~ 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.

Easy to Love a Beautiful Woman by Vanessa Plain

On 11 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Update: Video is no longer online.

Viral Verse marked the first anniversary of their launch with this videopoem, written, filmed and narrated by Vanessa Plain. Here’s what she wrote about the film over at VV and at Vimeo:

Easy to Love a Beautiful Woman is a dramatic narrative, a sci-fi poem. It was inspired by a worrying trend – I see a lot of love for the Earth but little faith.

They say we are here because of planetary accident. The intelligence of nature is dismissed as illusionary. We convince ourselves that it us vs. nature, yet we are here only by the Earth’s good grace.

We are dazzled by technology, believing any new discovery to be for our good. But all too often our choices have proved wrong.

The poem is a cautionary tale. It’s set in a future when Revelations become real and they tell us to pack…

Easy to love a new idea,
Fall deep in its charms.
Jump head first with a cursory look
blind to any harm.

-ed by Mairi Sharratt

On 8 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook’s latest filmpoem (and in my opinion his best to date). Here’s what he says about it at Vimeo:

-ed is my film of a poem by Mairi Sharratt, from her as yet unpublished (nudge) collection This is a Poem. You can read more of Mairi’s work on her excellent blog, alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com.

It took a long time for me to begin this filmpoem for two reasons: I have been busy with this summer’s solo film and photography show as part of the Edinburgh Festival; also the poem is dark and yet meditative, lifting to a powerful crescendo and as a result I felt that I needed to introduce a figurative element. So I ruminated…

Mairi says in a blog post that the film will be screened at Edingbugh’s Hidden Door Festival, which runs from October 22-24.

Natural Bitterness by Patrick Jones

On 7 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Australian artist Patrick Jones recently worked on a project called Food Forest with his family, and “Natural Bitterness” is another project in the same spirit of uniting art with gardening or gathering: it’s “a video-poem as field guide to some of the edible weeds and wild foods we’ve been eating lately in central Victoria, Australia,” according to the description on Vimeo. A brief blog post goes into a little more detail.

As high-concept as this is, it’s also a fine poem, and I love the name of his production company: Gift Ecology Films.

Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles

On 6 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 4 Comments - Animation, Book trailers, Performance Poetry
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The reading is evidently an excerpt from Myles’ new book. Update: this is not from Inferno, but a more recent piece (see comments). It takes a little while to get going, but stick with it: the hand-drawn, typographic animation on a green screen behind the reading is unique. It’s the work of Scott Gelber for Teleportal Readings, which includes some additional information:

This is the first of nine videos we shot in collaboration with Rattapallax at the Bowery Poetry Club this summer. That’s BPC founder Bob Holman you hear in the background during the beginning, before he gets whatevered by Eileen. We filmed with a green screen and Scott Gelber added animation after the fact (we’ve yet to perfect the magic of manifesting amazing, hand-drawn typefaces live, but believe us when we say we’re working on it). Eileen’s newest book, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is available from OR Books.

And here then is an excerpt from Inferno (via EileenMyles.com).

http://vimeo.com/14155318

Finally, here’s a book trailer for Inferno.

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The Watcher of Vowels by Robert Bly

On 5 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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One of the new batch of films from MotionPoems, read by Todd Boss and designed and animated by Matt Van Ekeren. If you can get to Minneapolis this Friday, October 8, it will be part of a screening of new motionpoems.

The Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf

On 3 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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The title poem of Rachel Zolf’s new book from Coach House Books, “a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs.” Poetry blogger Joshua Corey calls it “A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab.”

I like the cut-up approach to a live-reading video here. Poet Laura Mullen is the filmmaker. For more on Rachel Zolf, see her author page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

Poems for Santa Barbara by David Starkey

On 1 October, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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This half-hour show, produced by The Santa Barbara Channels community media network, includes 11 videopoems written and recited by the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, David Starkey. He calls this a cooperative endeavor with the people of Santa Barbara: all the poem topics were suggested by residents, and the music in the videos is all the original work of local musicians. Starkey also provides brief commentaries on the poems, kind of in the style of a poetry reading, except that they follow rather than precede the poems.

I love this project. Starkey really shows what it means to be a local poet, responsive to local concerns and helping people inhabit their landscape with imagination and grace. I hope other local arts commissions copy this. While of course I liked some of the constituent videopoems better than others, overall it’s one of the best made-for-TV poetry programs I’ve seen, not excluding the interviews and animations produced by the BBC.

Zucchini by Major Jackson

On 30 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Animator Allison Alexander Westbrook IV says in the notes at YouTube,

This is a commissioned animation I did for the poet Major Jackson. It was created by using a combination of Adobe photoshop and after effects. It first debuted at the exhibition titled “More Than Bilingual: Major Jackson & William Cordova.” at the Fleming Museum located on the campus of the University of Vermont on January 27th, 2009.

The Briefcase Phenomenon by Libby Hart

On 27 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Directed by Siena Stone and Jalen Lyle-Holmes, this is one of the 2010 finalists from the Poetry in Film Festival held in Melbourne, in which all contestants were challenged to make a 4- to 7-minute film based on the same poem by Australian poet Libby Hart. (See Vimeo for the full list of credits.)

No sooner had I posted about the festival at the Moving Poems forum than this video pops up on Vimeo. Here’s hoping some of the the other finalists appear, as well.

Victim by Nicole Blackman

On 24 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A short film shot in Australia and based on a spoken-word poem by the New York-based poet Nicole Blackman. I found a review from 2005 in RealTime Arts Magazine. This was apparently Corrie Jones’ directorial debut. He persuaded Blackman to take an active role in adapting the poem for the film, and it is she doing the voiceover.

Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.

Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”

Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival.

Sign Language by Tom Konyves

On 23 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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If one can use the term “classic” to describe something that’s only 26 years old, this videopoem certainly qualifies. I was surprised to discover I’ve never shared it here before. (I did post Eric Gamalinda’s similar “Front Toward Enemy,” which I assume was inspired by Konyves’ piece.)

Tom Konyves of course is the guy who coined the term “videopoetry,” and he’s done a lot to help definine and promote the genre. Be sure to check out the Moving Poems forum for his most recent summary of videopoetry, cross-posted from his Vimeo profile. Here’s what he says about “Sign Language” in the notes at Vimeo:

“Sign Language” (1984) is a videopoem constructed entirely from images of graffiti around the city of Vancouver. The rhythm of the work is created by the synchronized editing of the images with the soundtrack. The music I selected for the work, entitled “You Haunt Me”, is performed by the saxophonist John Lurie with the group Lounge Lizards. Unlike most of my work, the soundtrack complements the visual presentation. The title of the work contains the double meaning of hand-sign language, used to communicate with the deaf.

A pure example of “found poetry”, this videopoem gives voice to the faceless underground of Vancouver’s east side, bearing witness to their outrage and pain, their uncompromising and sometimes anarchic vision of the absurdity in our lives, all with a measured touch of humour to remind us that the family of man – no matter how far outcast we may be – includes each and every one of us.

Question by May Swenson

On 22 September, 2010 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Animation
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http://vimeo.com/31974260

Another video from Dara Elerath at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. The full poem includes an additional two stanzas at the end — read it on the Poetry Foundation website.