Posts By Dave Bonta
El sueño del árbol (The tree’s dream) by Lilián Pallares
A videopoem by Charles Olsen (Antena Blue), intended as a trailer for the book from which the text is sourced: Pájaro, vértigo (Editorial Huerga & Fierro, 2014) by the Colombian writer Lilián Pallares. Be sure to click on the CC (closed captioning) icon to read Olsen’s English translation. The guitar music in the soundtrack is by Quique Meléndez.
Last exit to Luton by Fran Lock
A “filmpoem by Alicja Pawluczuk. Commissioned in collaboration with Alastair Cook and Filmpoem,” according to a page for the poem at The Poetry Society’s website. “Last exit to Luton” by Fran Lock was the Third Prize winner in the UK’s 2014 National Poetry Competition. Click through and scroll down for more on the poet.
AWP 2015: videopoetry- and multimedia-related panels
With more than 12,000 attendees, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs or AWP conference is by far the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America. This year it’s being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to Motionpoems, and if you’re attending, be sure to check out the Motionpoems display at the book fair.
Visit us in Booth #1036! We’ll have:
- a preview of Season 6, produced in partnership with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
- free lesson plans with prompts by Janet Burroway
- more information on our Big Bridges contest
- and much, much more!
(That’s from their email newsletter.)
AWP is this very week, April 8-12, so I’m a little late in getting this out, but I was excited to see nine different panel discussions that are directly or indirectly related to videopoetry and multimedia. I think this is as good an indication as any of the growing literary prestige of multimedia experimentation. Only two of the following panels conflict with each other, so if you’re attending, be sure to check out as many of these as you can. (I’ll be happy to post reports if anyone wants to write them.) Click on the titles for more information, including biographies of the panelists.
R204. Hypertext: Bookish Writing for a Digital Age
Room 200 H&I, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Susannah Schouweiler, Halimah Marcus, Dustin Luke Nelson, Jamie Millard, David Doody
Panelists will speak to the interplay of medium and message as lit mag fare and literary journalism migrate from print to web-based platforms. We’ll highlight new forms of online storytelling and innovations in meaningful reader engagement in this new wave of bookish writing, marked by an increasingly interdisciplinary way of writing and publishing inclined toward more inclusive critical conversations and contributions by “professional” journalists and critics, writers and readers alike.
R237. Reimagining the Author: Pedagogies of Collaboration, Chance, and New Media in Poetry Workshops
Room 205 A&B, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Timothy Bradford, Susan Briante, Joseph Harrington, Cheryl Pallant, Grant Matthew Jenkins
Collaboration, digitization, automation, and conceptualization are just some of the ways traditional notions of authorship can be reimagined in the classroom. Panelists will discuss how rethinking these notions can unlock students’ creativity and critical thinking about their own writing, and they will share lesson plans geared toward helping community, undergraduate, and graduate students generate innovative work and practice new methods they can later apply in more traditional assignments.
R280. Ut Cinéma Poesis: Using Film in Poetry Workshops
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Thursday, April 9, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: James Pate, Sandra Lim, Lisa Fishman, Arda Collins, James Shea
Pasolini wrote poetry. Frank O’Hara made a film. Poetry and film have long found inspiration in one another. This panel of five poets explores ways to use film (Bergman, Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Trecartin) in poetry workshops. How can film lead to writing exercises and discussions about poetic form, image, repetition, sound, and juxtaposition? We also address new, evolving technologies, such as iMovie and the iPhone, and consider how they might be used in a poetry class.
R234. The Essay Blinks: Multimedia Writers on Crafting the Visual Essay
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Sarah Minor, Mark Ehling, Amaranth Borsuk, Eric LeMay
As literary publishing adjusts to the presence of both small-scale presses and web-based magazines, more publishers are adapting to and even selecting for writing that experiments visually. But what makes a multimedia essay? And what makes a good one? Specifically, which techniques render multimedia elements inextricable from rather than extraneous to a text? On this panel, four writers focus on the craft of visual texts and address how ancient essay forms are thriving in the newest media.
F204. Word Meets Image: The Video Essay
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Friday, April 10, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Ned Stuckey-French, Eula Biss, Kristen Radtke, John Bresland
New technologies (iPhones, editing software, YouTube, etc.) have made possible a new literary form—the video essay. This panel will investigate the video essay, including its relationship to other genres (e.g., print essays, graphic memoirs, film, documentaries, etc.), the relationship of text to image, video essays in the classroom, collaboration, curating essays for online magazines, developing scripts, editing, and the use of animation, sound, found footage, titles, and other techniques.
F274. Writing with Media: Poets, Printers, and Programmers
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Friday, April 10, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Kevin McFadden, Todd Boss, Katherine McNamara, Lisa Pearson, Steve Woodall
The art of the book in the digital age is the art of collaboration. Writer, poet, printer, programmer, filmmaker, animator, composer, publisher: all play vital roles in new media, widening the role of authorship. This panel of writers who are also editors-printers-filmmakers-programmers-publishers demonstrates, on screen and on the page, the emergence of the book as a total work of art, from text to voice, photo, scan, and video, forming a unified expression where codex meets multimedia.
S172. Literature On Air
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panelists: Marianne Kunkel, Jeffrey Brown, Don Share, Michael Nye
The panel will explore innovative ways in which the literary arts have achieved renewed life through various broadcast media, including video, vimeos, and the exciting rise in literary podcasts. Editors of Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Missouri Review, and PBS NewsHour will discuss strategies, challenges, and opportunities that come with creating on-air media platforms for the literary arts and what these productions mean for their vision for their pages.
S204. Video Poems and Cross-Genre Collaboration: A Conversation and Screening with Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich, and Trevino Brings Plenty
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Jocelyn Hale, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, National Book Award-winning author of The Round House, collaborates on video poems with her sister Heid and an all-indigenous filmmaking crew including musician-poet Trevino Brings Plenty and filmmaker Elizabeth Day.
S284. Creative Writing in the Digital Age
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Saturday, April 11, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Joseph Rein, Doug Dechow, Janelle Adsit, Trent Hergenrader, Michael Dean Clark
Digital technology has a profound and ever-increasing impact on creative writing; however, this impact is often overlooked in the traditional creative writing classroom. This panel addresses creative solutions to utilizing technology in traditional and hybrid genres, from digital poetics to social media to game theory. The panelists discuss traditional, hybrid, and online-only classrooms, and how instructors can integrate digital tools to enhance creativity both in process and product.
April poetry film events in the UK, Germany, Quebec and Greece
Back on March 7, I posted a list of poetry-film screenings and festivals for the spring in which I lamented the apparent lack of events in April. Since then, I’ve learned about quite a few, thanks to web and Facebook postings from Zata Banks (nee Kitowski), Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, and Helen Dewbery.
11 April in Swindon, UK
Poetry Film Workshop with Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery. According to the Facebook event page, there were only eight places available as of March 22, so don’t delay if you’re interested in signing up.
The objective is for participants to create a poetry film.
Part One: Short introduction on the history of film poetry with examples.
Part Two: Exercises using sound, words and images.
Part Three: Creating a film poem using newly created poetry and images.
Equipment: participants bring their own laptop, camera/phone if they have them.
With permission, and if suitable, the films will be shown at this year’s Poetry Swindon Festival in the Central Library on National Poetry Day (1st October 2015)
17 April in Hawick, Scotland
TRANSMUTATIONS programme at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and Zata Kitowski from PoetryFilm have co-curated this special screening, mixing films from our open submissions with classics of the genre. It features a diverse selection of film artworks, chosen for their alignment with poetry, with poetic structures, with poetic experiences, and with the visual, verbal and aural languages of poetry in various forms. The 45 minute screening will be followed by a 15 minute Q&A with some of the filmmakers, including Richard Bailey (USA) and Sean Martin (UK).
20-24 April in Münster
Poetry Film – Seminar mit Daniel Huhn & Julian Isfort. It’s great to see these workshops cropping up. This one, sponsored by Filmwerkstatt Münster, sounds very intensive, a five-day-long seminar with basic filmmaking knowledge recommended for participants.
22 April in Münster
Best of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2014: HEIMATKLÄNGE. The first of three events presented by Filmwerkstatt Münster in the Palace Theatre, each consisting of two, 45-minute screenings on a given theme, compiled and moderated by the ZEBRA program director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel. (The others are on 29 April—see below—and May 6.) The description for the first one reads:
Der deutschsprachige Raum ist bekannt für seine mannigfaltige Dichtkunst. Konkrete, Digitale und Lautpoesie, Naturlyrik oder Lieder beweisen: Die Varianten sind schier unbegrenzt.
23 April – 5 July in Montreal
Carrefour Vidéo-poétique. A very cool-sounding video installation featuring videopoems from Québec and the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.
The Goethe-Institut and Vidéographe are pleased to collaborate on Carrefour vidéo-poétique, a video installation presented in the windows of the Goethe-Institut from April 23 to July 5, every evening from sunset to midnight.
This presentation of video-poems aims to offer a fresh perspective and a new way of hearing contemporary poetry, in addition to innovating on how it’s disseminated: Video becomes a new means of spreading the word, thereby making poetry accessible to the general public.
24-26 April in Athens
PoetryFilm programme on body and gender identity at sound acts.
sound acts will be the first such event in Greece, introducing the athenian audience to work not frequently seen and hopefully opening a dialogue about gender and identity politics within sound production.
25-26 in Wenlock, UK.
PoetryFilm at the Wenlock Poetry Festival
For the Wenlock Poetry Festival, PoetryFilm is contributing a curated programme of ten short poetry films, which will be played on a loop at The Edge cinema venue. A real festival first!
29 April in Münster
Best of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2014: TANZREIME.
Tanz und Musik schwingen im Dreiklang mit der Lyrik. Moderne Rhythmen interpretieren bekannte Gedichte, ausdrucksstarke Tänze und Performances vermitteln uns die geballte Kraft der Sprache.
It’s official: Visible Verse Festival discontinued
UPDATE: Visible Verse will continue after all!
Vancouver’s long-running Visible Verse Festival, which justly described itself as “North America’s sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry and film,” is coming to a close. Festival organizer Heather Haley first mentioned the likelihood of discontinuing it in an update to her personal Facebook page last fall, after the successful completion of the 2014 festival. She’s now made it official with a post to the Visible Verse Facebook group:
It is with great sadness that I must inform you, my fellow videopoem and poetry film aficionados, that the Visible Verse Festival is coming to a close. My circumstances have changed drastically in the past few years and I can no longer afford to donate my time, especially as the work load, along with the festival, continues to grow. I now have a *real job,* rather a crappy job but one has to pay the bills, so neither do I have time to seek funding or find a sponsor. I am very grateful to the Cinematheque’s volunteers and staff, especially Artistic Director Jim Sinclair. We had a great run! I will keep this group page up, please feel free to continue posting and sharing.
Originally known as the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, it had its first run in 1999, found a home at The Cinematheque the following year, and ran every year since, with Haley doing most of the work single-handedly. Historically speaking, along with VideoBardo in Buenos Aires (biannual since 1996), Visible Verse bridged the gap between the Poetry Film Festival/Cin(E)-Poetry Festival in San Francisco—the world’s first poetry film festival, which ran from 1975 to 1998—and ZEBRA, PoetryFilm, TARP, Sadho, and all the other poetry-film festivals and organizations that sprang up in the new millennium. Haley also helped set the tone for many of these later festivals with her eclectic and inclusive approach to programming, representing mainstream, avant-garde, and spoken-word communities in roughly equal measure. She was a major inspiration for Moving Poems, as well. Visible Verse will be missed, but here’s hoping that Haley continues to direct her own poetry films and collaborate with other filmmakers as time permits.
Mother by Tim Atkins
One doesn’t tend to expect an ecofeminist poetry film from a male director and poet, but Graeme Maguire and Tim Atkins have given us just that. Here’s Maguire’s description on Vimeo:
DIRECTOR: Graeme Maguire
POETRY: Tim Atkins
SOUNDS: Paul D. McDowell
STARRING: Sarah Maguire, Gordon Raphael, Annie Gardiner, Sheridan Lunt and ‘Bump’
ASSISTANCE: James Sharkk
PROPS: Valerie Snelgrove
THANKS TO: Band Films, BristolMOTHER is a short film shot on super-8 and contains no dialogue. It is accompanied by a poetic interpretation by Tim Atkins and a guitar sound track by Paul D. McDowell. It is the story of a heavily pregnant woman on her journey towards birth. She carries a piece of paper inscribed with a symbol. Exhausted, she searches for the origins of the symbol in the hope of finding help. What she finds is more powerful than she could ever have imagined.
The starting point for Mother was the word ‘translation’. The film is about the medicalisation of birth and the ever-present persecution of midwives (witches). It symbolically tackles the issues of consent, control and blind trust in the male authoritarian within the medical institution. Mother is about the destruction of this institution by the ultimate power of nature.
Halloween by Hugo Claus
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UPDATE (3 Oct. 2015): Swoon has re-edited the English version, replacing the Jovan Todorovic film clip with footage by Jan Eerala.
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Belgian artist Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon recently released two entirely different films for a poem by his great countryman Hugo Claus: “a ‘European Dance-version’ (using Hugo’s reading from Lyrikline) and an ‘American Road movie version’ using a fantastic reading Michael Dickes made from the English translation by John Irons,” as he put it in a blog post.
The visual idea for the Dutch version came to me watching a great series of short videos by dancer/artist Nadia Vadori-Gauthier: One Minute of Dance a Day:
‘since January 14, 2015, I’ve been posting one minute of dance to this blog every day, simply, without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there.’
I asked if I could use one of her ‘minutes’ (2 février 2015 – 20e danse) for this videopoem. I could.
I simply adore this combination of Hugo’s poem, his voice and her dancing in the snow.
Enjoy! (There’s also a version with French subtitles: https://vimeo.com/118980966)[…]
The source of the ‘road movie’ version is a music video by the collective ESNAF
Their video for ‘The Long Haul’ by NO (cinematography by Jovan Todorović) had all the ingredients I needed for the English version of the poem. I believe the little storyline is the perfect match for the poem and Michael Dickes’ reading.
Frangipani Grove by Cindy St. Onge
https://vimeo.com/123074886
Nic S. has remixed a video of a horse and rider by Gregory Latham with a Poetry Storehouse poem about what endures after the death of planets by Cindy St. Onge. Somehow it works—for me, at any rate. I’m not crazy about the music (which is by David Mackey) and I think I might’ve preferred St. Onge’s own reading at the Storehouse to Sebastian’s. But the juxtaposition of images is strong and surprising enough to make up for that.
Sueños Culinarios (Culinary Dreams) by Pedro Mercado
This is Sogni Culinari, a humorous, surreal poetry film by Venezuelan director Clarissa Duque and AWA Producciones, based on a poem by her friend Pedro Mercado. The actors are Nabilia Gąnem and Javier Figuera, and the recitation is by Luigi Sciamanna. The Italian translation is by Marco Baldo and the English by Lorenzo Duque. There’s also a version with subtitles in the original Spanish.
For the full credits, see Vimeo or the film’s own website. Sogni Culinari also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account (which is how I found out about it). It’s kind of cool to see a surrealistic short getting this much promotion and publicity. And why not? It’s very well done, and they clearly spared no effort in the production. Duque talked about it on the blog Directors Notes. I was especially interested to hear how her script expanded on the text with details from her own dreams:
The idea for Sogni Culinary began once I read a poem written by my friend Pedro Mercado. That poem is recited exactly as in the original by the character of the dreaming man as voice over throughout the film. The very first time I listened to the poem, I felt bombarded by different images and sensations. One of the first ones that came up in my mind was that feeling when a great love breaks your heart and leaves it behind like pieces of waste laying on the ground. Everybody has felt at least once in their life that terrible sensation of emptiness produced by an unrequited love.
Alongside that is my passion for the culinary arts. I learned when I was still a child how every single ingredient of a dish is like a magic recipe, itself capable of activating every human sense and evoking all kinds of sensations in the human body. My father, a great cook, always used his skill as a tool to get what he desired. He was able to close great deals after his partners, captivated by the sensitivity and power of his food, would accept any proposition my father made to them. Never the less, he also managed so many times to solve romantic problems with delicious banquets. I always thought that he was a kind of magician. With time, I understood that love and food, even though they can also be my weakest points, will always be the greatest passions in my life.
Since my childhood, my oneiric world has been very intense. I wake up from nightmares very often where I am a fish and I end up dying asphyxiated outside of the fishbowl. The people around me, trying to calm me down always tell me “It was just a dream”. Therefore, this time with my new short film I couldn’t miss the opportunity to transmit not only my two greatest passions in life (Love and Food) but also a part of my own oneiric world. I have to confess, filming the scene of the fish was very stressful, even more so because lately I’ve been working for animal rights.
The production of Sogni Culinary was just wonderful. It was January 2015 and we didn’t have any money but we were all looking forward to starting the new year working on a new project, but not those that you don’t like but take to pay the rent. We actually wanted to start working on a project that you get really passionate about and involved with. We wanted to make cinema, so I gathered a group of friends and proposed that we start working without a budget but all together for this culinary dream. Luckily, everything that was needed came along. Rental company Pata Negra let us use a Red One camera, an optic kit, a dolly and lights with all their accessories. As we say in Venezuela “Now we got all the toys”. The crew from Artecomestible made the food makeup which was very rigorous work with lots of attention to detail. The shooting was very pleasant, even though it lasted for a very long day from 6.00am in the morning till 2.00am of the following day. Actually, we’re a tight crew so, when we are at work filming on the plateau, we feel like a fish in the water (literally).
Filming real food can turn out to be a very difficult art. The hardest shot we did was with the meatball, trying to make it bleed in a Tarantinoesque style. The hose placed inside the meatball got blocked many times by the fork, then we had to shoot it several times until it finally worked and looked just as I had dreamed. We knew from the beginning that we could achieve all the special effects that we wanted in post-production. For example; the water falling down from the paintings hung on the walls. Glendis Lopez and I have worked together in art direction many times and now we know that we don’t want to lose the sense of reality and handcraft in our productions. We like to keep the old school style. Still, it was very complicated for her and Filou Frechou to build the scenography with the system of pipes behind the walls but as expected, it turned out to work perfectly and we only had to repeat the shots twice.
News roundup: Text(e) Image Beat exhibition, “Send and Receive” videos, Facebook video embedding and more
The videopoetry exhibition Text(e) Image Beat, curated by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas, is now showing at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It runs through May 1.
With: Heid E. Erdrich + R. Vincent Moniz, Jr + Jonathan Thunder; Hannah Black; Matt Mullins; Martha Cooley; John D. Scott; Tom Konyves; Swoon (AKA Marc Neys) + Howie Good; Michel Félix Lemieux; Kevin Barrington + Bruce Ryder; Maryse Arseneault; Fernando Lazzari; Matthew Hayes + Sasha Patterson + Lee Rosevere.
[…]
The call for Text(e) / Image / Beat did not specify particular themes. Through the necessity of paring down the choices and assembling a flow of works that complemented and gave space to each other, we became aware of recurrent elements. In spite of the fact that the videos originate from many distinct locations, ideas of awaiting / finding miracles and mysteries of living, are frequent. Each work exhibits innovation and imagination, calling upon a wide range of skills to layer meaning. Slam poetry, rants, softly spoken words, hand written notes, and remixes are all used to articulate.
Click through to read the rest of the detailed and annotated curators’ commentary.
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I discovered this week that videos of presentations from the “Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” conference at FACT in Liverpool have been posted to the web at artplayer.tv. The videos are embeddable, but with code that will probably not show up in feeds or email, so I will just link to the presentations here. Check out presentations by: Suzie Hanna; Zata Kitowski; Marco Bertamini; Deryn Rees-Jones; Jason Nelson; George Szirtes; Judith Palmer; and Roger McKinley (the host). They’re all worth your time, but I found Rees-Jones’ talk to be especially thought-provoking. (See also the earlier report at Moving Poems Magazine: “Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views.”)
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News emerged this week from Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, that Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. Venturebeat reports.
A lot of poetry videos, especially of the more rough-and-ready sort (e.g. self-recorded recitations), are only uploaded to Facebook, so it will be helpful to have the freedom to share them on sites like this one. But Facebook launching a proper video hosting platform isn’t necessarily something I welcome, given the corporation’s poor track record with privacy and its ambition to swallow up the independent web, which Facebook succeeds in reproducing about as well as the Mall of America reproduces an agora.
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More details are emerging about Media Poetry Studio, the multimedia poetry summer camp for girls in Silicon Valley. The website now lists the time and location (July 20-31 at Edwin Markham House in San Jose’s History Park at Kelley Park, home of Poetry Center San Jose). And a March 27 article in the San Jose State University newspaper Spartan Daily interviews camp organizers Erica Goss and David Perez:
In terms of tuition, Goss said the program is “pretty reasonable,” costing $799 for two weeks.
The three poet laureates started planning the camp last spring.
“We had to secure funding, we had to write grants, we had to come up with curriculum—which we’re still working on—we had to find a place to do it and a fiscal sponsor since we’re not a nonprofit,” Goss said. “There’s lots of work and we’ll be doing it right up until the day it starts.”
Goss said they want to be able to give each student individualized attention so there is room for about 20 young women.
The Indiegogo campaign is now 62% funded, with $3,075 raised toward a $5,000 goal.
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And finally, speaking of Erica Goss, she has an essay in The Pedestal Magazine about her experience at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October.
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
https://vimeo.com/116807686
This is Último Fragmento, Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe‘s film based on a brief poem by Raymond Carver. The actors are Pau Vegas and Faustino Fernández, and the music is by Swoon. It’s the final film in a series of eight that Yagüe calls La Luz Tenaz.
LA LUZ TENAZ es una serie de ocho vídeos en los que investigo con los lenguajes de la poesía, el cine, la actuación, la música, la fotografía… Mezclo los géneros, experimento, busco la manera de contar las historias que los poemas que uso como inspiración me sugieren, creando una obra nueva y personal.
[THE TENACIOUS LIGHT is a series of eight videos in which I investigate the language of poetry, film, acting, music, photography… I mix genres, experiment, look for ways to tell the stories that the poems I use as inspiration suggest to me, creating a new and personal work.]
