Tag: Marc Neys

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Psalm 2.0: the movie

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

This new film, the result of a collaboration with two of my favorite poetry filmmakers, Janet Lees and Marc Neys, was the highlight of my week.


Watch on Vimeo

Here’s how Janet introduced it on Facebook:

A collaboration between Dave Bonta, Marc Neys and me. Dave wrote the poem in response to a film clip I shared on Instagram, a mirrored image of a pebble I’d thrown in the river, and Marc composed several pieces of music to the clip. This is one of the pieces, all brilliant, that we think works really well with Dave’s incredible poem.

It’s fun to collaborate with fellow loners, each of us kind of doing our own thing in response to the others.

If you missed the plain-text version of Psalm 2.0, I posted it back on October 3rd.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Net Work

A new videopoem. I’m grateful to Marc Neys for composing the original soundtrack (in response to a draft form of the video).

The poem is presented as text-on-screen, in a kind of call-and-response fashion, and was inspired by the footage, which I shot on my aging iPhone this summer. So I hesitate to extract it from that context, but here it is nevertheless for the benefit of those with impaired vision:

Net Work

for Rachel

It is still light where I sit
reading the lines you are touch-
typing in the dark.

The planet’s curves
are always coming between us
her ceaseless spinning
her magnetic field
her core of molten rock.

But it’s the state that says stop
behind arbitrary lines
the border force that says stand still
for security screening
and if you’re poor, stay out.

The earth is always knitting
us together. Her forces
are centripetal and convergent.
Even now she works to mend
each fraying thread.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ice Mountain: the videopoem

Belgian artist and musician Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon is one of the most original makers of videopoetry (AKA poetry film) in the world, and when he offered to make a book trailer for Ice Mountain, I was thrilled. However, I think you’ll agree that the video he produced is much more than a mere trailer — it’s an original creation in its own right. I supplied most of the footage, but the choice of what to use and how to mix it was all his. He asked me to record a montage of lines and stanzas from the book, which he let me pick, then chose additional lines to display as text-on-screen. The music, which he composed first (and asked me to comment on before finalizing) guided the composition of the video.

Ice Mountain: An Elegy is due out on January 25. If you missed my earlier post, here’s the back-story. And if you’d like a further sample of the contents, I’ve posted a section at DaveBonta.com. (I still feel faintly ridiculous typing that URL!)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Grave Dug by Beasts: a new videopoem by Swoon

This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

 


Watch on Vimeo.

The other videopoem that my friend Marc Neys AKA Swoon surprised me with at my birthday party (see yesterday’s post) was this interpretation of a poem I’d written in response to a painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, one of a series of ekphrastic poems I wrote in response to his series of paintings The Temptations of Solitude. (These poems were later collected along with the work of five other poets in a beautiful little anthology called The Book of Ystwyth: Six Poets on the Art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and you can watch the videos of our group reading at the 2011 book launch.)

I made my own videopoem with this text back in 2012, and while I wouldn’t call it a failure, I do think it rather pales in comparison to Marc’s. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating how the creative spark originally struck by Clive continues to give rise to new works of art. As Clive himself commented when I shared the video on Facebook last month: “I love the way art begets art begets art begets art. This is hauntingly beautiful.”

Sadly, this is among the last videopoems that Marc plans to make for a while. He told me he’s taking a year off from filmmaking to concentrate on other things—especially his music. Here’s hoping that when he does go back to making poetry films, it will be with new energy and fresh perspectives on the genre. His influence over the international videopoem and poetry film scene so far has been enormous.

For what it’s worth, I’ve added this and the videos I shared yesterday to the Plummer’s Hollow Poet channel on Vimeo, which is probably the best place to browse videos made with my own poems (since I don’t share those at my site Moving Poems).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The conversation continues: two videopoems

This entry is part 29 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

Back in 2011 and 2012, Rachel Rawlins and I had a public dialogue in poems and photos between this blog and hers. Usually I would write a poem, and she would respond with a photo that commented on the text in some way. We called it Conversari. Recently two new videopoems have extended this exercise in ekphrastic call-and-response.

Back on February 27, the Saturday after my 50th birthday, Rachel and a bunch of other friends surprised me with a videopoetry-themed party in the upstairs room of a nearby pub in London. Our friends Marc Neys and Katrijn Clemer came over from Belgium for the weekend, and Marc—AKA Swoon—acted as VJ at the party with a whole program of videopoems by different masters of the art, including two new ones of his own using texts I’d written. One of them adapted the poem “Hit the Lights” from the Conversari series, with a voiceover contributed by Rachel, which significantly changed how I heard the poem. (I didn’t even recognize it as my own at first, which is always a pleasure.) Marc incorporated some great footage of brown bears, a choice which gains in significance as the film proceeds. It was a terrific videopoem all around, I thought:

Watch on Vimeo.

On my birthday itself, we had gone to the old resort town of Southwold on the East Anglian coast, and were blessed with unseasonably warm and mild weather. We stayed in a grand old hotel associated with Adnams brewery, one of my favorite British brewers. I’ve shared some of my still photos from that trip, but I also shot some video footage, including a couple of great, unscripted moments from Rachel, one in our hotel room and one on the beach. The other day I finally thought of a way to use it, tweaking another poem from the Conversari series (mainly adding a couple of lines to make a better fit with the imagery). Here’s the result:

Watch on Vimeo.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Filming the filmmaker

Those who enjoyed my photo-essay on Belgium from last summer might be interested in another by-product of that visit which I’ve just gotten around to finishing. Google says it’s not a good idea to re-blog full posts, so I’ll send you to the Moving Poems Forum: “Marc Neys in front of the camera: The Swoon interviews.” Despite my dodgy video and audio recording techniques, I think you’ll be inspired by Marc’s creative ethos. He’s the film-making embodiment of Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Make it new!”