~ Video Library ~

Bullets by Brayden

On 24 March, 2022 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Videopoems
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For World Poetry Day, here’s an Ohio preschooler’s poem animated by Ukrainian artist Stas Santimov. It’s from a project called Preschool Poets:

Old snakes, loose teeth, hot tubs, and ugly people in your face.
This is the world when you are four.

For nearly a decade, resident artist Nancy Kangas led a poetry program for preschool-aged children at Columbus Early Learning Centers on the near east side of Columbus. She was struck with how clearly her kids wrote about what they loved and feared. They want bullets to relax, lions to roar, and kids to climb up to the sun.

Nancy and documentary filmmaker Josh Kun asked award-winning international artists to animate these poems, and the resulting hand-crafted animations show a depth and complexity of expression we don’t expect from four-year olds. The films are fueled by the children’s untethered imaginations, but they open a portal to the real world of growing up in the inner city.

Thanks to Maria Popova for highlighting this. You can read the text of the poem there, or at the project site.

Dobre mašine / Good Machines by Ana Pantić

On 23 March, 2022 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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I’m surfacing after a long hiatus to share the latest author-made videopoem by Serbian poet Ana Pantić, who included this description at YouTube:

Poetry film Good Machines (Dobre mašine)

Ana Pantić – poem, voice, film
Nebojša Anđelković – original music, sound editing
Milan Bogdanović – sound editing
Videopoezija, Belgrade 2022

This poetry film, composed of only two clips, highlights subconscious thought processes activated by everyday mechanical actions. The poem came about after the video, although this kind of creative process is considered to be the reversed one, I find it quite inspiring.

This appeals to my metalhead side as well as my poetry side, with lyrics that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern death metal album. In times like these, maybe that’s what we need? I know it’s what I need!

Jux/ta/po/si/tion by Miriam Hechtman

On 13 June, 2021 by Marie Craven with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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https://youtu.be/Mpl57ewno6s

Jux/ta/po/si/tion is an author-made videopoem by Australian performance poet Miriam Hechtman, whose array of projects include founding and directing POETICA, a regular live poetry and music event in Bondi, Sydney.

The poem takes an abecedarian structure to convey minimal but strongly resonant meanings. The effectiveness of these arises from the inventiveness of word combinations. The piece is minimal in film-making elements as well, with layered voice and text on screen giving distinct perspectives on the poetic text.

I see a connection here with the work of well-known Adelaide videopoet Ian Gibbins, especially his Game Over: Grand Final Edition. Subject and expressive tone are unique to each artist, but I find a similarly bold, experimental approach to film-making and to poetry in these videos.

I discovered Jux/ta/po/si/tion on the website for a recent poetry cinema event in Canberra, curated by Jacqui Malens. That program is now on permanent exhibition at the Poetic City website.

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Escribimos/We Write by Juan Bullón et. al.

On 11 April, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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An exemplary anthology videopoem from Seville-based poetry filmmaker Juan Bullón’s creative writing workshop. Be sure to click the CC (closed captioning) icon if you need the English translation (which is very good). As Juan told me in an email last November:

This year, with some of the students from my Creative Writing workshop, we decided to create a single piece, and although the stories that each one recites are more or less different, I think it can be seen as a single work made up of a few very personal poems and stories. Besides, all the authors are in the video, we all act. Another bet we made was to use as few verses or words as possible of what each one had written on the image, trying not to be so graphic so that the image and text could walk in parallel instead of chained.

The poems and authors in order: DICEN/THEY SAY by Juan Bullón; ESFINGE NEGRA/BLACK SPHINX by Carmen R. Hiraldo; DE CÓMO UN GRAMÁTICO APENADO SE QUEJA DESATENTO/HOW A SAD GRAMMARIAN COMPLAINS DISTRACTED (COOL) by Carmen Galeto; MAULLIDOS Y ESPANTOS/MEOWS AND HORRORS by Manuel Rodríguez de los Santos; SABER/KNOWING by Pedro García Ordiales; and ÚLTIMO DESPACHO/LAST DISPATCH by Juan Bullón. To read the original texts, go here, and for the translations, go here.

Scratching at the Surface of Tears by Jill Munro

On 11 April, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Filmmaker Karen Dennison writes in a blog post,

As part of Abegail Morley’s series of posts on The Poetry Shed on the theme of Unlocking Creativity, I compiled a film as a prompt with a call out to poets to respond. Jill Munro wrote a fantastic poem in response and here is the resulting film poem.

Click through for the text of the poem and a short biog of Munro.

You Still Have Something of The Ghost About You by JinJin Xu

On 8 March, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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For International Women’s Day, here’s a cento videopoem by JinJin Xu 徐今今, a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai. Here’s the Vimeo description:

The cento-film “You Still Have Something of the Ghost About You” was shot in the hauntingly empty casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in Macau, China after I left mandatory government quarantine and realized I’d stumbled into the underworld. The polyvocal collage slips the viewer into an otherworldly, post-COVID globalized hypnosis: interweaving strangely prescient texts from Chinese and Western epics such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Beastiary, Dante’s Inferno, and contemporary texts such as John Cage’s X, and Gu Cheng’s Ying’er, to journey into the afterlife of forgetfulness.

As a former comparative literature major, I love this blend! And I’m always excited to see up-and-coming poets integrating filmmaking into their practice. Xu’s bio notes that after getting her BA at Amherst College, she “traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated across nine countries.” She’s currently in the MFA program at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife just came out in November, after winning the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize from Radix Media. Be sure to follow her on Vimeo.

Arrival at Elsewhere (extract) by Karen Dennison, Carl Griffin et. al.

On 7 March, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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A filmpoem by Karen Dennison, who also supplied the voiceover. The text was written by Jemma Borg, Annie Butler, Kerry Darbishire, Catherine Fletcher, Bashabi Fraser, Carl Griffin, Philip Gross, Chrys Salt, and Alina Stefanescu. Here’s the YouTube description:

Arrival at Elsewhere is a book length long poem response to the pandemic, curated by one poet, Carl Griffin, but written by 97. This is an extract from the book. It’s published by Against the Grain poetry press and available to buy at https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere/

From the description at that link:

Poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere.

We Have Become Children by Al Rempel

On 5 January, 2021 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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so we too open our lips
to mouth our prayers
like water over stones

This recent videopoem by Erica Goss incorporates a text by Canadian poet Al Rempel, voiced by Annelyse Gelman, herself a videopoet. As Erica’s Vimeo description notes, “This is the second collaboration between poet Al Rempel and me. […] I used some of my photographs from years ago and video I took last summer.”

Their first collaboration came out last spring: I’ve in the Rain. This new one has a certain New Year’s flavor to it, I thought — a good way to kick off 2021 at Moving Poems.

To The End Of Things, Part 5: Mountains by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey

On 20 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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An excerpt from a unique collaboration between poet-filmmakers Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey, celebrating and evoking the spirits of place — or as they put it, “deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.”

In September 2019, writer and composer Martin Heslop and poet Helen Tookey spent a two-week residency in Great Village, Nova Scotia, in the house where Elizabeth Bishop lived as a child. They wrote poems and prose pieces, fragments, notes. And they collected field recordings and sounds: waterfalls, rivers, cave-drips; crickets under pylons, in blueberry fields, by the shafts of old mines; the creaking and cracking of a wooden church during a hurricane; the harmonium and all the bells in the house; the turning mechanism of a lighthouse beam, abandoned radio-sets. They were recording the present and searching for possible futures, but also looking to summon the buried histories of the place.

Back home they made films, visiting and revisiting the Durham and Northumberland coast, Parys Mountain on Anglesey, South Gare on Teesside – places similarly scarred by the presence and now the loss of industry. Over the past year, they have been weaving these sounds into the films, creating new conversations, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Using sound and film, their poems and their voices, entwined with early recordings of Nova Scotian Gaelic songs gathered from the archives of the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University, Helen and Martin are creating a series of audio-visual poems – a narrative sequence – weaving together the experiences of a woman trying to navigate an uncertain and unfamiliar landscape, and the voice of a man who is of this place, but of a different time. This man is the draegerman of the mines, the rescuer, and he tells of the underground world he remembers, recalls voices of those he rescued and those he could not. They are both deciphering the landscape, coaxing it back into language.

Parts one to five were released in November 2020, with the second half of the story to follow in the New Year.

Watch all five November releases.

Welcome to the edge of your seat by Janet Lees

On 19 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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For David Ballantyne
Photography & animation by Janet Lees
Music by Henyao

Simple but brilliant. Reminds me of the minimalism that drew me to Janet’s filmpoems from the very beginning. The contrast between the music and the text really adds to the unsettling quality of the piece.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

On 18 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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The On Being Project — a 15-year-old American Public Media radio show/podcast that’s spawned a whole web empire — has recently started producing poetry films, each an animation with a different director. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s by the London-based animator Jocie Juritz, with sound by Galina Juritz. The YouTube description notes that “This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Elizabeth Alexander, Words That Shimmer,” which aired on January 6, 2011.

Juritz posted some process notes on her website:

I was struck by the line “emptying the proverbial pocketbook” which sparked imagery of my own creative process – scribbling into sketchbooks, accumulating paper and mementos. As a sort of homage to the pen and paper (and reference to the ideas making process) I decided to animate the frames of this film directly into the pages of Elizabeth Alexander’s book ‘Crave Radiance’ which contains “I Believe”. Kindly, she gave me the go ahead to do whatever I liked with the book!

I animated each frame in Photoshop first, to make sure I had a perfect reference to trace. Those frames were then printed out. Using a lightbox I hand painted each frame in gouache paint, directly onto the pages of the book. Once they were all coloured I scanned each page, then placed each frame in position in After Effects.

People may remember Alexander as President Obama’s first inaugural poet, but she’s much more than that. Here’s her page at the Poetry Foundation.

Needleminer by Gary Barwin

On 13 November, 2020 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Mooneyes mimic shiner for this, trifathead checkerspot for that. We call it opera. Or disease.

This videopoem by writer, composer, and “melted media” artist Gary Barwin reverses the usual balance between text and video in which the latter adds complexity to a relatively straightforward text. Here, the text—sections 5 and 3 from Barwin’s long poem “Needleminer” in No TV for Woodpeckers—is rather thicket-like, full of obscure words, neologisms, and unexpected turns of phrase in the best tradition of avant-garde ecopoetry. So the images are kept relatively simple and consistent throughout, while still reversing our ordinary perspective of nature as something outside. The soundtrack includes Barwin’s adaptation of Nisi Dominus by Vivaldi.

This joins three other videos made from texts in No TV for Woodpeckers; watch them all (and browse reviews) on Barwin’s website.