Offering by Paul Perry

On 4 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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This new videopoem by Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon with a text and reading by Irish poet Paul Perry appears in the inaugural issue of Poetry Film Live, whose editors note:

Marc is a composer/video artist from Belgium and is one of the leading and most prolific figures in modern videopoetry. That makes it a particular privilege that Offering was made for the launch of this site.

Click through for the text of the poem. This is the second third Swoon film based on a Paul Perry poem, following Drift (2012) and River of Light (2103).

Clouds by Lucy English

On 3 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This recent addition to the Book of Hours project is

A poetryfilm by Jutta Pryor (Aust) with the words of Lucy English (UK) and soundscape created for ‘CLOUDS’ by

Bruno Gussoni: Flute, Alto Flute, Tibetan Bells (Italy)
Claudio Ferrari: Electronics (Italy)
Iao Aea: Fretless Electric Bass (Italy)

Click through for the text for the poem.

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Quadrant by Matt Dennison

On 2 March, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A 2015 video by Marie Craven, remixing old footage from the Prelinger Archives with a poem and voiceover by Matt Dennison and music by Dementio13.

Night on Klamath River by Patricia Killelea

On 28 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A videopoem by poet, teacher and musician Patricia Killelea using a text from her collection Counterglow. In an interview with Passages North, where she’s now the poetry editor, Killelea talked about the impetus behind her poetry videos:

I carry a video camera with me wherever I go—I think of it as my visual notebook. For a long time I theorized my poetry mostly in terms of sound and silence, but the more I started thinking about the relationship between my body and language, the more I wanted to create a multi-sensorial experience. We don’t experience language merely through sound or even visually on the page, but everywhere we go. I walk through the woods and I’m reminded of a story told to me by Oneida beadwork artist Karen Ann Hoffman, or I’m watching my bandmate Aubrey Hess cradle a jug of wine and it reminds me of thirst and insatiable longing. I think in terms of interwoven networks between words and images, sounds and movement and so my video poems are an attempt-in-progress to capture both my associative writing process as well as to situate my poetry in the actual, physical world of things.

Granite As Heirloom: A Portrait by Caleb Femi

On 24 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/205223348

Caleb Femi, the Young People’s Laureate for London, is a poet-filmmaker whose latest film is

a deconstruction of the white gaze in the portraiture of the black British working-class face; it makes a play on the response to particular black facial features as something sinister, a Hollywoodised alien threat, a dread, out of place, an omen of destruction etc.
The marriage between the poem and the film work as a self-proclamation of the beauty in the black British face and a release from perceived validation of the external gaze.

Although the marginalisation of ‘black’ features in modern aesthetics is a global conversation, this project centres around the aesthetics in the British working-class experience as it is one whose nuances are very much understood by me.

Watch all of his films on Vimeo.

Woke Up Asleep by Meghan McDonald

On 23 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new videopoem from Meghan McDonald, a New York-based “Sound experimenter, visual poet, micro filmmaker and absurdist,” not to mention master of the succinct Twitter bio. Here’s the YouTube description:

“Woke Up Asleep” is a poetry video about awakening from the daily routines that seem to put us all in a fear-stricken daze. “The gutless” go on silently in order, but those who choose to step out of line are seen as mad.

Talk About the Apocalypse by Brendan Bonsack

On 22 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This new videopoem from Melbourne-based poet and songwriter Brendan Bonsack deploys an expert remix of footage from the Prelinger Archive, with a surprising ending that makes one want to watch it all over again.

El fin de la existencia de las cosas / The end of the existence of things by Dalia Huerta Cano

On 21 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A 2013 filmpoem written, directed and edited by Dalia Huerta Cano. The voiceover is by Patrick Danse, and Luciano Rodríguez Arredondo composed the original score. See the webpage for full credits and the list of festival screenings, as well as this description:

The point of view of a boy who has a big love loss and how he faces it. A voyage that goes through his mind and his sadness, that will take him through memories and the things that are left of that intense relationship, towards a liberating destination.

Poemas Videográficos / Videographic Poems by Fernando Tavares Pereira

On 18 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 3 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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Brazilian poet Fernando Tavares Pereira made these fascinating animated text videos with the help of Rafael Veggi (computer graphics, sound). For those of us who don’t know Portuguese, he was kind enough to email a translation of each as well as an explanation of the project:

The videographic poem is the record of the birth of a word. Through the experience of emotions, associations, forms, memories, everything that contributes to the formation and understanding. It’s the word behind the word.

Secret – Secreto

Portrait – Retrato

Sun – Sol – As the letter sun in Portuguese, s-o-l, as the key of sol, as a sun shining, as the sol note at the end

One – Um – The ONE is the element one and at the same time the multiplicity in time. This back and forth movement means your birth as a word.

I asked about their composition process, and Fernando replied:

The poem is born as a graphic on paper. Then I wrote a project, a script to follow, to turn the poem into movement. And so Rafael is free to create solutions on top of what I present, and many times I have counted on his talent to improve the quality of the job. I’m the pen and he’s the byte. We are a partnership to works in the same sense to create beauty and, I usually say, entertainment. In fact I see poetry as entertainment, image, cinema, more than anything else. I believe that with this poetry does not lose anything of its flavor.

The poems are numbered as an untitled movie, because they are born and nominated by themselves. They are the subject of reading and we are the observing object. The logical layout has changed and reinvented itself.

Rafael added:

The sound was arranged by me following Fernando’s guidelines.
All samples come from open source databases around the internet and then edited in Audacity software.

Poems 01 and 02 animations were made on Blender, poems 03 and 04 were made in SVG/HTML/Javascript/CSS. I’ve had a great time working on them!

The fourth poem represents a deconstructed word ‘um’, which means ‘one’ in portuguese, as well as the number 1 itself.

knuckleshop by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch

On 16 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Just uploaded to Vimeo, this 2008 videopoem is from the long-time video-making partnership of artists Jeff Crouch and Cecelia Chapman:

Cecelia Chapman’s work explores the image in communication and revolves around environmental and cultural transformation.
For the past ten years Chapman has been collaborating with artist Jeff Crouch, with performer Christa Hunter, and with sound artists she meets online to produce short new media video.

The music here is by Crouch, as are the drawings. Rarely does one see an ekphrastic poetry video that succeeds as a separate artwork in its own right. Perhaps part of the key here is that Crouch’s sketches satisfy what I think of as the Konyvesian imperative: “In a successful videopoem, the work’s elements contain a collaborative property, an original incompleteness.” (Tom Konyves, In Retrospect: A Manifesto and its Underpinnings, p. 3.)

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accidentals (recalculated) by Ian Gibbins

On 15 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Math and poetry merge in this brilliant videopoem by Ian Gibbins. Here’s the Vimeo description:

… the probability that accidents do happen, if you slip and fall, fly too close to the sun, if your car runs off the road, if you cut your finger, miss a secret assignation, catch (or not) a slip of the tongue, when words fail, when all you have left is abstraction, operators, a lasting approximation, a mathematician’s code …

This video was a finalist in the Carbon Culture Review 2016 Poetry Film Contest: carbonculturereview.com/news/2016-poetry-film-contest-winner-and-finalists/

ななつめの窓 / Seventh Window by Shuhei Hatano

On 14 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“My eye is your finger,” reads the Vimeo description of this silent, black-and-white videopoem by Tokyo-based filmmaker Shuhei Hatano. Made in July 2015, it was part of an exhibition of hand-held films in Kunitachi, Japan called 92TOUCH. There’s also a version with only the English titling.