Category: Videopoetry

My own videopoems, plus videos made by other people for poems that originally appeared at Via Negativa. This is a sub-category of Poems & poem-like things, but posts are also cross-listed to Video (which contains a few non-poetry-related videos, too). I maintain a separate blog devoted to videopoetry: Moving Poems.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dead leaf (videohaiku)

Watch on Vimeo.

I had fun watching and filming a woolly bear caterpillar this morning. The text of the haiku occurred to me as I was filming. The word “frass” may be slighty obscure, but I hope it’s obvious from the context what it means. Caterpillar droppings are hard and dry — not at all the image that “shit” or “excrement” conjure up (though my mother does have a t-shirt with a drawing of a caterpillar and the message “frass happens”).

As with other videohaiku I’ve done, I find that, in contrast to regular videopoetry, a straightforward, “naive” relationship between footage and text can succeed as long as the text is saved for afterwards. The effect, I hope, is to reproduce something of the process by which a haiku is born: close observation yielding a sudden insight (though in this case, arguably, my insight was not especially profound). This is the first time I’ve added music to the soundtrack of a videohaiku; usually I just use the ambient sound, but that was marred this time by the camera scraping against the concrete.

The time equation might be of interest. In all, it took me three hours to make the video and an hour and fifteen minutes to upload it. Of that time, only about three minutes were spent polishing the text of the poem. So the filmmaking took about 60 times longer than the writing. (And then I spent some 25 minutes adjusting the settings on Vimeo and composing this post. Sure would’ve been easier just to post the damn haiku!)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Asterisk (videopoem)

This entry is part 24 of 34 in the series Small World

 

This may be too literal and/or droll a video for the poem, but I couldn’t resist. Rachel encouraged me to make a shot list this time, so I did. It looked like this:

  1. Location: yard / Shot description: asters / Framing: whatever looks good / Action: whatever happens / Actors: whatever flies past

I used the Extract effect in Adobe Premiere to make it look vaguely like an animation.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Love After 50 (videopoem)

View on Vimeo

Yeah, so “Love after 40” got upgraded by a decade and envideoed. The 1912 vaudeville clip is in the public domain, and comes courtesy of the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral film. The music by Mick Kelley (A.K.A. Ecklecticmick) is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. It’s a revamped “electroswing” version of an Ella Fitzgerald tune, “When I Get Low I Get High.” Rachel Rawlins kindly agreed to do the reading. It must be said that neither she nor I have yet to dress and act quite like the characters in the film, though I suspect that that’s kind of what some young people see when they catch sight of our graying hair and deeply uncool mannerisms.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

New “Hope”

There’s now a larger, HD version of the video I made for Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers…” last year — the one using a Nic S. reading and clips from an old Encyclopedia Brittanica educational film about the American Civil War, which was going on when Dickinson wrote her poem 150 years ago. (Vimeo permits users to swap one file for another, so this will replace the earlier version in all embeds that may be out there. Neat, eh?) The difference in quality may not be all that large, however, due to the limitations of the source file at archive.org. An artists’ collective in Athens requested a projection-quality version for an upcoming festival/exhibition of poetry videos, which intrigues me because of their approach: a number of screens playing videos in different rooms, museum-style, rather than scheduled screenings as in a typical film festival. I find longer videos rather tiresome to watch in a museum gallery, but since most videopoems are quite brief, this approach should work well, I think, and expose any given video to many more viewers. One of the four rooms in this two-day poetry event will be devoted to the work of four master poets: Dickinson, Blake, Plath and Bukowski — some interesting company for the Belle of Amherst! “Void Network thinks that Poetry Nights are a chance to create a vibrant place in the hurt of the Metropolis,” they told me. Well, one can always hope.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

(note to self)

(watch on Vimeo)

Be sure to expand this to full screen — it’s beautiful footage. I can say that because I didn’t shoot it myself. It’s from the free stock video site Beachfront B-Roll and is licensed under the Creative Commons (Attribution Unported license). But I did go to the trouble to save and upload a true HD version, for once. It actually didn’t take much more than an hour to upload, so maybe I’ll do that more often from now on and stop subjecting y’all to crappy low-resolution videos.

UPDATE 7/8/12: I’ve completely revised the soundtrack to include a somewhat livelier soundscape than the one included in the original video, as well as a more natural reading. Freesound.org is a marvelous resource.

*

(note to self)

don’t be so eager to find yourself

the deer rolls her eye in panic
at your approach
birds take flight
the rabbit’s pelt quivers

consider the possibility
that they’re right about you
those whom we trust to predict earthquakes

stop trying to dot your i’s
broken columns
from a Greek temple
where no one now remembers
the name of the god

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Correspondence

Watch on Vimeo

[text]
How did they do it, those long-
distance lovers of old, waiting
months for a letter to make
its way by sea?
And when it did, oh the slow
parsing of its every word!
Onion-skin paper
like a bed of salt.
Cursive writing
like Jonah’s gourd vine,
the work of a single night.

*

I shot the footage of a question mark butterfly on my right hand left-handed (obviously) while preparing to post to The Morning Porch. The “Caravan” mash-up is by electro-swing maestro Mick Kelly, AKA Ecklecticmick, on Soundcloud (Creative Commons Attribution licence).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Speech alone

Watch on Vimeo

One of my favorite Jean Follain poems, with the W.S. Merwin translation in the subtitles. The reading is by Nic S., from her audiopoetry site pizzicati of hosanna.

I captured the footage of a half-grown bunny this evening, right outside my house. The eastern cottontail rabbits seem to be at a peak of population these days, which, somewhat counter-intuitively, may be due to the proliferation of predators such as coyotes, fishers and owls, which we think is the reason why there are no more feral housecats around. The cats predate heavily on baby bunnies. If true, this would be an example of what ecologists call a trophic cascade. Anyway, some of these bunnies are so accustomed to me now, I can walk right by them. It’s a cuteness overload almost every time I step outside the door.