Archive for the ‘Audio/Video’ Category

If you search for “BOA Editions” on YouTube you’ll come across all sorts of cool videos of our authors reading at different venues. But now BOA has our very own YouTube Channel – and we’re about to start packing it with some high quality literary viewing!

Our first offering is from BOA’s “Poetry is Jazz” event, held at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center on June 16th 2010, featuring BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty and the ABC quartet. This video (I really want to call it a documentary because it’s certainly more than just a straightforward videotaping) was done by Icon Creative. We give special thanks to Icon’s president Tim Wainwright. Also a special shout-out to Steve Smock who created a painting during this event which he subsequently donated for auction at our annual Dine & Rhyme last month. In subsequent segments, you’ll see time lapse video of Steve creating the painting and a great shot of the final product.

The Poetry Is Jazz video is now broken into a dozen sections of 5-8 minutes each. We will be adding new segments to our YouTube channel throughout October and by the end of the month, the whole thing will be posted.

Happy Viewing!

Anne Germanacos. BOA fiction author.

This link takes you to a beautifully clear video of Anne Germanacos reading from her new story collection, In the Time of the Girls. The reading took place on October 5th, 2010 at the Simon Pearce Gallery in Quechee, Vermont.

You do have to download the video to watch it, but I highly recommend doing it. There are so many grainy, poor sounding author readings online – it’s a treat to watch one with real production value and the fiction is, of course, knock out. (BTW, all you profs and teachers, I bet your students would love this too!)

[Anne Germanacos Reads from In the Time of the Girls]

The Write Question is an NPR show that, ”explores the world of writing and publishing in the Western United States.” Poulin Prize-winning poet Keetje Kuipers appears on the show today to talk about (and read from) her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, and the writing life.

Listen to the show here: [Keetje Kuipers on the Writing Life]

Here’s the program’s introduction to the feature:

Keetje Kuipers has a unique way of creating poetry: she walks and puts words to the rhythms of her strides. Once in a while, if a poem gets too long, she’ll grab an advertisement out of someone’s mailbox and a pencil from a laundromat so she can scribble the thing down. During this program Kuipers talks about her writing and travel experiences, and she reads a few poems from her first collection of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth.

Kuipers teaches writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula.

BOA Poets: Dan Albergotti, Cecilia Woloch, and Keetje Kuipers

Sometimes technology actually makes things harder. You send the wrong email to the wrong email list and cause mass confusion. Or else a spambot does that for you about, say, 956 times, and everyone on the list emails each other to say how upset they are, thus exponentially increasing the amount of spam everyone receives. Or maybe you forget your passcode because you have 89 of them that control every aspect of your life. Or maybe you get dumped by your sweetheart via Twitter.  Oh the (lack of) humanity! 

But then again, sometimes technology is very very cool. Say a book comes out by an author who you love, but you live 3,000 miles away… or just down the block from them, but you’re completely tied up with raising a family and/or flock of sheep… or the same goes for the author, and they’re not able to get out and promote their book at your local bookstore… Either way, the result is the same. You wish you could hear that author discuss their book and read choice passages, but it just isn’t going to happen.

That’s where the “cool” part of technology comes in!

Witness BOA author Craig Morgan Teicher and the “Virtual Book Tour” for his new collection, Cradle Book: Stories and Fables.  Craig would love to read for you – wherever you are. He really would. But he just can’t do that. It wouldn’t be physically possible. He may not even know your address. So, instead, he uses the miracle of technology to beam himself right into your computer where he can share stories and chit-chat with you in the comfort of your own favorite free wi-fi zone.

Here’s how Craig describes the situation:

“Welcome to my virtual book tour!  I wasn’t able to embark on an actual book tour to promote my new collection of stories and fables, Cradle Book, just published by BOA Editions (please buy it–please, please, in print or as a Kindle E-book), so I decided I’d stage this little virtual tour, reading a few fables from various places around my house.  Here’s the first stop–my favorite chair!  Each video features one fable.  Thanks for watching!”

So why are you still reading this blog post? Go ahead and check out Craig’s Virtual Book Tour below!

[Craig Morgan Teicher's "Virtual Book Tour"]

Painter Steve Smock with BOA Editor Peter Conners and BOA Development Director Melissa Hall

Q: What’s more fun than watching an artist create a painting in two hours flat?

A: Watching it speeded-up to forty seconds flat with time lapse video!

Click the below link to check out Steve Smock painting during BOA’s “Poetry Is Jazz” event on June 15, 2010. This painting will be auctioned off at BOA’s annual Dine & Rhyme celebration on October 16th, 2010. It is signed by the artist and also inscribed with “BOA” and the date it was created.

[Smock Speed Painting]

Ah yes, it’s true, kids do say the darndest things. But in the hands of poet Naomi Shihab Nye, those “darndest things” turn into poetic observations with the power to remind our adult minds of the pure wonder – and insight - that children possess. 

Here is Naomi reading her poem “One Boy Told Me” which is a “found poem” of insights given to her by her son as he grew up. The recording is from The Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry Everywhere” video series and the reading is from the Dodge Poetry Festival.

BOA is proud to have published Naomi’s collections, Red Suitcase,  Fuel,  and, You & Yours. We are also thrilled to say that we will be publishing Naomi’s next collection, Transfer, in September 2011.

Enjoy the poem – and the dynamic reading by Naomi Shihab Nye!

Click [Here] to watch Naomi Shihab Nye Reading “One Boy Told Me”

David Gura from NPR’s “All Things Considered” put together a beautiful tribute to Lucille that was broadcasted last weekend. The piece begins:

“As a girl growing up in the 1940s on Lake Erie, Lucille Clifton never thought she would become a poet.

“The only poets I ever saw were the portraits that hung on the walls in elementary school in Buffalo, N.Y.,” she said in 1993. “Old, dead white men, with beards, from New England.”

Clifton did not look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman. She was a woman and an African-American, and later, a wife and a mother of six children.

But Clifton did become a poet — and after a long, successful career, she died on Feb. 13 at age 73 from complications from cancer.”

You can listen to the entire broadcast here [NPR Tribute to Lucille Clifton]

Bill Moyers Journal.

The tribute to Lucille by Bill Moyers was one of the most beautiful pieces on a poet I have ever seen. Lucille’s readings are powerful, playful, deadly serious, and passionate. Moyers eloquently described the impact of her work and the combination of interviews, readings, and information about Lucille’s career presented a well-rounded portrait of the poet.

In his introduction to the piece, Moyer’s said, “The long arc of morality that bends toward justice leads not only through the courthouse and the statehouse but out on the streets and in the pages of poetry and prose. Luckily for the rest of us, there are writers who in words both beautiful and bold can express rage at injustice. But they don’t stop there, they help us experience sorrow and joy through an intimate knowledge of our tempestuous human nature. We lost one of those gifted people the other day- one of our most popular poets, my friend, Lucille Clifton.”

You can watch the entire tribute here: [Bill Moyers Tribute to Lucille Clifton]

The Rooster's Wife, poems (and cover art) by Russell Edson

In 2005, we were thrilled to publish The Rooster’s Wife by prose poet master Russell Edson. Russell was at the forefront of the emergence of prose poetry in America in the early 60s and he continues to produce his trademark hilarious, surreal, and poignant poems. What many people don’t know is that Russell’s father was a cartoonist and that cartooning had a strong influence on his style. Russell is also a visual artist himself – in fact, his artwork graces the cover of The Rooster’s Wife.

Given his influences and style, it was a stroke of brilliance on the part of the Poetry Foundation to create an animated adaptation of a poem by Russell Edson. The poem they used is “Let Us Consider” from The Rooster’s Wife. The piece was animated and designed by Chris Lightbody.

You can watch the animation here ["Let Us Consider" animated poem]

Here is the text of the poem:

“Let Us Consider”

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his

sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;

or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping

her shadow off a wall….

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’

tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips

in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given

to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which

saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in vanity.

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,

whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man

who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for

dessert served himself a chilled fedora.

Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Poet.

The “Poetry Everywhere” series features short poetry films of poets reading their own work, animated interpretations of much-loved poems, and celebrities reading personal favorites. The videos are produced by WGBH and David Grubin Productions, filmmaker Leita Luchetti, and student filmmakers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s docUWM media center. They are housed online at the Poetry Foundation’s website: www.poetryfoundation.org

Here’s a wonderful short film featuring BOA poet Naomi Shihab Nye and highlighting her poem “One Boy Told Me”. Watch the film here:

[Naomi Shihab Nye Video]