Thanks to the editors for choosing the video, and for doing such a nice job with the layout and accompanying text. To me, the poem says something deep about giving and taking, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the video came together through several acts of generosity: my normally camera-shy friend letting me film her; Nic Sebastian providing a reading for the soundtrack, and Chris Kent letting me use his tin whistle tune. I hope other, more talented filmmakers will consider making videos with Mistral’s work, too. She deserves it.
Most poetry chapbooks are lucky to get any reviews, let alone one as kind as this, from long-time blogger Jonah at Love During Wartime in response to Twelve Simple Songs:
Song Two, “My parachute knapsack,” is another example of the dialogue between photo and poem. The poem closes with the lines “That’s what it was like / being alone.” The photograph is of a pair of boots on a red porch, a white wall behind them and white snow bordering the left of the porch. This is possibly the most “illustrative” pairing in the collection, yet I don’t see this as cloyingly obvious. There’s no self-pity on either the verso or recto: both speak of being alone, rather than being lonely. Each offer images devoid of sentimentality.
Do read the whole review… and of course check out the collection if you haven’t already. (And note that I still have some 20%-off coupons available for the print-on-demand version.)
Last weekend, Jonah blogged another review, this one for a collection I haven’t even bothered to publish aside from the series at Via Negativa and accompanying audio recordings: Manual. He wrote, in part:
I read through this brief collection in a few hours. But each poem deserves its own hour. Many of us think of poetry as some code that must be deciphered. These poems are a fine antidote to that fear: they are approachable, friendly (in their imperious way), tender, often whimsical, and sly.
It’s always gratifying when one’s work garners these kinds of close reads (especially of course when the reader has such a favorable reaction!). Both these projects have also sparked unsolicited artistic responses — close readings of a sort — from the Dutch filmmaker Swoon (Marc Neys): a single, seven-and-a-half-minute-long film for Twelve Simple Songs as read by Nic Sebastian, and a series of five films for poems in Manual. What a gift.
I now have a number of cycles of poems like Manual that feel complete and could be made into books. The question is always: Would the effort to design and produce a book be worth it? How does one measure such things if you’re giving your work away? How many downloads and purchases are enough? Or should I submit these collections to other publishers on the chance that they may be able to do a better job reaching readers, even though it means in most cases giving up control over design and the chance to have digital versions? Right now I’m putting most of my effort into an anthology of newly revised work which I may also self-publish; it’s clear to me that this book will offer value to readers simply as an act of curation from my too-voluminous online corpus. And I’m thinking I’d also like to pursue an idea suggested by Jean Morris in a recent comment at Via Negativa: an illustrated version of Bear Medicine.
So here’s the proposal: I’m looking for an artist or artists with an affinity for bears to collaborate on a small book incorporating my Bear Medicine prose poems. I’m thinking woodblock prints, but paintings or other media might work, too. Publication would be digital and print-on-demand under the Via Negativa Press imprint. I can’t afford to pay much. Contact me if you’re interested.
[Slippage] is a brand-new magazine devoted to “the confluence of science and art.” I have three poems in the first issue: “Dutchman’s Breeches,” “Kissing Bug” and “Siphonophore.” All three originally appeared at Via Negativa, but much to their credit, the editors do consider work that has been posted to a writer’s or artist’s own blog.
I was also pleased to find myself in some very good company, alongside poets such as Robin Chapman, Bill Knott, William Doreski and Jessamyn Smyth. Check it out. I think their mission to bridge the gap between the the arts and science is an important one.
Twelve Simple Songs is a short cycle of poems in dialogue with photographs about an intercontinental love affair. It started as a Valentine’s Day gift for my girlfriend Rachel, a one-off print publication through Snapfish, but then I decided to make it available as free PDF and MP3 downloads, uploaded it to the ebook reader service Issuu, and enough readers at Via Negativa expressed interest in a print version that I set up an account with Peecho.com for print-on-demand, too, where you can get it in any of three formats (magazine, glossy paperback and hardcover). Meanwhile, in accordance with my decision to keep it in the gift economy, my friends Nic Sebastian and Marc Neys (a.k.a. Swoon) surprised me with a lovely videopoem, and Rachel pulled together an iBook incorporating text, photos, my readings, and the videopom. I’ve set up a permanent page for the chapbook where you can access all these versions: https://davebonta.com/twelve-simple-songs/.
I have a photo up at one of my favorite online magazines, tinywords. The editors chose it as an interim feature between issues, a visual writing prompt for fans of the site:
While we are assembling the next issue, tinywords invites you to get inspired by Dave Bonta’s beautiful photograph above. Add your short poems inspired by his image “new ice” to our comment box below.
Thank you for lending your voices. And thanks to Dave for lending his photo. We will consider the best of the best for possible inclusion in tinywords 13.1.
Happy New Year!
Please stop by and contribute a poem to the growing collection. I wrote my own haiku in response to the photo back in January 2008 at Woodrat Photohaiku:
bone-white sticks
trapped in the cross-hatch foliage
new blue ice
I have a brief essay about bento boxes in the new anthology New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, available in paperback (Amazon link) and for the Kindle. That’s not the main reason to get it though. Think of it instead as a donation to the Japanese Red Cross to support survivors of the 2011 tsunami, for which you get a free book. None of the editors, authors, or illustrators make a penny for this, and neither does the Aussie publisher. It’s a beautiful book with a great diversity of contributions — a feel-good gift for all the readers on your Christmas list. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan is an anthology of stories, flash fiction, poems, haibun, haiku and artwork and photography donated by over 60 creators from all over the world to support those in Japan still affected by the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. All monies go the Japanese Red Cross.
This anthology was prepared by an international team of volunteers and includes the donation of a poem in German with English translation by award-winning Austrian poet and writer, Friederike Mayröcker.
Greg Mc Queen, founder of 100 Stories for Haiti and 50 Stories for Pakistan says this:
“You’re holding a book that beat the odds. A book made from determination. From compassion. And by holding it – buying it – reading it – telling others about it – you stand with the writers and artists who created it: ordinary people who watched the lives of strangers destroyed and decided that they needed to help.”
I finally got around to joining Goodreads, the social network for readers. If you’re a member, please send me a friend request. Here’s my author page.
Hard to say yet how I’ll use the site, aside from promoting my own books, but I hope to link to all my book reviews at Via Negativa going forward. I’ve also taken the time to add some favorite books to my virtual shelves there. And I imagine I’ll be using the blog feature from time to time. (I have a post there now announcing that Breakdown: Banjo Poems is due out in September.)
For years I dithered about whether to register this domain. Then two years ago, another Dave Bonta made things simple for me by registering it himself. Since he’s an author too, and is doing good work by promoting small-scale solar power, I didn’t begrudge him that. Then last week it occurred to me to see what he was up to, only to find that the domain was no longer in use. On a whim I went ahead and registered it, then contacted the previous owner to make sure he hadn’t let it go accidently. I don’t think he’ll mind if I share part of his very genial response:
I originally got the Dave Bonta website for my books, New Green Home Solutions and New Solar Home.
It was part of the deal I made with my co-author, Steve Snyder. I let it lapse after a couple of years (as the books became older) so I would be happy to have you take it over, since it was more about published works than solar. I actually have another blog, Green Guru, Dave Bonta that allows me to pontificate on RE [renewable energy] issues (and facebook, etc, where I never get the time to update anyway…) so I am happy to let you have the other. As a poet, it makes sense that you would have it.
Nice guy, right? But the question remains: given that Via Negativa is already my home base on the open web, what do I really need this site for? I’ve always been sort of opposed to the notion of building a personal brand. I guess I figure that if Via Negativa ever morphs into a full-fledged group blog, it would be good to have this in reserve. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll go ahead and set up a books page. Beyond that, I’m not sure. Maybe some homebrewing recipes, or other things that don’t quite fit on any of my other sites? If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments.
For the 2012 AWP panel, “Poetry Video in the Shadow of Music Video—Performance, Document, and Film”
Thursday March 1 from 10:30 A.M.-11:45 A.M.
Boulevard Room A,B,C, Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor
I define a videopoem as a wedding of word and image. Achieving that level of integration is difficult and rare. In my experience the greatest challenge of this hybrid genre is fusing voice and vision, aligning ear with eye. For me, voice is the critical element, medium and venue secondary considerations. Unlike a music video — the inevitable and ubiquitous comparison — a videopoem stars the poem rather than the poet, the voice seen as well as heard. (Emphasis added)
There are certainly other valid ways to think about videopoetry and related genres, but Haley’s sense of it happens to coincide with my own.
Let’s consider one example of my videopoetry, a piece I did for a poem by the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral called “Riqueza” (Riches). This came about in an ekphrastic manner, which is fairly typical for me: I will shoot some footage — or discover some public-domain footage online that I really like — and then write or find a poem that somehow seems to go with it.
When I shot the footage, I didn’t know what I’d use it for, if anything. I happened to be visiting a normally camera-shy, wool-spinning friend when she was in a mood to let herself be filmed, as long as I promised not to include her face. When I got home, I stared at the film for a while until the Mistral poem popped into my head. I emailed Nic Sebastian, poetry reader extraordinaire, and asked if she might record a reading of the Spanish text for me — something she could also post to her new audiopoetry site Pizzicati of Hosanna. She readily agreed. Then I did an English translation and began searching through various sites where musicians and composers post Creative Commons-licensed work. After a couple hours, I found something at SoundCloud.com that seemed to work. A Celtic tune on pennywhistle might seem an odd match for a Chilean poem, but I thought it had just the right mixture of sweetness and melancholy.
So that became something I could add to MovingPoems.com, a site where I’ve been sharing poetry videos from around the web for three years now. I post five new videos a week, and everything is indexed by poet, filmmaker(s) and nationality of poet. It’s not a high-traffic site — it only gets about 10,000 visitors a month — but it’s helping to bring together people working in videopoetry, sparking new collaborations and inspiring new works.
I’m not necessarily the best-suited candidate for the job. I grew up without TV and still live way out in the sticks, which means my exposure to art films is mostly restricted to what I can watch online — on a 1M/sec DSL connection. I’m part of an informal network of literary bloggers, and I started making videos originally for the same reason I began taking still photos: to feed my writer’s blog, Via Negativa. I think I had the idea originally that making poems into watchable videos would bring them to a wider audience. I’ve actually seen very little evidence that that’s the case. But I’m having too much fun making the things — I can’t stop. In fact, I’ve even managed to entice several of my poetry-blogger friends into trying their hand at it, too, with some very interesting results. Some of them don’t even have video cameras, and just use public-domain footage.
As a blogger, I’ve been working ekphrastically for a long time: sometimes when I’m too tired to think of anything else, a photo can make a great writing prompt. In 2008 and 2009, I was co-curator of a site called Postal Poems, where we asked poets to create and submit what were essentially modern equivalents of haiga.
A poetry postcard by Teju Cole from PostalPoems.com
That experience really prepared me, I think, to appreciate the effectiveness of a creative juxtaposition between text and image. It’s that juxtaposition, more than anything else, which makes a videopoem work. One-to-one matches between text and image are much less interesting to me, except sometimes in the hands of a skilled animator.
Aside from the necessity of feeding a poetry blog, what are some of the other reasons why people make poetry videos? Here are a few I’ve noticed:
To document live readings or other performances.
To accompany live readings, etc.
For art installations.
To share audio of favorite poems on YouTube.
To show at film festivals.
To broadcast on television.
To serve as book trailers or to accompany books as DVDs.
To publish in online magazines.
To fulfill course requirements.
Naturally, these uses shape the kinds of videos that are made. I include some but not all kinds of poetry videos at Moving Poems, where my categorization system reflects my own interests and also my relative ignorance when I launched the site. (The numbers in parentheses are numbers of videos in that category as of Oscar Night 2012.)
In hindsight, I might’ve done well to include a couple of sub-categories to animation, such as machinima and kinetic text. I do insist that a video include a poem or poem-like text either as graphic text or in the soundtrack; films or videos that are merely inspired by, or made in response to, poems don’t make the cut.
O.K., now let’s talk semantics. In a nutshell, no one can agree what to call the hybrid genre that I refer to as videopoetry, and critics argue about what does or doesn’t quality as a filmpoem or videopoem. Historically, the term film poem came first. Trouble was, modernist filmmakers didn’t want to include text in any way—a film poem should merely imitate the approach of poetry, they said. Poetry-film was a term coined in the 60s to specify a new, hybrid genre which did include text, though some people still called everything film poetry anyway. George Aguilar coined the term Cin(e)poetry, which stands for cinematic electronic poetry, in the early 90s. Poem film, film-poem, film/poem and filmpoem have all been deployed at one time or another, especially in the U.K. Videopoetry, a term originally coined by Tom Konyves in 1978, seems ascendant on the web.
As for “film” versus “video,” digitization has greatly muddied the waters. In North America, “film” seems too specific to the actual, physical medium, whereas in the U.K., according to Scottish filmmaker Alastair Cook, people feel the same way about “video” — it makes them think of videotape. So there’s no consensus on what to call digital moving pictures (which can be expanded to include Flash animations as well).
Well, whatever you call them, filmmakers have been making them for quite a while. Here are some highlights from the filmpoetry/videopoetry tradition:
1920: Manhatta by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand — the first feature-length poetry film.
1973: Frank and Caroline Mouris’ Frank Film wins an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.
1975: Herman Berlandt launches an annual poetry film festival in San Francisco.
1978: Tom Konyves makes the first videopoem as part of the Montreal Vehicule Poets.
1987: Tony Harrison’s V airs on Channel 4, is hugely popular and politically controversial, and sparks a minor craze for film-poems on British television.
Poetry film festivals now regularly occur in every continent except Antarctica, featuring poems from many languages. Videobardo in Buenos Aires, Orbita in Latvia, ZEBRA in Berlin and Visible Verse in Vancouver have each been going for at least a decade, and more poetry film festivals seem to be popping up every year. Meanwhile, I keep finding newcomers whose very lack of familiarity with this tradition brings a fresh perspective. “I call these ‘video poems,'” enthuses artist Elena Knox about her installation at a London bookstore, and yes, looking at her documentary on Vimeo, one can see that’s clearly what they are. Like the eye itself, the videopoem has evolved independently many times.
![[Slippage] magazine](https://davebonta.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Slippage-cover-300x227.png)
