Category Archives: Video

My own videos: amateur wildlife footage and videopoetry, for the most part.

Cuba, Coltrane, and videotape

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo – Watch on YouTube

I made another video with one of Nic Sebastian’s readings, this time for a poem by Nicelle Davis, “Cuba and Coltrane,” from her Whale Sound audio chapbook, Studies in Monogamy. I may not have any personal familiarity with marital discord, but who can’t identify with a relationship built on a shared longing to be elsewhere and otherwise than we are?

Process notes

As is almost always the case, this started with me noticing that something looked cool and needed to be filmed: in this case, the cattails blowing in the clear morning light with my new pink flamingo garden ornament slightly out-of-focus in the foreground. So I set up the camera on Saturday morning, knowing too that at some point someone would drive up the road and pass between cattails and flamingo. Once I had the footage, I began looking through Nic’s Whale Sound material for something appropriate, and “Cuba and Coltrane” immediately struck me as the best fit. Cuba, after all, actually hosts a breeding population of flamingos, unlike — say — Florida. And the blowing cattails were nothing if not jazzy.

I contacted the author for permission before I got too far along in the editing, gave her a rough outline of what I wanted to do, and linked to my videopoetry album on Vimeo. When she wrote back, she mentioned that she and her 3 1/2-year-old son had watched all of my videos, which was astonishing, and added that her son actually requested more of them this morning in preference to cartoons! High praise indeed. I remember just how addictive cartoons were when I was that age.

Maybe it was the mention of cartoons, but I got the idea of putting in some clips from slapstick comedies of the silent film era to illustrate the domestic conflict a bit more graphically. This may be a bit of overkill, I’m not sure. But it gave me a good excuse to browse through the online Edison Motion Pictures collection on the Library of Congress website.

I also thought it important to include some Coltrane in the soundtrack, and one way to do that without breaking copyright laws was to find a cover of a Coltrane tune licensed for remix/reuse under the Creative Commons. I decided to try SoundCloud this time, and hit paydirt right away with a great cover of “Naima” by a group called The VIG Quartet. SoundCloud has advanced search capability within Creative Commons-licensed material, so searching for tracks with the word “Coltrane” in the title, description or tags was quick and painless. I duly added SoundCloud to my page of web resources for videopoem makers at Moving Poems.

Posted in Video, Videopoetry | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Stepping into the heat

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

A small, volunteer sunflower growing alongside the footpath between my house and my folks’ house has attracted a huge following, from mordelid beetles to flea beetles to some kind of plant bug that lurk on the back side. Add to that the small wasps and bees coming in for shorter visits, and it’s quite a happening little scene.

That’s what tempted me to stand out in the sun for ten minutes yesterday evening videoing it. But when I brought up the clips on my desktop monitor, it was the sun-struck footage rather than the footage focused more on the insects that seemed the most striking. I hadn’t had anything specific in mind when I shot it, but I picked up my copy of Nic Sebastian‘s book Forever Will End On Thursday and quickly found a nearly perfect fit: the poem “homesteader,” which begins:

I step into the heat
as into a dress

the sun fits me, it is
my size

and the heat is
face-shaped…

Every time I make a videopoem, even one as simple as this, I feel I learn something new. This time, I discovered that the natural sound from the video itself made a perfectly satisfactory soundtrack, as long as I was careful, in my couple of splices, not to cut off the field sparrow in mid-song. I’m also refining my technique for massaging the poetry reading. In general, I find it necessary to lengthen the spaces between phrases when adapting a sound recording for use in a videopoem, in order to counteract the distraction-effect of the video images and give the words time to sink in. Nic’s readings lend themselves especially well to this kind of spacing, since her readings are already slower and more clearly articulated than most other people’s. On the other hand, there’s nothing that says a viewer or listener has to catch every word on the first listen. We certainly don’t have that expectation with music!

This is my third video so far for a poem by Nic Sebastian. In case you missed them, the other two were “on being constantly civil towards death” and “the wanderers’ blessing.” Two other videos used Nic’s readings (originally recorded for Whale Sound): “hollow” (text by Peter Stephens — possibly my best videopoem to date) and “A Bigfoot Poem,” Nic’s rendering of one of my own pieces.

Posted in Nature/Ecology, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged | 8 Comments

Eating roast ox at the outhouse races

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday I went to Martinsburg, Pennsylvania with a couple of friends to take in the newly-revived tradition there of outhouse races, a fundraising event sponsored by the local firehall. This was my first exposure to an activity of apparently quite widespread popularity: a Google search for “outhouse race” turns up photos, videos and articles on events from the Ozarks to Michigan to Alaska. One of the outhouses in attendance (and the one that won) bore a painting of the Confederate flag, which led me to wonder whether outhouse racing is seen as a Southern thing originally.

Contestants were judged on design as well as speed, and each outhouse had an occupant and four pushers. There weren’t that many outhouses this year, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. It was, among other things, a rolling display of folk art, notional shithouses with painted-on names — The Midnight Dumpster, The Boss’s Office. They ran multiple heats and everyone yucked it up. One of the outhouses lost a wheel, but otherwise there were no NASCAR-style crashes. I suggested they have a pit crew next year, but making a pit stop in an outhouse might be kind of redundant, come to think of it.

Afterwards, we joined the crowd at the pavilions in the park, where the firemen were cooking cheap dinner fare — roast ox sandwiches for $2.00, barbecued chicken for $4.00. I had the former: a round, brown patty in a bun. It wasn’t too bad slathered with condiments. We sat with a friendly couple who, seeing our photographic equipment, peppered us with suggestions of cool things to go see in Pennsylvania. He had worked for Conrail, he said, but quit after “the rebels” (meaning Norfolk-Southern, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia) took it over and ran roughshod over workers — a story I’ve heard before.

Afterwards, we sat out on the main drag until dusk, talking and watching a steady stream of classic cars, tricked-out Harleys and other outlandish vehicles go past. It was an all-American kind of day, I thought. I was led to muse about how, as a people, we are in love with speed and consumption. The result: when we gotta go, we gotta go.

*

I got home to discover my night-blooming cereus had opened, filling the room with a pungent, aromatic scent. By morning, it had already deflated, consigned, as it were, to the midnight dumpster.

Posted in Humor, Video | 11 Comments

Dickinson on heaven

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

I decided to envideo a poem by Emily Dickinson (#413 in the R. W. Franklin edition of the complete poems), written in 1862.

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –

‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here -

While this obviously isn’t one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, it does encapsulate, I think, one of her core beliefs, and is therefore a useful key to understanding her work as a whole. I couldn’t resist adding an ironic visual reference to one of her most famous poems.

And I must admit I picked a short poem because I didn’t have that much footage. I spent some time going through Franklin looking for poems about Heaven and Nature, and almost went with #721, which is more apophatic (and still pretty short), but it wasn’t as good a fit.

Posted in Philosophy/Religion, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged | Comments Off

Audio poetry contributions of the day

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Apparently my process notes about yesterday’s videopoem gave Cynthia Cox the nudge she needed to take the leap into videopoetry herself. This morning she messaged me on Facebook:

I need a male voice to read a poem for my very low-budget, first-time video/poem thing. Would you be willing to record it and send it to me, or do you know of a male who would be willing do so?

She did her best to lower my expectations:

All I have is a little P&S camera & video of me undressing some dolls, so don’t expect much (I am cheap). And, I don’t think the poem is my best either – it’s just the one that came to me when I got the idea.

So of course I said yes, did the reading (four takes), and sent it off. Here’s what she came up with. This is way better than my earliest videopoetry experiments (also done with a point-and-shoot camera and Windows Movie Maker):


Watch on YouTube.

Cynthia Cox is a long-time online acquaintance whose poetry I admire, and she’s currently blogging poems for a new chapbook manuscript as part of her editing/polishing process — clearly a poet-blogger after my own heart.

My other poetry reading-related contribution today (aside from the usual podcast at qarrtsiluni — a poem called “Neon in a Jar” by the amazing Susan Elbe) was a new post at the group blog Voice Alpha, “From bookstore to telephone: the incredible shrinking poetry reading.” It was just going to be a simple link-post, but, well, you know how it goes. I talk about the success Heather Christle has been having with her offer to read poems over the telephone for anyone who wants to call (which includes coverage at the BBC!) and speculate that perhaps the era of chasing big audiences at bookstores is over, and we should instead concentrate on more intimate “microaudiences” — telephone, video chat, door-to-door readings… Because who are we kidding? Poetry is never going to be even remotely popular in this country. We’re freaks. Even videopoems on YouTube struggle to amass 100 views, with a few notable exceptions. If you don’t write to amuse yourself and entertain your friends first and foremost, you’re screwed.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry, Video | Tagged | 3 Comments

Dark and like a videopoem

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday, my dad spotted a cecropia moth — newly eclosed, from the looks of it — on the side of one of the black walnut trees in the yard. This is the largest moth in North America, and it’s in the same Saturniidae family as polyphemus and luna moths (which have appeared on this same tree or its immediate neighbor two years in a row, in early August). I shot some video footage of it right away, but figured it wouldn’t be flying until after dark, so I went back at dusk with a flashlight to shoot some more footage.

This morning, it occurred to me that the nighttime footage might make a good fit with one of Nic Sebastian’s poems from her recent nanopress chapbook, Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, edited by Beth Adams. Nic had given me “blanket permission to use any and all of my stuff out there, any time” in a comment on my post about the new videopoetry album, so I didn’t have to worry about the fact that she’s off on vacation somewhere and probably not reading emails. The poem I had in mind, “on being constantly civil towards death,” is very short, but I’ve made at least half a dozen videos for haiku poems, and this is twice the length of a haiku. Would the text and the footage make a good pair? Maybe. It would depend on what I did with the soundtrack.

I downloaded the MP3 link off the chapbook’s website and listened to it a few more times. Due to the poem’s brevity, each line does a lot of work, so the first order of business was to make sure they didn’t go by so quickly that they wouldn’t register with a viewer. I could have slowed down Nic’s reading — my audio software has a function that lets you change the speed of a track without altering its pitch — but unlike many poets, Nic already seems to read at just about the right speed. So instead I lengthened almost every pause, a strategy that seemed to work well with the first poem of hers I did a video for, “the wanderers’ blessing.” This made the poem half again longer, though it was still pretty brief.

After listening to a bunch of Creative Commons-licensed pieces of music at Jamendo.com and ccmixter.org, I decided not to use any background music this time — it just didn’t seem to fit a poem dominated by a “great black stillness.” But from one death-metal track with a telephone ring in it, I got the idea of turning the poem into a phone call. It seemed appropriate for the overall theme of Nic’s chapbook — attempting to commune with a perhaps unreachable Other. This was good, because I conceive of the video not just as Moving Poems material, but also as something akin to a trailer for the book. (It helps that, as a paying customer of Vimeo, I now have the ability to conclude embedded videos with a clickable link.)

But yes, I did briefly consider using death metal in the soundtrack. Which is why you should probably be very careful about giving someone like me blanket permission to monkey with your work.

Posted in Greatest Hits, The via negativa, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged | 24 Comments

New videopoetry album

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Dave Bonta

I realized this morning that my most recent videopoem was my 100th upload to Vimeo, so in celebration I created a new album for my videopoems there. It contains 45 videos so far, including those I’ve made for poems by others (Nic Sebastian, Dick Jones, Peter Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Czeslaw Milosz, Cesar Vallejo and Juan Ramon Jimenez). The Flash player at the head of this post (probably not visible to RSS or email subscribers) displays everything in the album in reverse chronological order. Once you start viewing videos, it will continue playing them in order unless you click on something, which allows you to resume browsing. (If it starts giving error messages, refresh the page.) I’ve also stuck this player at the top of the Videopoetry category page here, since I do store almost all my videopoems on Vimeo.

Vimeo calls this a Hubnut widget, and says it offers “a TV-style viewing experience.” I guess being able to change videos with one click of the mouse is kind of like changing channels with a remote, assuming there’s someplace with 45 channels devoted to poetry.

Speaking of channels, I do still also maintain the amazing Undiscovery Channel for wildlife videos, though many of my best are actually hosted at YouTube. (Since until recently I didn’t have a paid account at Vimeo, it was faster to get videos processed at YouTube, and like most bloggers I’m often in a hurry to post. I still think YouTube is a great free service and an indispensible website, albeit increasingly junked-up with ads.)

As time permits I’ll be making and uploading higher-definition versions of some of my older videos, and maybe even fixing some problems with soundtracks, sub-par readings and the like. One of Vimeo’s chief virtues is that it allows one to swap in a new file for an old one while keeping the same URL and embed code, and without losing accumulated statistics, comments and likes. And see, this is why I prefer the freemium model for web services: once I’ve committed to paying $60 a year for something, it makes me want to get my money’s worth and stop being so goddamned slap-dash about everything.

Posted in Video | 6 Comments

Clive Hicks-Jenkins retrospective exhibition: official opening now on video

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Dave Bonta

I’ve shared videos of the May 6 poetry reading for The Book of Ystwyth, but the main event was the opening of Clive’s 60th birthday career retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales the following afternoon. And fortunately I didn’t have to worry about videoing that one; they had a professional filmmaker there to do it for them. This is the result.


Watch on YouTube.

Following Andrew Green’s introduction, Clive’s own remarks focus on the central role of place, love and community in his work:

Being a painter isn’t just about standing in the studio and making still lives and landscapes and narrative paintings. It’s about the people you surround yourself with, people who cluster around you, the people you love.

Would that all gifted artists and writers took their social obligations so seriously.

The exhibition continues through August 20th. If you’re anywhere in the U.K., don’t miss it! It’s a huge exhibition and well worth the time and effort to go see it, I think. Browse the works on Clive’s website and his blog posts about the exhibition for a preview.

Posted in Art, Video | Tagged | Comments Off

Wanderers and garden eels

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta


Watch on Vimeo.

More footage from the algae exhibit at the Kew Gardens. The garden eels were fascinating to watch: shy creatures, but more or less habituated to the steady stream of humans on the other side of the glass. Rooted as they were, they were clearly very far from home indeed. I somehow got the idea of pairing them with a poem by Nic Sebastian from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday, which I read and wrote about in April. Fortunately, Nic saw the logic in my seemingly bizarre choice, as she wrote in an email and subsequently blogged:

I would never have thought of pairing the footage and the poem, but the footage speaks to the themes in the poem — solidarity yet separateness; deep wariness and alertness to the environment; the need for camouflage and the longing for connection — all things that characterize the ‘order of strangers and interlopers.’ The music resonates as well – made me think of yearning and unfinishedness. It’s an unexpected connection you made, but I think it works.

This is the third videopoem I’ve made with a Nic Sebastian reading in the soundtrack, but the first for one of her own poems. If you only know her as the editor and main reader for the audiopoetry magazine Whale Sound, you’re missing a real treat: her own poems are wonderful, too. I hope this video helps win her a few more fans.

Posted in Greatest Hits, Video, Videopoetry | Tagged | 18 Comments

Woodrat TV: The Book of Ystwyth poetry reading

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Dave Bonta


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 1).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 2).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 3).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 4).

In lieu of a podcast this week, here in video form is the full, hour-long poetry reading I flew to Wales to take part in last month. This was a group reading in support of The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose launch coincided with a 60th birthday retrospective exhibition of, and monograph on, the contemporary Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (who I interviewed in the two most recent episodes of the Woodrat podcast). All six of us — three Yanks and three Brits — had written poems in response to his paintings, and The Book of Ystwyth includes a generous selection, illustrated with full-color details of the paintings in question.

In the reading, ably MC’d by Damian Walford Davies, as you’ll see, each poet appears twice, once on either side of a break (which occurs in part 3), so that the first poet is also the last, the second is the penultimate, etc. Here’s a key to who appears in which video:

Catriona Urquhart (read by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Ian Hamilton): parts 1 and 4
Andrea Selch: 1 and 4
Callum James: 2 and 4
Marly Youmans: 2 and 3
Damian Walford Davies (as reader): 2 and 3
Me: 3

Anita Mills was the camerawoman. I take the blame for the sound and all the editing. The bookstore’s set-up had the podium in shadow, which meant that the camera often focused on better-lit bookshelves behind our heads. In the process of lightening and increasing contrast on the videos, the color turned spotty, whence my decision to make it black and white. I assure viewers who have never been to Wales that it is a fully modern country now, and almost everything is in color all the time.

The Book of YstwythAs for the book: quite apart from its contents, which are of course scintillating, it’s a beautifully designed object with high-quality paper and image reproduction, retailing at a very affordable $15.95/£9.99. It was published in the U.K. by Grey Mare Press in association with Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales, and in the U.S. by Carolina Wren Press. Click on either link to order.

Posted in Art, Books and Music, Poets and poetry, Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments
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