zata Banks has just issued a special invitation to submit poetry films about love:

All topics and themes are welcome, and material exploring LOVE is invited specifically for an event in December 2015.

Work welcome: poetry films, art films, text films, sound films, silent films, collaborations, auteur films, films based on poems, poems based on films, and other experimental text/image/sound screening and performance material. Submissions will be catalogued in the PoetryFilm Archive and will be considered for all future PoetryFilm projects.

Please send hard copies of film submissions in the post (e.g. DVD, USB stick). If you are sending a DVD, please make sure that your DVD is properly formatted and that it will play correctly.

Submission Form

Please click here to download the PoetryFilm Submission Form 2015.

Please send your work together with the form to: PoetryFilm, First Floor, 85 Harwood Road, Fulham, London SW6 4QL.

– A fully completed Submission Form must accompany all submissions

– Please print out and include hard copies of all the additional material you would like to have considered as part of your submission

– Please do not write website links or “see website” on the form

– Please do not submit links by e-mail or through social media

Deadline

The event featuring poetry films about LOVE will take place in December 2015; however, all submissions will be catalogued in the PoetryFilm Archive and will be considered for all future events.

Questions

Please email info@poetryfilm.org if you have any questions. Thanks.

If you’d like to attend a PoetryFilm screening to see what it’s like, there’s one coming up in London in just three weeks: PoetryFilm Parallax, ICA Cinema, Sunday 16 August, 4pm, and another one the following month, also in London: the PoetryFilm Equinox event at The Groucho Club Cinema on Sunday 27 September.

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Alle Tage by Ingeborg Bachmann

On 28 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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The postwar Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann‘s voice and words are featured in the latest film from Swoon (Marc Neys). He used a sound recording from Lyrikline together with some footage he shot on his recent trip to Finland and back home in Mechelen, Belgium, according to the process notes on his blog. The English translation in the subtitles is by Monika Zobel, guest-edited by Ilya Kaminsky. There’s a Dutch version of the video with a translation by Paul Beers and Isolde Quadflieg. The music, as usual, is Swoon’s own composition. (And if you liked it, you can support him by buying his music on Bandcamp. He includes “Alle Tage” on his latest album, Timorous Sounds.)

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Late Love Poems 1: Spring by Steve Griffiths

On 27 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry
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This performance-style poetry film is interesting not just for its content (which, as someone who just fell in love in my late 40s, I kind of identify with), but also for the very well thought-out publication strategy of which it is a part. As the YouTube description says:

‘Spring’ is the first of 30 Late Love Poems by Steve Griffiths going up on YouTube weekly from 27 July, culminating in the book of the same name to be published by Cinnamon Press in time for Valentine’s 2016. Find out more from www.latelovepoems.com.

‘Spring’ is filmed in the Mortimer Forest in Shropshire, in the very landscape of the poem’s beginning, and at the same time of the year.

Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Eamon Bourke (Park6 Productions) directed and edited, with sound, camera assisting and photography by Jules May. There’s a good biography of Griffiths on the Late Love Poems website, which also features his thoughts about the project on the About page. This is especially interesting because of what it suggests about the power of active collaborations between poets and filmmakers:

The feeling that I’d made something life-enhancing fed my desire to share these poems in a new way. I hope that with these films we’ve created a format with an intimacy, an immediacy, and something of the quality of a live reading, but which is retrievable and can be savoured and shared.

Thanks to the support of Arts Council England, I’ve had a great team for this project – and it’s certainly been a voyage of discovery for us. My initial flatness in our first experiments in front of a camera made me work hard once again on my poems, and I rediscovered intonations, insights, glancing emphases, that were there when I first worked on the lines, but had somehow gone missing over time. I’ll always be grateful for that: after all the preparation for standing in front of a camera, I can’t say how much I learned about the quality of attention to a line of poetry in performance. And hearing my wife read my poems naturally and beautifully in rehearsal as I worked to learn them reminded me of the multiplicity of voices that can own a poem – but of course, especially hers.

Over months, it took on new forms, with the visual dimensions and echoes glancing off the poems’ imagery from film-maker Eamon Bourke – and glancing off the map of my face in close-up – and the unexpected gifts of music from two friends I’d known for more than thirty years – one old, one young, and their meeting again in these films, responding to my poems, bringing sensitivities from spectacularly different worlds to enrich my work.

Finally, I must say I’m impressed with Cinnamon Press‘ commitment to this project, going so far as to hire an excellent PR consultant to get the word out. I wish that more of the really ambitious poetry-film and videopoetry projects that I’ve seen in recent years had had that kind of backing. The trouble is, most poets, filmmakers and video artists I know are really crap at promotion. It’s the one area where the DIY ethos isn’t of very much use.

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Call for submissions: Film-poems at Lighthouse

On 26 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Lighthouse film-poems

An arts organization called Lighthouse in Dorset, UK issued a call for submissions back on July 3 which I only just became aware of (sorry!). The deadline is August 20th. They offer a poster version of their call as a PDF, but I’d prefer to share it in text form from their website:

Lighthouse is inviting submissions for an exciting new project highlighting film-poetry, a developing hybrid art-form that connects the apparently disparate worlds of the moving image and the written word.

Film-Poems are typically short, usually just two or three minutes long, featuring a voiceover or talking head and images that connect to the text in some way.

To be launched in October, Film-Poems @ Lighthouse will feature 24 short films to be screened over the course of a year in the Cinema at Lighthouse.

“It’s about exploring new ways of presenting poetry, moving poetry away from people’s expectations and reaching out to the YouTube generation – something to have fun with,” says Lighthouse writer in residence Simon McCormack.

Films can be lo-fi, shot on phones, or they might be packed with wild graphics. There can be a narrative flow or not, literal representations of the words, or something more abstract.

For this series we have chosen the theme of ‘performance’. We want entries to be as adventurous as possible with their interpretation. The idea of performance runs through our everyday experience – there’s the ballet dancer on stage, the paint applied to the canvas, the child carefully spelling a word, the lollipop man holding up traffic and music heard through an open window. Go to the people and places where you find performance and show them to us.”

Submissions guidelines:

Films must be no longer than three minutes.

In the first instance email a link to the entry to submissions@lighthouse.co.uk stating ‘Film-Poems’ in the heading.

Please include a paragraph or two about yourself in the main body of the email.

If accepted we will ask you to send a good digital copy.

By submitting you agree to Lighthouse showing your work in the Cinema. You retain full rights to the work.

The closing date for submissions in 20 August.

New essays at Poetryfilmkanal from Javier Robledo, Ram Devineni and Sigrun Höllrigl

On 26 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - opinions, theory

The German website Poetryfilmkanal has continued its broad, international focus and clockwork regularity with its weekly series of short essays. On July 12, Vienna-based Art Visuals & Poetry (Film)Festival organizer Sigrun Höllrigl contributed “Meine dreifache Faszination für den Poetry Film“—”My triple fascination with the Poetry Film,” according to Google Translate. She wrote about her differing yet complementary perspectives on the genre as a film curator, as a filmmaker and as a poet.

The poet is sometimes at odds with the requirement that linguistic complexity and formal perfection in the sense of formal hermeticism make the film version of a text very difficult. Not all my lyrical texts are suitable for a cinematic presentation. The meaning of the words must be detectable in film speed. Unlike with a book, there is not a natural pause in the movie. What is needed are simple sentences that offer a meaning to the surface, or recorded speech with poetic touch. Good Poetry Film texts are compacted, reduced, and more minimal in their linguistic complexity compared to a poem. The more reduced, the better the simple text, the more space is created for the image. Repeated words or nonsense lyrics are stylistic devices that have proven their suitability. In Poetry Film autocracy of the picture is resolved by the language.

Last Sunday, it was Ram Devineni’s turn. Devineni is “a filmmaker, publisher and founder of Rattapallax films and magazine,” and his essay addressed “Poetry Film Reality,” championing a style of film focused on the poet that he refers to as a poetry-based film, which he says is an ideal form for many beginning filmmakers as well as a good fit for festival programming. I was especially struck by his conclusion:

Soon this small and vibrant genre is going to be challenged with new technological formats that are already challenging traditional fiction and documentary filmmakers. One such technology is virtual reality (VR) which allows the user to fully immerse themselves into an alternative world through a headset like Oculus VR or Google Cardboard. Some of the best VR stories challenge your senses by bending reality. While others create empathy with the subjects you encounter by allowing you to live their experiences. I think VR is ripe for remarkable collaborations between poets and VR designers for the same reasons poetry-based films were for filmmakers and poets. Currently all VR modules are short because of the lengthy time it takes to create them and the large files sizes that need to be downloaded. Virtual reality, like poetry-based films, lets the designer to interpret the poem and go deep into the metaphors. I am curious what ingenious new work will be created in the new emerging genre of ›virtual reality based poems‹? I am sure someone is working on the first one.

Today’s essay is by Javier Alejandro Robledo, organizer of the long-running Videobardo festival in Buenos Aires: “Die archaische Faszination am Poetryfilm“—”The archaic fascination of Poetry Film.” Judging again by Google Translate, Robledo began his historical overview in the Pleistocene:

The director Werner Herzog showed in an artistic way in his film Cave of Forgotten Pictures how petroglyphs came to move in the wavering light of the torches, and proto-cinematic style was formed. I imagine that these projections were accompanied by dances, music and magical-poetic recitations. The magical significance that is the fascination of such projections is the result of their own origin. The dialogue between the moving image, a poetic word, sound and body is so archaic, its origin a magical ritual — from this the fascination derived. From that archaic form until today, every new technology of audiovisual poetry has given new possibilities of expression and invented new special languages, all of which I want the term “Audiovisual” to encompass.

He too concluded with a look ahead:

Today there are about 15 festivals for poetry films and video poetry in the world. Video poetry will grow and develop. To give an example: holographic projections are a technology in full bloom and will be a new format and a new language for the Video Poetry and the Poetry Film that will fascinate you — in this case even without a screen.

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Portlet by Kathleen Kelley and Sarah Rose Nordgren

On 24 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation, Dance
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Where does the poem end and the dance begin? I don’t usually include the filmmaker’s name in the title, but the collaboration between dance and video artist Kathleen Kelley and poet Sarah Rose Nordgren is so tight here, it’s hard to see how to credit the poem exclusively to Nordgren. In an email, she told me that “the poetry and choreography for this piece were done collaboratively, i.e. they were created simultaneously in response to each other.” The result is pure videopoetry.

Portlet is one of three films from their collaborative project Digitized Figures, which has a dedicated page on Kelley’s website where you can view all three as well as a live rehearsal video. Here’s the description:

Digitized Figures: A Practice of Choreographing Text is a collaborative project in development by poet Sarah Rose Nordgren and choreographer Kathleen Kelley. Set to premiere in 2015, Digitized Figures will create an interactive performance environment that weaves words and images through both digital and analog space to investigate the other face of digital technology: its mirrored relationship to organic and evolutionary impulses.

The final version of this installation will include 3 video projections that surround and react to the viewer, animating poems as living and responsive text. Visitors to the installation will be able to move through each of the projections, changing and redirecting them with their own gestures. In addition to the projections, there will be dancers performing live in the space, providing a geometric embodiment that works contrapuntally to the abstraction of the moving words. The viewers will be able to interact with the dancers using touchscreens that give the dancers qualitative and emotional directions.

I’ve featured poetry-dance videos on this website since its inception; it’s a fascinating genre. With the inclusion of “dancing” text animation and the incorporation of the videos into a live, interactive installation/performance, this project really pushes the genre forward.

Black Hole by Chris Woods

On 23 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/132274460

A fine, narrative-style poetry film by Ben Mottershead. The text is by Lancashire poet Chris Woods, who’s been unusually fortunate in having terrific films made from his poetry. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

‘Black Hole’ tells of Jack; an alcoholic determined on self destruction in the wake of his wife’s death.

Made for the Bokeh Yeah Poetry Challenge and adapted from Chris Woods’ poem, courtesy of Comma Press.

Filmed with the 5d Miii using the Magic Lantern Raw Hack.

Directed, Shot and Cut by Ben Mottershead
Jack – Kevin Harper
Kate – Serena Ryan
Jack’s Wife – Maya Ozolina
Sound Recording – Kenneth James
Assistant Director – Marta Nie
Make Up Artist – Faye Aydin Le Jeune
Production Stills and Production Assistant – Darren Mcginn
Behind the Scenes and Production Assistant – Tristan Mayer
Runner – Keeley Knight
Voiceover Recording – Chris Taylor
Music, Sound Design and Sound Mix by Tim Gray
Colourist – Paul Willis
Thanks to
Adele Myers
The Castle Hotel
Comma Press

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Tripping on Mt. Olympus by Yesha Townsend

On 22 July, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry
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Bermudian poet Yesha Townsend in an exemplary performance-poetry film by Alyson Thompson. The poem lives up to its title, so the low-key camera work (no cliched “trippy” effects) provides just the right balance, I think.