Posts By Dave Bonta

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

New directories: poetry film festivals, and free-to-use audio and video

I’ve just posted two new pages of resources for videopoem and poetry-film makers.

The Poetry film festival list includes websites and, where available, Facebook pages for regularly occurring poetry film festivals. Left off the list, at least for now, are all the more general film festivals to which poetry films might be submitted.

Web resources for videopoem makers includes information on determining what’s free to use, as well as links to free and Creative Commons-licensed film and video, spoken word, sound and music collections. I also include a link to the software I use for downloading videos from the web, but I welcome other suggestions.

Please use the comments here or at the respective pages to alert me about other links I should include. I would also encourage people who regularly use Creative Commons-licensed material to follow the Golden Rule and apply a “copyleft” license to your own work, as well. (I don’t always remember to do this myself, but I should.)

We’ll Go No More A-Roving, by Lord Byron

An amusing interpretation of Lord Byron’s ballad, directed by Kevin Jackson. (See Vimeo for the rest of the credits.) I was expecting some melodramatic ending, but thankfully that didn’t happen, and I ended up admiring this remix of a classic.

the lake by Karyn Eisler

A great example of how to create anticipation in a videopoem and make reading a more urgent act. This was featured at Referential Magazine. Karyn Eisler blogs at Living ?s.

Abachan by Alastair Cook

I’ve featured a number of Alastair Cook‘s filmpoems for other poets’ work, but this is the first one he’s made for a poem of his own. It’s due to premiere at a Geopoetics conference on March 27th at John Ruskin’s house, Brentwood, in the Lake District.

Today also we bring you the full text of Alastair’s think-piece on the poetry-film genre, “The Filming of Poetry.” Please go read and add your own thoughts. This first appeared in paper form at Anon Seven last summer. Thanks to Alastair for letting me repost it.

May by Karel Hynek Mácha

This is The Tone of a Broken Harp, The Sound of a Snapped String performed by the composer, Jiří Kadeřábek, and Fourbythree. It uses two brief excerpts from the poem, which may be read in its entirety here. Kadeřábek writes,

This piece is inspired by the dark, almost decadent level of the Czech romantic poem May by Karel Hynek Mácha. Poetic images of love and spring nature mix with description of ruin, despair and death. The quotations, used in the piece as well as in its title, have been taken from the latest English translation of the poem. The concept of the piece as well as the exact image of the video came to me, when I suddenly and unusually took a nap one afternoon.

My spirit – my spirit – and my soul!
that’s how his words, each one distinct,
escape from his clenched lips.
Before the voice reaches the ear
these awful words are once more nothing –
they die – as they were born.

It was late evening – first of May
was evening – the time for love.
The turtledove invited love
to where the pine grove’s fragrance lay.

The video is as effective as the music, I thought. It was put together by Avion Film and Sound Postproduction in Prague.

What’s up with the Moving Poems newsletter?

If you’ve signed up for the weekly email list advertised in the sidebar, you may be wondering why you haven’t gotten anything the last two weeks. I was too. All I can determine is that the blended RSS feed created by Mail Chimp from the two Moving Poems feeds (forum and main site) stopped working. So I’ve created a new blended feed with Yahoo Pipes and substituted that. We’ll see if it works. If not, I’ll switch to the tried-and-true RSS-to-email service Feedblitz; I was simply trying to avoid the ads it serves. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up, by the way.

In the process of editing the newsletter at Mail Chimp, I switched the delivery time from Monday to early Saturday morning. It sometimes happens that a video gets taken down or turned private after I share it here, presumably because the uploader never meant to share it with the world in the first place, and is alarmed to discover my post. Thus for example the Neruda video I shared last week is history. The point is that it makes sense to email links to the week’s content early in the weekend to maximize the chances that all the videos are still in fact online.

Interview with “How Pedestrian” curator Katherine Leyton

Nic S. at Voice Alpha interviews Katherine Leyton, who stops people on the street and gets them to read poems on camera for her site How Pedestrian.

The visual element of the project, of course, was the main idea. I wanted to bring poetry to people in pubs and streets and taxis around Toronto, capture it on video and post it online. However, the visual aspect of a poem itself is also very important, and I think to fully absorb a poem you need to actually read it; this is why I decided to post the work next to the video. I really wanted the viewer be able to read along.

One of the most surprising results of the project so far has been the overwhelmingly positive public response.

The enthusiasm with which pedestrians agree to read for me is astonishing. I would say that out of every ten people I ask to read a poem, nine say yes. When I started, I never expected a 90% response rate, which speaks of my own misperceptions about the way the Canadian public views poetry. People are willing and curious, they just might not be inspired to seek it out on their own – they need a push. Many of my readers want to discuss the poem or poet with me after they read, and almost all are fascinated by the project.

Read more.

The Carcass (Une Charogne) by Charles Baudelaire

A mesmerizing film and reading in French, with the English translation by Geoffrey Wagner provided in subtitles. I am guessing that the filmmaker, Koustoz, is Greek.

Meet the Bluffs by Cecelia Chapman

Cecelia Chapman directed the film and wrote the text, which may be read at Referential Magazine. The soundtrack was provided by Jeff Crouch (music) and Blaine Reininger (chant). At her tumblelog, Chapman contextualizes the film:

She does look like that art director that fired you, he the coke dealer at last years xmas party. But they are the inhabitants of apartments about to fall into the sea. MEET THE BLUFFS. They want the good life. Entertaining their friends drinking local cabs on the terrace watching the great fireball hit the horizon. Jogs on the beach. But wait! There is no more beach!

For a long time it has been apparent that the left side of the continental shelf, balanced on a plate that likes to shift, is slipping into the sea. But never doubt the selling power of California real estate agents and developers! Despite the bulldozers, workers hanging outside smoking, cranes throwing giant rocks into the sea to defend the cliff, an infinite variety of caterpillar equipment parked in the private parking lot, warning signs all over the area, midnight evacuations in soul-humbling storms to the apartment down the block, the apartments continue to rent. And the mile long cliff of small gated private communities continues to fall into the sea when the big north storms hit.

Shuttered Windows by Yahia Lababidi

Update: Video has been made private.

Swoon has been busy lately, so again we end the week with one of his creations. This one’s based on a poem by Yahia Lababidi — a collaboration sparked, I think, by this very blog. Which makes me happy.

Subway by Charles Reznikoff

http://www.vimeo.com/20036498

I’ve been surprised to run across several videos for Reznikoff poems at Vimeo in the past month. This one’s by Canadian film student Alan Sencich with Jonny Page, Luke Banville and KinHang Ho.

Dwa Nieba by Bożena Urszula Malinowska

http://vimeo.com/20305333

Filmmaker Marcin Konrad Malinowski‘s first videopoem, for a poem by his mother. Here’s the English translation he provided:

You and me,
Two heavens,
With a little bit of hell,
With the energy of a volcano
That has gone somewhere,
You and me.

His mother passed away four years ago, he told me in an email, leaving behind a box of poems.

UPDATE: Marcin has started a blog on Tumblr about the project, which hopefully will give rise to many more videopoems of this caliber: Dwa Nieba. (It’s in Polish, but Google Translate can give a pretty good idea of the contents.)