We’re back!
My apologies for the outage over the past 24 hours. Moving Poems is now on a new server, where I hope things will be a little faster and more dependable than on the old server (where the rest of my sites still reside, for now).
Tagged: housekeeping RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Dave Bonta
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Dave Bonta
I’ve just installed a caching plugin at the main Moving Poems site to try to reduce CPU spikes at the server (we’re on a typical, cheap shared webhost). Please let me know if you run into any problems viewing or using the site.
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Dave Bonta
New directories: poetry film festivals, and free-to-use audio and video
I’ve just posted two new pages of resources for videopoem and poetry-film makers.
The Poetry film festival list includes websites and, where available, Facebook pages for regularly occurring poetry film festivals. Left off the list, at least for now, are all the more general film festivals to which poetry films might be submitted.
Web resources for videopoem makers includes information on determining what’s free to use, as well as links to free and Creative Commons-licensed film and video, spoken word, sound and music collections. I also include a link to the software I use for downloading videos from the web, but I welcome other suggestions.
Please use the comments here or at the respective pages to alert me about other links I should include. I would also encourage people who regularly use Creative Commons-licensed material to follow the Golden Rule and apply a “copyleft” license to your own work, as well. (I don’t always remember to do this myself, but I should.)
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Dave Bonta
What’s up with the Moving Poems newsletter?
If you’ve signed up for the weekly email list advertised in the sidebar, you may be wondering why you haven’t gotten anything the last two weeks. I was too. All I can determine is that the blended RSS feed created by Mail Chimp from the two Moving Poems feeds (forum and main site) stopped working. So I’ve created a new blended feed with Yahoo Pipes and substituted that. We’ll see if it works. If not, I’ll switch to the tried-and-true RSS-to-email service Feedblitz; I was simply trying to avoid the ads it serves. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up, by the way.
In the process of editing the newsletter at Mail Chimp, I switched the delivery time from Monday to early Saturday morning. It sometimes happens that a video gets taken down or turned private after I share it here, presumably because the uploader never meant to share it with the world in the first place, and is alarmed to discover my post. Thus for example the Neruda video I shared last week is history. The point is that it makes sense to email links to the week’s content early in the weekend to maximize the chances that all the videos are still in fact online.
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Dave Bonta
Nominations of exemplary videopoems wanted for a new section of the site
I’ve now shared close to 500 videos on Moving Poems, more than 400 of them in the Video Poems category. It occurs to me that the site would be a lot more useful to students, poets and filmmakers if I created a new, top-level page to display a small number of exemplary videopoems (filmpoems, cinepoems — I’m not hung up on the terminology). Of course I have my own ideas of what should go on this page, but I’d really like input from people who know the genre well. Please email me: bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com with suggestions of videos to include, or leave a link in the comments. Obviously they have to be embeddable, if you’re thinking of things I haven’t yet posted. (And please don’t send me links to your own work. Who among us is capable of being truly objective about the work of our own hands?)
I’m thinking no more than 20 videos, illustrating a range of styles, and including inspired amateurs with cheaper equipment and software as well as those with professional-level tools and experience. I wouldn’t want them all to be so technically perfect that neophytes would be discouraged from getting into it, but I also would like to show some examples of what ace filmmakers have done in the genre so people already making videopoems will have something to aspire to.
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Dave Bonta
I just updated this site (along with the main Moving Poems site) to WordPress 3.0. As soon as I did so, a new update of this theme became available, so I updated to that as well. Let me know if you notice anything funny.
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Dave Bonta
Great to see all the discussion here this morning (well, afternoon for some of you). Minor housekeeping note: You’ll probably notice I just switched the default setting to show rather than hide comment threads. Though this might make the site initially more confusing to navigate for first-time visitors until they discover the global toggle button, I found I was getting annoyed by the fact that I had to toggle-on comments even on single-post views, and decided it would make for better usability if comment links in the sidebar worked by default. If you prefer things the way they were, though, let me know — I’m not wedded to this.
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Viral Verse
Ya I like the toggle-on setting. Thanks Dave! And also – great forum!! So glad you started this.
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Tom Konyves
Ditto.
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Dave Bonta
Self-registration off
An obvious spammer registered this morning, so unfortunately I’ve had to turn off self-registration already. I’ve deleted that contributor, plus one other I wasn’t sure of — if you are that other person, and you’re not in fact a spammer, please accept my apologies and email me to have your status reinstated. For anyone else who who would like to join — and the more, the merrier! — please do email me as well: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com. (Contact pages are more hassle than they’re worth, in my experience.)
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Dave
(By the way, if anyone caught my post about the Sort by Comments plugin, I’m afraid on further testing it did turn out be buggy. Oh well. I’ll keep my eye on it, in case it gets updated to work properly with this theme at some point.)
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Tom Konyves, and 
Dave 11:19 am on February 12, 2011 Permalink |
I was thinking Nicole Prowell’s “The River of Bees” might be a good example of the non-literal videopoem with text in the soundtrack: