Posts By Dave Bonta
Moth by Katie Frank
http://vimeo.com/39317127
Film by Jessica Bass; poem and performance by Katie Frank.
Channeling Gertrude by Tom Konyves
Swoon turned the tables on the renowned videopoet Tom Konyves here, making a video with a text and reading by Konyves. “Channeling Gertrude” was published in qarrtsiluni at the end of February, as part of our Imitation issue (which is still being serialized). Konyves’ description of how the text came about is worth quoting in full, I think:
An unusual experience prompted the writing of this poem — hearing the voice of someone we have never met. For me, it was the voice of Gertrude Stein. I managed to capture only one brief statement: ‘make a name for yourself.’ What followed was a torrent of words that astonished me; it was like being caught up in a whirlwind. Almost faster than I could record them, repeated phrases — with minute modifications — swirled through my mind and onto the page. When it was done, it was as if the words had been written by another. I then truly understood Rimbaud’s famous phrase, ‘Je est un autre.’
Swoon said a little bit about his process in a blog post:
I used recordings of reflections on the window of a train in a tunnel, mixed with an excerpt of recycled images from a video I had made a half years ago.
may i feel said he by e.e. cummings
This is You and Me by Karsten Krause, which uses footage of her taken by Hans Krause. As the description at Vimeo puts it: “A woman is walking towards her husband’s camera for four decades. A love story on small gauge film.”
See here for the text of the poem.
Precious Are The Feet of Those… by Kwame Dawes
Another in the Voices from Haiti series produced by the Pulitzer Center, exploring life after the earthquake and focusing on the lives of those affected by HIV/AIDS, with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by photographer Andre Lambertson, editing by Robin Bell and music by Kevin Simmonds. See YouTube for the text.
just midnight by Robert Lax
An interesting solution to the problem of how to envideo a poem whose typographical arrangement was very important to its author. Susanne Wiegner notes at Vimeo,
“just midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax that describes a temporal and spacial situation by very minimal means. For Robert Lax the composition of the letters and words on the paper was very important. And so he created one of his vertical typefaces, that was transferred for the film. The letters become spaces and actors, crossed and circled by the camera. Step by step a three-dimensional formation of words is generated and disappears again in a sheet of paper.
The film has been very widely screened — click through for a full list of festivals and awards.
Billy Collins and his animated poems at TED conference
You’ve probably seen these animations before — if not, check out the dedicated site Billy Collins Action Poetry, or watch them (and others) on Moving Poems. What I found interesting here was Collins’ explanation for why he decided to let the animators go ahead and illustrate his poems, since in general he didn’t understand why a poem would need to be animated. His remarks evince little familiarity with the genre, and in questioning why any poem would need to be illustrated in this manner, strangely echo Ron Silliman’s criticism of one of them:
Thus Billy Collins’ The Dead is animated by Juan Delcan, neither poem nor cartoon threatening to break any new ground whatsoever. … [It’s] nothing more than a reading of the piece over which a cartoon has been superimposed.
But he gave in because he says he’s always loved cartoons, and because he figured it would bring his poems to a wider audience.
Advertising Lullaby by George Carlin
Found text has played a central role in the development of videopoetry, so this montage of advertising tropes by the late comedian George Carlin becomes a full-fledged poem merely by adaptation to the kinetic-text medium. An inspired choice and execution by Jenny Lien.
“Poetry & Film” feature at Lyrikline blog
Lyrikline.org, an international audiopoetry site, is celebrating World Poetry Day with a feature on Poetry & Film at their blog. Since their parent organization, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, also sponsors the ZEBRA poetry film festival, they were in a good position to solicit statements from a number of practitioners of the art. Begin with their own statement:
Diverse as the entries might be, there’s one thing that all the good ones have in common: they succeed if one can experience in some way a clever and maybe even poetic relationship and correspondence between the words and images. When poetic principles and features, such as rhythm, tempo, meter, imagery, denseness, and tone unfold, poetry and film together can reach another level and merge into something unique.
Then read the statments by Paul Bogaert, Avi Dabach, Tom Konyves, J.P. Sipilä, and Uljana Wolf.
I particularly liked the statement by Wolf, a German poet and past member of the ZEBRA film jury, for its concision and gnomic quality:
Like a translation, and like poetry itself, or perhaps like prose poetry, or the prose poem—already we see the problem here—a poetry film exists in a between-space, a Zwischenraum. It can not be named. It can only be invented with each attempt; its inability to occupy a name or a space or a genre is what generates these attempts to create something that is true to its name. It will fail every time.
But I think the most interesting thing about the feature is the extent to which these diverse filmmakers agree about what makes a good videopoem or filmpoem. There’s far less disagreement among them than one might have supposed.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
“People and places from a recent trip to San Diego, CA,” says documentary photojournalist and filmmaker Kristyn Ulanday in the description at Vimeo. I think she rather understates the awesomeness of this videopoem. (For the text of the poem, see Poets.org.)
