Posts By Dave Bonta
Prodigy by Charles Simic
This is noteworthy in part because it aired on a major television network, but it’s also an effective poetry video, I think. It’s been up on YouTube for a while, so it’s probably safe to assume that ABC isn’t going to ask for it to be taken down.
Emily Melting by Gérard Rudolf
A collaboration between Scottish filmmaker Alastair Cook and South African poet Gérard Rudolf. The poem is from his new collection Orphaned Latitudes. Cook writes, “This film is the beginning of a series of work with Gérard, and we plan to write, produce and direct a feature length film in due course.”
Aliénation et Magie Noire by Antonin Artaud
Update: this video is no longer online.
I know hardly a word of French, yet I still enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s a remix of some public-domain footage from the Prelinger Archives by Fabrice Aussel, A.K.A. DJ Spooky. The reading by Artaud was recorded for radio broadcast in 1946.
Names I’d Forgotten by Joseph Millar
Directed by David Hambridge and David Sherrill. The poem appears in Millar’s book Overtime.
My Insomnia and I by Charles Simic
Geoff Tarulli made this one. It’s kind of slow-moving, but maybe that’s the point.
Poem (As the cat) by William Carlos Williams
Gotta love film students for keeping the medium irreverent. This is by Kurt Snyder. Here’s the text of the poem:
As the cat
climbed over
the top ofthe jamcloset
first the right
forefootcarefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin
http://www.vimeo.com/10534508
An exceptionally fine videopoem by Nicole Prowell.
Shot at Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport/Stratford, CT March 2010. Music by Harold Budd and Brian Eno.
Filmed on the Sony EX3, 1080 24p.
A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body by Andrew Marvell
A delightful experiment in machine translation by Michelle Phillips.
A conversation between two computers. One read a verse aloud and the other transcribed it through voice recognition and vice versa. The process was repeated until Andrew Marvell’s poem “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” had been completely re-written.
I am thinking we could dub the result a meta-metaphysical poem.
Stone by Charles Simic
There’s a video of Simic reading this poem, but it’s not as interesting as the two videos included here. About the musical performance above I could gather nothing, though it appears from the one comment that it may have been uploaded by one of the performers. I love the interpretation of the poem as a Sufi teaching, though I’m not sure how Simic would feel about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JG7F9dDnAA
Brian Watterson is the filmmaker here.
The Hanging Stanes by Sam Meekings
http://www.vimeo.com/10287177
Ginnetta Correli directs. The poem is #65 in This Collection’s Top 100 poems about Edinburgh, and is read by Alastair Cook.
Tamamushi-Iro: haiku about bugs by Issa
A thoroughly wonderful project from Media Mike Hazard at The Center for International Education:
A swarm of 25 first through eighth graders at Capitol Hill School in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was busy as bees off and on for a whole school year, creating Tamamushi-Iro. It is a great little video of haiku about bugs written by the Japanese poet Issa (1763-1827). We might look at it in many different ways.
While developing the project with the art teacher Julie Woodman, I learned from Ross Corson, then an aide to Ambassador Mondale in Japan, that there is a saying, “tama-mushi-iro,” literally meaning “round-bug-color.” It is used in diplomatic circles to describe something which looks beautiful to everyone, yet different from all angles. Our dream became to create a video of some of Issa’s insect haiku which might be seen as tamamushi-iro.
Like a Rashomon, the video has been seen as a program about Issa, about bugs, about poetry, about Japan, about kids’ views of the world, about art and artist residencies, about television, about international education, about experiential learning, about crossgenerational, crosscultural and crossdisciplinary education, about a person who lived 200 years ago, about inquiry science, about old poetry and new technology…It has been seen in many colorful ways.
First, it’s about great poems. This is why I love poetry. My nine year old daughter, who was on the Issa team, saw a spring fly, and flew to get a flyswatter. She raised her arm, and in mid-air stopped, and thought “Issa,” and let the fly fly. Now if we raise a society to respect even the tiniest creatures of the earth, maybe when some dumb finger is about to push a button and blow us all to kingdom come, some small poem will save us from our worst selves. If we can create a society which stops and thinks, stop and think: we just might….
Ambassador Mondale helped us connect with Sakurababa Junior High School in Nagasaki. Our sister city relationship between Saint Paul and Nagasaki was set up to heal the war wounds of World War Two. On a profound level, this was all about international education, across time and space.
I look into a dragonfly’s eye
and see
the mountains over my shoulder.Toyama ga
tsuki ni utsuru
tonbo kana
Be sure to read the whole article, and if you’re an educator, consider ordering a copy of the video.
Gacela of Unforeseen Love by Federico Garcia Lorca
I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.
