Category: Festivals

Videohaiku and haibun at the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia

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International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia banner

UPDATE (10/20/20): Here’s the full list of films for The Art of Videohaiku.

The folks behind the Weimar Poetry Film Award and the bilingual Poetry Film Magazine have launched an ambitious new festival, the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia, October 22-25. I’m pleased to have a minor role in its maiden launch—which, due to the pandemic, will be happening online: a program called The Art of Videohaiku.

Video haikus are small-format poetry films in which the form of the haiku is visually interpreted and adapted. During a workshop with the filmmaker Ana María Vallejo, the genre was explored artistically. In addition to the workshop results, the program shows video haikus and haibuns by the US-American artist and poet Dave Bonta.

They’ve chosen six of my videopoems, three videohaiku from last year’s Summer in the UK series, and three haibun videos from this year’s Pandemic Season series. Ana told me, “I wanted to have these two ‘realities’ before and after corona.”

videohaiku workshop banner

They’ll also be screening the films made by the four students who took Ana’s weekend-long workshop last month. I had recorded a brief lecture for them (below). According to Ana, they found my haiku-writing and video-making practice inspirational, which is highly gratifying if also a little worrying.

The whole program looks wonderful — check it out. I’m especially interested in the focus on African videopoetry and the “Women in Resistance” screening. One 10-Euro ticket ($11.71 USD) gives you access to all the programs, and three weeks in which to watch them.

Watch on Vimeo.

Crossing the Pond and three other videopoems featured at HaikuLife 2020

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HaikuLife 2020 banner

The Haiku Foundation’s Jim Kacian, a poet whose own haiku and haiku videos I admire, was kind enough to select four of my videos for their annual online HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival, which debuted this morning as part of International Haiku Poetry Day. Here’s the link.

It would probably seem churlish to offer criticism, so I’ll just say that this festival is clearly designed by someone with an archivist’s mindset, and as the son of an academic reference librarian, I couldn’t be more pleased to have my videos added to the Haiku Foundation’s digital library and uploaded to their own servers. More usability-minded librarians might give them a hard time over the number of clicks it takes to get to the content, however. And as is to be expected with independently hosted videos, they don’t scale down well for people on slow internet connections, so I will have to wait until I get back to London later this year to watch the other films in the festival myself, unless the local public libraries and coffee shops with good WiFi reopen in the meantime.

The main film of mine in the festival is Crossing the Pond, archived here. It’s a selection of 30 of the best videohaiku from the 80 I made last year, pulled together for a program at the REELpoetry festival in Houston back in January. If you’re on crappy internet, it’s probably easier to watch it on Google Drive (it was too big for my Vimeo account). Here are the other three links, accompanied by embeds of my own uploads to Vimeo:

Pandemic Time

Sea Levels

Self-Quarantine

Do check out the other videos in the festival if you can.

I’m not sure anyone has referred to me as an auteur before. I am feeling an inexplicable urge to don a beret and smoke Gauloises cigarettes.

Videohaiku feature at Atticus Review + REELpoetry festival gig

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Some of my videohaiku, along with an artist’s statement, comprise the latest biweekly feature in the Mixed Media section of Atticus Review: Five Trains / Sea Levels. I’m honored to appear in one of the web’s two or three best homes for videopoetry in English, edited by Matt Mullins, himself a stand-out practitioner of the craft. I’d been reluctant to submit since I know Matt pretty well—I didn’t want to either presume on our friendship, or put him in the awkward spot of having to say no. (I’m told that’s not the way most poets operate, but whatever. Ambition is poison.) But when Matt solicited work, I sure wasn’t going to refuse!

That was several months ago; they have a long queue. Fortunately, my turn came up just in time to promote a program I’m giving as part of the 2020 REELpoetry festival in Houston, which takes place on the weekend of January 24-26. On Sunday, in lieu of a reading I’ll be showing a bunch of my videohaiku, and expanding on some of the thoughts in the Atticus Review essay.

The REELpoetry folks also have me giving the keynote address (gulp!) on Saturday, and I’ll be helping to kick things off on Friday night with a screening called Poesía sin fronteras / Poetry Without Borders focusing on Latin American poetry films, especially those that grew out of the online “Poetry from the Other Americas” group translation project back in 2015-16. Here’s a trailer:

Watch on Vimeo

I’m also on the five-judge panel, and I can tell you that the competition films range all the way from great to spectacular. So why not spend a weekend watching poetry films in Houston, Texas? I’ll be the guy with the big, dark circles under his eyes from weeks of sleep deprivation.

Failing up: More texts from Failed State make their way into the world

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Oops, I’ve forgotten about this website again! I apologize to both of my subscribers.

To be honest, I think my major creative accomplishment of the summer has been learning how to make no-knead, whole grain sourdough bread that is not at all brick-like. But since this is a writer’s blog, I do feel obliged to periodically make note of my publications and other similar accomplishments. Why this is important, I’m not entirely sure (unlike with bread baking, where the rewards are obvious and life-sustaining). So. Um, let’s see. I had a haiku appear in an actual print publication called hedgerow, their spring issue, which turned out to be a rather nice anthology, including some genuinely fine English-language haiku that I was pleased to share space with. The haiku of mine that the editor chose happens to be the one that closes my manuscript Failed State:

fresh snow
the child fills the trailer
of her toy truck

Another couple of haiku appeared online in NOON: journal of the short poem, both in Issue 15 (pp. 34-35 if you’re in a hurry). Again, good company, and yes, both haiku are also from Failed State, written this spring as replacements for earlier, weaker haiku. I was especially pleased with the second one—

above the mall
the rest of the mountain’s
unrest

—which caps a haibun titled “Economic Growth”. (Environmentalist friends from the Altoona area may recognize the reference to the ill-advised Logan Town Centre, which despite its name ignored the many serviceable brownfields areas in the actual town center to take advantage of a ridiculous tax break and carve out a steep, seep area on the side of Brush Mountain. Which hasn’t actually collapsed onto Barnes & Noble and Bed Bath & Beyond quite yet, but a big scary crack has opened up in the slope just above.)

Also worth mentioning is a haiku I wrote for a senryu contest sponsored by a publication called Sonic Boom. It’s true that I tend to turn my nose up at contests, but they can be a great spur to creativity, and such was the case this time, as it not only yielded another replacement for a haiku in Failed State, but it was also accepted for publication since it landed on both judges’ shortlists, apparently. You can find it here (PDF) on page 22. A memory from childhood.

Also, Marie Craven’s videopoem based on some of my erasure haibun appeared in Rochford Street Review, Lori Ersolmaz’s Triptych filmpoem from Failed State was screened at the Oaxaca Filmfest, and In West Virginia by Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, based on my haibun of the same title, has appeared in six festivals, including the Buffalo International Film Festival, the Lisbon Film Rendezvous, the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, and the Green Screen Environmental Film Festival in Trinidad and Tobago.

“Winter Trees” in Poetry Film Live and other videopoetry news

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I’m very pleased to have my Winter Trees videohaiku sequence included in the UK-based journal Poetry Film Live, accompanied by a generous review from my friend Marie Craven. It’s the sort of highly personal reaction I really appreciate, and from a poetry filmmaker whose work I admire. She writes about her favorite videos and why they work for her, and also zeroes in on the series’ weakest point: the text-on-screen font and effect choices. She concludes:

Overall, I found Dave’s collection a rewarding experience. I recommend it to anyone interested in poet-made videos, or in smaller, subtler and more personal approaches to the genre.

Read the rest.

Three videos from Winter Trees in HaikuLife Festival

HaikuLife banner
It’s been really gratifying to have people responding warmly to Winter Trees on Twitter and elsewhere. I sent along the link to the Haiku Foundation website for possible inclusion in their extensive bibliography of haiku-related publications, and got back a request to submit three of the videos for their 5th annual online HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival, along with some encouraging words about the sequence from Jim Kacian, whose own haiku I deeply admire.

Does this mean I’m a big poet now?

If you’re in the UK, mark your calendar for the Big Poetry Weekend, formerly known as the Swindon Poetry Festival, to be held in Swindon, UK at the Richard Jeffries Museum, October 3-7. Rather a thrill to see my ugly mug on the front page surrounded by a bunch of real poets. I’m helping to judge a film poetry competition alongside Lucy English, and will be part of a panel discussion on poetry film with her and Helen Dewbery, following a presentation by Lucy of her fantastic Book of Hours collaborative project, and followed by the awards presentation and screening. That’s all happening on Friday evening, October 4. Here’s the full programme.

If you’d like to enter the competition, by the way, there’s still time. The deadline is July 12th. Here are the guidelines.

In West Virginia

Many years ago, I was stranded in West Virginia for several days when my brother’s car broke down, and instead of going camping in the Monongahela National Forest, we got to explore the strip mall and downtown of scenic Summersville, a town famous for its speed trap and its old-time music scene. A blog post followed, and eventually a prose poem which mutated into a haibun. Now it’s been adapted into a film by Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran of Outlier Moving Pictures. In West Virginia isn’t available on the open web yet because it’s still making the film festival rounds, and some festivals require films to be web virgins. But I’m pleased to report that it’s a lovely film that makes unique use of postcard-like images, and that it was selected for screening in April at the Newlyn International Short Film Festival in Cornwall.

Oops

Speaking of Newlyn: such is my neglect of this poor blog that I forgot to mention I had a video of my own screened there in 2018, Ornithology. A birder struggling through quicksand becomes a metaphor for our mostly fruitless efforts at transcendence:

Bloodshot Cartography at Cadence Video Poetry Festival

I was pleased to have a videopoem I made for a poem by Sarah J Sloat, Bloodshot Cartography, included in a couple of events in the month-long Cadence Video Poetry Festival held at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum in April. It didn’t qualify for the main screening, but apparently they got a deluge of submissions this year… possibly because I promoted them on Moving Poems. D’oh! Regardless, it was great to be able to support such a fantastic new videopoetry festival. I’m always happy to submit films or manuscripts for a reasonable fee to organizations I believe in.

Anyway, the video combines Sarah’s evocation of travel in the tropics with a beautifully decayed old home movie, in a sort of lazy person’s homage to Stan Brakhage. The soundtrack is courtesy of the bird-sound library xeno-canto, from recordist Rodrigo Dela Rosa in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil. The footage has been lightly edited from a single movie at the International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM):

Taking the Waters goes on tour with Poetry + Video program

A final bit of videopoetry news that I’m excited about brings us back to my Australian film-maker friend Marie Craven, who has put together an hour-long touring program of videopoems from around the world called simply Poetry + Video, and was kind enough to include an old collaboration I did with filmmaker and composer Marc Neys, with my partner Rachel Rawlins in the soundtrack: Taking the Waters. Here’s the very complete description on the website, and here’s the full program. If you’re a teacher, run a poetry reading series, or coordinate a film series in your community, get in touch with Marie — “The program is designed to be highly portable, and easily obtainable on request to screening spaces in any location. It is available to cultural organisations internationally during 2019-20.”

The world premiere screening was on May 4th in Murwillumbah, Australia, and two further screenings are on the schedule so far, one in Kathmandu and another in Muncie, Indiana.