Posts By Dave Bonta
Le Mince Rideau (The Thin Curtain) by Henrique Costa
Brazilian American poet Henrique Costa says,
I wrote this poem in 2019 and made it into a film with Jonny Knowles in mid-2020.
Another collaboration with the outstanding Mr. Knowles, in which we sought to capture l’air du temps.
Jonathan Knowles is an award-winning filmmaker and animator from Huddersfield, UK. This is his sixth poetry-film collaboration with Costa; this is the third we’ve shared here, and you can watch the others on Costa’s Vimeo page.
The current events unfolding in this four-year-old film still feel current, with so much civil unrest and the hegemonic world order continuing to unravel, so the blend of French in the voiceover with English in the subtitles and scenes from Brazil and elsewhere seems fitting.
Review of Cadence 2024 for SeattleDances
A new online review of the Cadence Video Poetry Festival takes a deep dive into poetry films that incorporate dancing for SeattleDances, “an advocacy organization dedicated to supporting Seattle-area dance performance through in-depth journalism and free resources to dance artists and audiences.” Author Kari Tai took advantage of the festival’s hybrid format to engage with the films at home—an experience I’ve always likened to solitary reading, since the viewer can pause and/or re-watch as often as she likes. For example:
Each time I watch Antipodes, I glean something more of the yin and yang of relationships the poem describes. The scenes toggle between black and white and color underscoring the complementary interconnectedness the poem expresses. The choreography amplifies this tension as dancers pace facing each other across a field to the line The ebony magnetism of existence binds poles. Throughout the video, the spoken words rise and fall with the crescendo of the music and crashing of the surf as the dancers feet tattoo the earth–a demonstration of how choreography and poetry use repetition, theme and variation that stimulates empathetic waves of emotion in the viewer. The pace of the video editing between scenes acts like poetic punctuation or choreographic choices for stillness amid frenetic movement.
Another film prompts this observation:
The festival literature remarks that throughout history poets have been persecuted for not writing the party line and it strikes me that dance also has often been outlawed as a subversive form of expression. When I think about how video is instantly shareable across the world via social media and how, like dance, it offers a form of communication that transcends spoken language, it is understandable how video has become a powerful tool of modern revolt. Exiles combines all three—video, dance, and poetry—a triple threat, an amplified way to shout out to the world.
Why does dance work so well in videopoetry? Tai has some ideas:
I think one thing that is key to illuminating my empathetic response to watching Only is a principle I learned through my training as a Dance for Parkinson’s instructor. Scientists have discovered that watching someone dance pleasurably activates the brain’s movement areas. In the classes I teach, the participants feel a fuller movement experience just by watching the teacher even if they don’t express it on the outside.
Perhaps that is why when we watch dance, even about topics we have not personally experienced, we can feel aligned with the “otherness” dancers can express. This happened for me watching Fairies, a video poem about growing up queer on a farm in the Netherlands.
I haven’t told my garden yet by Emily Dickinson
A new upload from South African visual artist and animator Diek Grobler, “Animated on a Alexandre Noyer pinscreen. Music by Anne Vanschothorst,” according to the Vimeo description. Here’s the text.
As a lover of both Emily Dickinson and forests, the imagery really spoke to me. With the closing image in particular, Grobler seems perfectly attuned to the poet’s “Hint … within the Riddle,” and maintains a light touch throughout, avoiding the pitfall of over-interpretation that ruins so many poetry animations for me.
Moving Poems re-launch and next steps
Our involuntary re-launch of Moving Poems after its destruction in late March has been a resounding success. We’ve been able to recover all posts and pages, and have manually restored missing images on the more recent posts. The combination of two formerly separate WordPress installations into one prompted a re-think of the site architecture and how best to arrange elements on the new front page, which has led us to think more deeply about what the site might be missing and how we can make it better. (More on that below.) And it has made a site-wide search much more powerful: type the name of a videopoet into the expandable search form in the header, and you’ll get not only all the posts from the video library where they were the filmmaker and/or poet, but also all mentions in news posts, anything they might’ve guest-authored, etc.
Some of the most important improvements are invisible: increased security measures of all kinds to try to prevent a re-occurrence of the malware attack that took the old site down. I’ve also updated the links page for the first time in five years, and will try to remember to do this annually from now on, because I do feel that we need to do a better job of supporting other important websites and organizations in the international poetry-film/videopoetry space. To that end, I’ve created a new page, How to make a poetry film or videopoem—currently included in a short menu in the footer—that so far does little but link to a another site:
U.K. poetry filmmaker Helen Dewbery at Poetry Film Live has created a terrific page on Making Poetry Films which we can’t top, so please go check that out. There’s a mix of practical suggestions and philosophical considerations that should appeal to newbies and seasoned filmmakers alike, supplemented with engaging video interviews and other material. And do consider signing up for one of her online courses.
We’ve been joined by a new contributor, Dr. Patricia Killelea, an associate professor of English at Northern Michigan University who regularly uses Moving Poems in the classroom, and have been brainstorming ways to make the site more useful to teachers and students. Poetry videos can be handy ways to expose students to poetry in general, something that the now-inactive organization Motionpoems recognized with its poetry curriculum. But while professionally made poetry films can be brilliant, and represent a significant percentage of our archives, we’re keen to encourage more poets, at whatever skill level, to learn to make videos themselves—something that will probably become a lot more common with the debut of video AI tools. I don’t know whether it helps or hurts the cause that Google has dubbed their own LLM ‘for zero-shot video generation’ VideoPoet! At the very least, it should mean a lot more web searches for videopoetry. How best to prepare?
We’d love to hear from other educators and students. If you use the site in the classroom, what has been most useful, and what additional features would you like to see? If you know of other sites or resources we should link to, please pass those suggestions along as well. Feel free to leave public comments on this post, or reach out in private using the contact form.
Poetry film screening ‘Fear and Yearning’ at The MERL
The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading is hosting a poetry-film screening and discussion on June 12 that should be of particular interest to Moving Poems readers:
Join us for a presentation of short films created by poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, filmmaker Jane Glennie, and sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova.
Together, they question bucolic depictions of rural life, and explore notions of the uncanny, the intangible, and the obscure in relation to landscape, agriculture, and rural social practice. The films have been developed from initial work by Toby when he was writer-in-residence at The MERL, working with images from the Eric Guy photographic archive.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists to hear how ‘Fear & Yearning’ evolved from Toby’s poetry residency at The MERL, and images from the inter-war photograph archive of Eric Guy.
This event is suitable for adults. All are welcome.
Fear & Yearning: Meet the Artists event
For many users of the internet, The MERL is a fabled place, so I am dead chuffed to be able to claim some association with it, if only second-hand. The event is live-only, as is perhaps fitting for a museum celebrating real life at its most tangible and pungent, and dare I say most absolute. For those who are able to attend, it’ll be from 6:00-7:30 p.m. on 12 June. Here’s the link to book free tickets.
Incidentally, this is not The MERL’s first go-round with poetry film. Remember I, Sheep?
Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz by Marsha de la O
The latest videopoem by Matt Mullins, who writes:
Here’s Janet Leigh; she’s afraid of jazz in reverse as an overlay to diagrammatical stereographic explanations. The knife-blade shrieks are Doppler warps to a molasses of strips teased. Unimaginable synchronicities abound. The drain eye has an arm and spins water into sound. It’s all very pointed in its touching.
poem: Marsha de la O
concept/direction/audio-visual composition: Matt Mullins
Vimeo description
Via the Filmetry Archive. The poem by Marsha de la O was one of the texts supplied to filmmakers for their 2024 contest; this film placed second. I was especially impressed by how Mullins handled the challenge of including and suggesting jazz elements in the soundtrack without simply deploying a jazz track, giving the film an allusive depth and working to counter-balance what might have otherwise seemed too cerebral an approach to the imagery. And given the long history of jazz at poetry readings, Mullins’ Beat-style vocal delivery seemed just right to my ear.
The Bride Goes Wild by Amy Gerstler
This recent film by Janet Lees, who needs no introduction here, took top honors at this year’s Filmetry festival, part of the ten-day Capital City Film Festival (CCFF) in Lansing, Michigan. Its propulsive energy and light-hearted approach, while a bit of a departure from some of the slower, more meditative work that Lees is best known for, demonstrates a mastery of textured layering, and overall makes a great fit with the poem by Amy Gerstler — one of a selection of texts provided by the organizers:
This year’s theme was POETICS OF CINEMA. Pre-selected poems all engaged the concept of cinema in some way, and filmmakers were encouraged to create new work from them. The only rule is that filmmakers must include the text of the poem in full.
CCFF website
As for the poet,
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art criticism, journalism and other stuff. She has published thirteen books of poems, a children’s book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. Index of Women, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
author website
Be sure to browse the archive at Filmetry, which has been updated to include all of this year’s films—a great resource.
Balta puķe / The white flower: Latvian folk-poetry
This winner of the 2017 Maldito Festival de Videopoesía, by Spanish artist, filmmaker and videopoet Hernán Talavera, deploys an unspecified quantity of short, anonymous folk poems to great effect.
Dainas are small lyric poems coming from the oral tradition that constitute one of the most important and ancient treasures of Latvia. In 2001, dainas were declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. “Balta puķe” (“The white flower”) is a dialogue between some of these dainas and images recorded in Latvia in the winter of 2015. This dialogue revolves around the concept of “memento mori” -remember that you have to die- that reminds us the inexorability of Death.
webpage (click through for the list of screenings)
Latvian language along with Lithuanian, are considered the most archaic Indo-European languages of those which are spoken today.
Talavera is one of the filmmakers included in Versogramas, a 2017 documentary about videopoetry, in which he said that places are the main characters in his videopoems; he sees them as “little universes.” “Solitude and emptiness are not negative concepts” for him, but provide relief from the suffering caused by our endless quest for stimulation. He added that he frequently removes sound or color from his videos in a “compromise with austerity,” pointing out that “when you close your eyes you may begin to hear better.” One can certainly see this in Balta puķe.
There’s also a version with Spanish subtitles: La flor blanca.
Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” soliloquy by William Shakespeare
London-based videopoet Mikey Delgado just surfaced after a three-year hiatus with this remix of war footage with a recitation from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, all of it uncredited in the best samizdat style, and it’s perfectly, horribly on-point. I’ve lost my mirth, too…
I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.What a piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and
yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
delights not me, no, nor women neither, though by
your smiling you seem to say so.
