Posts By Dave Bonta
The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake
Blake in Turkish kinetic type animation! I think Alper Yildirim really captures the mood of Blake’s poems (see the Wikipedia for the complete text). In the notes on Vimeo, he explains:
This video is done for the typography course, when i was in the post-graduate program of Hacettepe University -i am not studying there now ,thanks to god-. I tried to make a mixage of using moving typographic elements with animation. The Chimney Sweeper is a poem of William Blake, and i used its first verse.
When my mother Died, I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
Sounds (excerpt) by Roger Bonair-Agard
Carmen Kordas and Erika Harrsch, from the NYC-based collective VisionIntoArt, have envideoed a section of the Trinidadian poet’s reading to make a very compelling videopoem.
Advance screening of Korean film Poetry in NYC Feb. 9
The following press release from Poets House just came over the transom, and I thought it might be of interest to those in the New York City area. —Dave
Poets House is delighted to present an advance screening of the new, award-winning Korean film Poetry with an introduction and discussion by film critic Michael Atkinson. A reception to follow.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 6pm
Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street
This event is FREE FOR POETS HOUSE MEMBERS. To renew your Poets House membership, click here. $10 for the general public.
RSVP by Friday, February 4, 2011 to rsvp@poetshouse.org or by phone 212-431-7920, ext. 2832. (Email strongly preferred.)
Advance praise for the film Poetry
“An extraordinary vision of human empathy.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“A life-size movie about loss and self-discovery.” – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
Acclaimed Korean director Lee Chang-dong (“a major figure in world cinema” – The New York Times) follows his award-winning Secret Sunshine with the story of another woman raising a child on her own.
Mija (an extraordinary performance by veteran actress Yun Jung-hee) is a proper, sixty-ish woman struggling to provide for her adolescent grandson. Faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime, she finds strength and purpose upon enrolling in a poetry class — a creative process that allows her to understand and escape her own pain.
Best Screenplay winner at the Cannes International Film Festival and an official selection at the New York, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, Poetry is a masterful study of the subtle empowerment of an indefatigable woman.
Poetry opens in New York City on February 11. Click here for the film’s official page.
MICHAEL ATKINSON is a former film critic for The Village Voice and has written for The Believer, Spin, Details, LA Weekly, The Boston Phoenix, The Stranger, Interview, and more. He is also the author of five books, and he lectures on film history and screenwriting at C.W. Post/Long Island University and New York University.
Rebels of This Timeless Town by Niki Andrikopoulou
Natasha Pantazopoulou and Gerry Domenikos (uncut productions) made the film for This Collection, where you can read the poem. According to the description on Vimeo, this is
A film and dance response to Niki Andrikopoulou’s poem about Edinburgh— The Athens of the North. The experimental interpretative dance with performer Vanessa Spinassa was filmed in the Ancient theatre of Ilida, Peloponnese.
Unlike most videos in the Dance category here, the filmmaking is as experimental as the dance, which gives this full videopoem status, I think.
In Earth Dreams by Daniela Elza
Interesting kinetic text animation by Daniela Elza’s husband Dethe, “programmed in NodeBox, final video produced using QuickTime and iMovie.” To me, this kind of fits in the “concrete poetry” category (though I admit that’s subjective, and I should probably just merge it into a kinetic text category).
Alex Cigale becomes Moving Poems’ Russian-language editor
This week, Ukranian-American poet and translator Alex Cigale became the first foreign-language editor at Moving Poems, contributing translations and analysis of videopoems for works by Alexander Vvedensky and Anna Akhmatova — see Alex’s author archive to view both posts.
I know Alex from his work as an author and now issue editor at qarrtsiluni, and I’ve come to appreciate his enthusiasm for poetry of all kinds and passion for bringing it to ordinary readers. In addition to qarrtsiluni, he’s placed poems in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n and McSweeney’s, among others. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
I’m excited by this sudden broadening of the site’s horizons, and I’d welcome volunteers for other languages, as well (Dutch? German? Spanish?) presuming that we could agree on the quality of the videopoems in need of explication. Contributions could be as regular or as occasional as you like — I have an aversion to schedules. Contact me via email, bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, if you’re interested.
The Deer by Wendy Burk
A 16mm film by Audrey Smith and Jesse Moore. “The Deer” is available as a broadside from Kore Press.
Music, When Soft Voices Die by Percy Bysshe Shelley
http://www.vimeo.com/18828632
A kinetic text piece called “In the Memory” by Hyunjoo Oh, who writes, “I wanted to talk about how longing and yearning become stronger as the relationship fades away. Through the process of blowing away and forming typography in various ways, I tried to express Shelly’s poem ‘Music, When Soft Voice Die’ visually; existing permanent values among many things that fade out in this world.”
November Graveyard by Sylvia Plath
Update: Video has been made private.
A new videopoem by Swoon titled “Red Lost Ghosts” remixes an old audio recording of Plath with other audio samples, video and stills to very good effect in what he calls
A remembrance-piece for Birkenau.
Not the blunt and awful images of the place, but the those images of horror hidden behind the automation of a wind-up-toy and the slight hope of some ‘forget-me-nots’
For the hope we will not forget that awful ‘machine’
Skinhead by Patricia Smith
The great Patricia Smith performs at (I think) the HBO show Def Poetry Jam.
A Nephilim Grieves by Vignette-Noelle Lammott
http://www.vimeo.com/16896497
Anna Patel, the director, says, “How often do you let something consume you? This film was about setting aside our instincts of closure and being open to a wide variety of emotions.”
