The Future is Here by Bianca Stone

On 24 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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“Nothing bad can touch this life I haven’t already imagined.” This stunning black-and-white poetry film from UK filmmaker Helen Dewbery and US poet Bianca Stone should serve as a reminder—if any were needed—of the power of international collaboration on this day when the advocates for Little England seem to have triumphed. The poem is from Stone’s 2014 collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. Colin Heaney composed the music.

The Way The Light Reflects by Richard Siken

On 23 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by the Tucson, Arizona-based poet Richard Siken. As with his first videopoem, Why, this does double-duty as a music video for the French singer Marianne Dissard, though this time it’s an instrumental: “Fondre”, off the album L’Abandon (2010), composed by Christian Ravaglioli. Click through to Vimeo for the full credits and the text of the poem.

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The Ugly Daughter by Warsan Shire

On 22 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance
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Dancer/choreographer Ella Mesma performs as Warsan Shire recites her poem. This was one of two dance-poetry pieces premiered at London’s Southbank Centre on October 6, 2014 under the aegis of The Complete Works II, directed by Nathalie Teitler, which gave rise to the Dancing Words project.

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Aubade by Lucy English

On 21 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A collaboration between Matt Mullins (audiovisual composition) and Lucy English (poem, voiceover) for English’s Book of Hours project.

S by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

On 18 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Another author-made videopoem recently published by Voluble, this time from the enormously talented poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Click through to listen to her artist’s statement, where she explains that “‘S’ is the first piece in a trilogy of videos that engage Audre Lorde’s poem The Black Unicorn.” Her discussion of the relationship between audio and video, hearing and seeing in her creation of the video is absolutely fascinating.

This concludes this week’s focus on videopoems or poetry films made solely by the poet her- or himself. Over the years I’ve shared many such videos, and Matt Mullins put together an annotated gallery of Ten Notable Single-Author Videopoems to showcase some of the best. There are many more examples of films that emerge from active collaborations between the poet and the filmmaker. I hadn’t planned this as a promotion for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, which alone among poetry film and videopoetry festivals requires the poet to have been directly involved in making the video, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that their deadline for submissions is coming up on July 1. (Which happens also to to be the deadline for the 2016 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.)

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This Dull Chaos by A. H. Jerriod Avant

On 17 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Kinestasis
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An author-made videopoem by A. H. Jerriod Avant, one of the three lead curators of a new, Los Angeles Review of Books-sponsored website and YouTube channel called Voluble, where the video debuted:

“this dull chaos” wants to track a very specific emotion, through at least a singular episode of social chaos, right down to the family function. an episode where the speaker wants to escape, if just for a moment, or from a cycle of these moments, even if that escape’s no larger than one’s own mind, if that be a measure. these moments, hell bent on frightening the psyche, remind me of the love we often run from, the love that we don’t always get to keep, conflict, peace and how this breaks down at the infamous and beautiful family gathering. the photographs seek out angles, similar to the way a spider web’s thread does. also in its construction, with a center, “like an ambition done sat up in you,” I once heard an elder Black deacon say. it explores this episode of social chaos while simultaneously commenting on episodes or cycles of social chaos we witness at large and outside the walls of the home. the photographs move chaotically, not caught by any one rhythm. their changes are responses to certain disruptions. the speaker is frantic and at times, seems to wish to get a signal outside this one house for help, even if that help is time, relief or any mode of meditation and or sense-making.

Voluble looks like a promising site to follow for anyone interested in multimedia experimentation. From the About page:

Voluble is an off-the-page makers’ space for writers and artists of all kinds. The channel aspires to be an outlet for experimentation, play, collaboration, and any other gestures that coincide with a visual or literary art practice.

Voluble hopes to shed light on the personal, political, and public lives of writers and artists from around the world.

Gallery space, incubator, laboratory, studio! Each week a different artist or artists will use this online platform to show us their world.

Everyone is invited to join us in making this space as open, challenging, and diverse as the world we hope to live in. We are actively seeking works and proposals, and would love to carry on a conversation about interstitial, interdisciplinary creativity.

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A confession at line 16 by Mikey Delgado

On 16 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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I had already decided to feature author-made videopoems this week when this one from Mikey Delgado appeared in my Vimeo feed. Delgado is a North London poet and blogger; this is his first new post on Vimeo in three years. Here’s the description:

a film by Foy Migado (Mikey Delgado) featuring a text and reading from Mikey and the music of the inestimable my hot air balloon (soundcloud.com/welcometotheamericas) in a roundtable at The Ephraim Cockle Centre for Poesy, discussing via an entertainment the manifest and the latent; the impulse for, and the evolution of, a text and its will to exist; response to horror, retreat from horror, pseudo conversion into art, exculpatory codas, metaphors for the poet’s will to register an experience; texts as arrows with no targets; poets standing naked in the woods.

Click through to read the poem.

Elegy for a Hymen by Cindy St. Onge

On 15 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Cindy St. Onge, using footage sourced from Shutterstock and a soundtrack by Jeff Beal, according to the Vimeo description.

two story train by Martha McCollough

On 14 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Martha McCollough. It appears in Issue 4.0 of the experimental poetry zine Datableed.

Jigsawed by Tania Hershman

On 10 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is I love it how conversations flow from family to brown bread, an elegant, black-and-white poetry film by Ana Levisky with an interesting directive:

From landscapes to pubs and stores, a sequence of spots where personal episodes occurred is presented in an attempt to capture the geographical power in the absence of events or characters.

Bristol-based writer Tania Hershman reads her poem in the soundtrack, accompanied by Christopher Kestell’s original score on piano.

The Small Ones by Lynne Sachs

On 9 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs created this videopoem with quotes from a cousin in the audio track juxtaposed with imagery on top of which several of the most memorable lines are repeated as text. Here’s the description from her website:

During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs’ cousin, Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party.

“Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work.” Barbara Hammer

Black Maria Film Festival Director’s Choice Award; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Tribeca Film Festival; MadCat Film and Video Festival; Harvard Film Archive; Pacific Film Archive; Dallas Film Fest; Cinema Project, Portland.

available on Lynne Sachs 10 Short Films DVD from www.microcinema.com
and on For Life, Against the War DVD Compilation of 25 films from the Filmmakers Cooperative

A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman

On 8 June, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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This is one of the best student poetry films I’ve seen. Ayesha Raees is from Lahore, Pakistan, a literature student at Bennington College in Vermont who is writing her thesis on videopoetry. She told me she’s been working on this piece for the past eight months, and it shows. The spot-on music is by Sarah Rasines.

Raees’ decision to use just the second stanza of Whitman’s poem gives the text, I think, that quality of incompleteness that Tom Konyves maintains is intrinsic to each element in a true videopoem. (Read the complete poem at the Poetry Foundation website.) Another filmmaker’s take on the poem was recently deleted from Vimeo, so I’m pleased that such a fine new interpretation has appeared to take its place in the Moving Poems archive.