~ January 2012 ~
New Year Philosophy #5 by Inua Ellams
Art direction and animation by Jonathan Mckee for Smile for London. Inua Ellams is a word and graphic artist from Nigeria.
Flames by Billy Collins
A new film by Brandon Dziokonski blends animation with recycled footage from old Smokey the Bear public service anouncements.
Videopoems sought for the Shanghai Tunnels Project
A new international poetry festival is in the works. Entries are due by February 25.
With screening events to be held during March 2012 in both Portland, Oregon and Shanghai, China, this festival will celebrate the art of video poetry—the mix of verse and video into a creative form all its own.
Clikc through for the details and guidelines.
Mile End Pugatorio by Martin Doyle
Poet Martin Doyle and filmmaker Guy Sherwin collaborated on this 1991 film-poem, produced (so the credits inform us) for the Arts Council of Great Britain and BBC 2’s The Late Show, and uploaded to YouTube for Luxonline, “the single most extensive publicly available resource devoted to British film and video artists.”
Delikatnie mnie odepchnąłeś całą… (You gently pushed all of me away…) by Bozena Urszula Malinowska
http://vimeo.com/35127990
You said…
—I do not want you
And you said
—leave
You said quietly
—through the fog
and so (it seemed) calmly
timidly
gently pushed all of me
away…
Another video by Marcin Konrad Malinowski for a poem by his deceased mother, part of his Dwa Nieba (“Two Heavens”) project:
It’s mostly inspired by the work of Bozena Urszula Malinowska, my mother, who left a substantial collection of poems. Whether or not it strengthens them, interpretation gives them new meaning because in poetry, we find ourselves. Videopoetry is a way to share these poems with the world, and also gives me the opportunity to respond to them.
(Rendered with the help of Google Translate)
I like the extreme minimalism in this one.
I Accelerate by Musa Okwonga
According to a bio at The Independent,
Musa Okwonga is a football writer, poet and musician of Ugandan descent. In 2008 his first football book, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He is one half of The King’s Will, an electronica outfit that blends poetry, music, and animated videos.
Various “poetry in motion” projects on buses, trains and subways have been a staple of public poetry campaigns in cities around the world since at least the 1980s. Smile for London is taking this a step further by bringing poetry animation to the tube. The above animation by Amy Thornley and Louise Lawlor (Collective of two) is one example of what Underground riders will see, though I gather it will be shown without audio accompaniment. Let me paste in the text from the Smile for London website:
Our Mission is to bring the talent, creativity and culture of London to the digital screens on the Underground.
We LOVE London. That’s why we’re turning the cross track projection screens on the London Underground into a digital playground by exhibiting moving image by the best emerging and established artists around. Our mission is to unleash these creative minds to explore the medium of silent digital film with the aim of engaging, uplifting and inspiring commuters.
Following the great support and feedback from our pilot exhibition in 2011, we’re back to proudly present Word in Motion, our upcoming exhibition that blends the world of literature with the world of art.
A number of this year’s animations have been popping up on Vimeo. I’ll share some more of them here in the weeks to come.
Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith
http://vimeo.com/35205909
Video and reading by Nic S. for her site Pizzicati of Hosanna. Though sometimes I don’t quite share Nic’s enthusiasm for outer-space imagery, I thought it really worked here.
Tom Konyves on the making of a videopoetry manifesto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7WMAVnwZSk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5y8RQUSdoY
Tom’s presentation at Visible Verse Festival 2011, held at the Cinémathèque Pacifique in Vancouver, November 4-5, 2011. Do set aside half an hour to watch this.
We’re living at an amazing point in time as far as this particular genre [videopoetry] is concerned. It is so new. It can make you feel like you’re living in the 1920s, when the great art revolutions were taking place.
As many regular visitors to this site are probably aware, Tom Konyves coined the term “videopoetry” back in the 1970s and has played a strong role in shaping its conception, at least among avant-garde poets. It’s not necessary to have first read his new videopoetry manifesto, but this certainly helps to introduce and contextualize it.
You don’t have to be an avant-garde poet to appreciate Tom’s points about, for example, the subversion of narrative expectations or the importance of poetic juxtaposition in a videopoem. But what’s especially appealing about this talk to me is what it reveals about Tom’s careful and methodical thought process, his essential generosity and his openness to opinions contrary to his own — qualities not normally associated with authors of manifestos, as he acknowledges:
In writing a manifesto, you tend to be very polemic, you tend to say that this is the only way to look at works, but I came across this quote from genre theorist Richard Cole, who wrote: “The phrase ‘tyranny of genre’ is normally taken to signify how generic structures constrain individual creativity. If genre functions as a taxonomic classification system, it could constrain individual creativity.” So I was concerned about that, that what I had to say about videopoetry may have that kind of effect.
Watch the talk, and then check out the manifesto on Issuu. Also, the earlier Poem Film Manifesto by Ian Cottage, which Tom mentions around 12:50 in Part 1 above, may be read at Cottage’s blog.
Ochtend (Dawning) by Yahia Lababidi
Swoon re-edited a video he originally posted eight months ago, making it shorter, more visually appealing and I think more effective in the process. I’m not sure why I didn’t share the original, but I love this videopoem now. The poem was written in English by the Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, and has been translated into Dutch by Katelijne De Vuyst for the soundrack. Swoon and his wife Arlekeno Anselmo, who reads the translation, are Belgian. This is perhaps an extreme example of a widespread tendency I’ve noticed in the online videopoetry community to ignore national boundaries and strive to overcome linguistic ones, as well — facilitated, I would argue, by the change in focus from written text to audio and visual media. We are no longer quite so locked into our separate linguistic and cultural rooms.
