~ Videopoems ~

Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.

The God of Our Farm Had Blades by Todd Boss

On 10 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A beautiful animation by Tom Jacobsen from the Minneapolis-based Pixel Farm. I’ve been remiss in not posting more of Todd Boss’s work, considering he’s one of the two people behind the ambitious new videopoetry site MotionPoems.com. Here’s his website.

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The Peter Principle: Week 23 by Clayton Crosby

On 9 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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The Peter Principle is “an epic work poem released in blog form each week” at thepeterprinciple.org, but it just occurred to me to check YouTube as well, where I found uploads from the author, Clayton Crosby, of five of his Flash animations converted to video form. These are all very basic typographic animations, and they’re not integrated with the audio on the blog, but it’s a very interesting project and I wanted to recognize it here. On the About page, he describes its origin as follows:

In 1968, Laurence J. Peter published The Peter Principle, which held the theory that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” He reasoned that any employee who excelled at a particular job would be promoted up the corporate chain, and though the employee might adapt to the requirements of the new job, each promotion brought him closer to a job he couldn’t know how to do. Therefore, any employee is eventually promoted beyond his level of skill and competence.

I’ve been reading Homer, and have been putting a lot of thought into heroes and poetic forms. As a result, I’m exploring the tension between epic and lyric poetry – which is to say the narrative, the expressive and what falls between.

All of these poems are completed before or shortly after going to work.

I am also in awe of the website’s design. It has to be one of the coolest single-author poetry sites on the internet. Check it out.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

On 8 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Jeanette Seah and Daniel Nudds directed this “Final project from the VFS Digital Design Program” at the Vancouver Film School. I’m not sure how well the video fits the poem, but the animation is too gorgeous not to share.

Dún Chaoin by David McLoghlin

On 4 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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[Update: embedding disabled — watch on Vimeo]

A wonderful evocation of an artist and a place, with original music and a poem for the narration. I strongly recommend expanding it to full-screen. The director, Lanka Haouche Perren, describes it as follows:

7 minutes non-narrative documentary exploring the work & methods of the renowned Irish artist Maria Simonds-Gooding who has been based in Dún Chaoin, Co. Kerry, Ireland, for the last 40 years. It features a poem by award winning poet & writer David McLoghlin, narrated by Dominic West.

More examples of McLoghlin’s work may be found at his website. And be sure to check out Maria Simonds-Gooding’s website as well.

Waitress in Waiting by Julia Effertz

On 3 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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A nicely conceived film with the poet as actor, by the UK-based team of poets and filmmakers behind Viral Verse (which fans of this site should also follow).

Ars Poetica? by Czeslaw Milosz

On 2 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A Moving Poems production (with fingers crossed that Milosz’s heirs aren’t too litigious). The audio is Milosz himself, not the same translation as the one that made it into the Collected Poems (which you can read here).

This was “found video” rather than something deliberately planned and acted to go along with the poem, though of course I edited it to make a better fit.

Seven-Year-Old Finds Her Murdered Mother’s Naked Body by Lyn Lifshin

On 1 March, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Bob Borgatti (editor of Slipstream) says,

This is a segment from the film “in/word/out” by Robert Borgatti and Paul Lamont. It is a visualization of the poem “Seven-Year-Old Finds Her Murdered Mother’s Naked Body” by Lyn Lifshin. Lifshin performs the voice-over narration for the piece.

Check out Lifshin’s website for her bio and abundant links.

The End of the Day (La Fin de la Journée) by Charles Baudelaire

On 25 February, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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An experimental short to which the poem was added at the end — which to me makes for a more satisfying blend than most videopoems where words and images are tightly matched.

This is an experimental short movie made in a week (from the concept to the final release). This movie doesn’t want any interpretation. The poem was chosen after the filming. Finally was composed the music. The basic idea is to show some scenes before go to bed leaving an unhappy impression.

Levitation by Gerhard Rühm

On 24 February, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Hubert Sielecki made this damn-near perfect videopoem for a piece by Austrian writer, composer, and visual artist Gerhard Rühm.

The Jump by Susan Balboni

On 23 February, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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If the author is the same Susan Balboni who is an established voice-over actor for American television (and also a writer), it’s kind of surprising that the reading is by someone else. A fine videopoem nevertheless. Alan Marino says,

A piece I put together for the Lstudio.com Imaginings series produced and directed by Intelligent Life Productions’ Ron Qurashi. Ron presented me with a poem written by Susan Balboni which he wanted me to marry somehow to this Phantom camera 1000 fps footage of a horse clearing a jump. Got the idea of isolating the horse and placing it in a timelapse cloudscape with poetry reading and music by my friend, Kevin Sullivan. Compositing was painstakingly executed by SFX artist Austin Wallender.

Suitcase by Jane Hirshfield

On 22 February, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Animation by John Eickholt for MotionPoems.com (see also their YouTube channel).

Five ( Dramatic Pauses ) by Brendan Bell

On 18 February, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A found-poetry masterpiece comprised entirely of phrases from the NBC Nightly News between July 2008 and February 2009. Brendan Bell credits himself with “imagery, music, and language reconfiguation,” with additional film footage by Lester Bell. He also singles out NBC anchor Brian Williams as a specific source of some of the language. The description on the Vimeo page is worth quoting in full:

We let the television news into the perceived safety of our lives on a daily basis. Even without direct contact, the language of the medium connects with us via background noise, internet blips, and watercooler small-talk. It has a distinct, and often overlooked, authority over the way we think and feel.

The nightly half-hour national news format attempts to condense the state of the world into easily digestible soundbites. My intention is to release these soundbites, inherent powers intact, realign them and force them to interact in unintended ways.

For seven months, I watched NBC Nightly News, recording phrases that piqued my interest. I focused on this single media outlet to give the project a specific voice and began reconfiguring the phrases into what can best be described as collage poems. Poetry, like the news media, uses evocative language to provide insight into the inner workings of the world. However, poetry allows subtleties and subtext to take center stage. The resulting collage poems highlight the ambiguous spaces between language and life, exposing the vagaries of the ostensibly concrete world around us.

The term (Dramatic Pause) implies a brief deviation from an intended script, or a small crack in real time, where things that are normally hidden become visible. It is based on instructions written for news broadcasters on their teleprompters.