~ September 2014 ~

Situation 5 by Claudia Rankine

On 30 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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One of a series of “Situation” videos created by Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine in collaboration with her husband, the photographer John Lucas, for Rankine’s book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).

Note that Rankine refers to the Situation series as “video essays” on her website. But as she said in a 2009 interview at Poets.org, she thinks

less in terms of genre and just in terms of writing in general. My background, my education, has been in poetry, so I feel that many of the layers in whatever I’m doing are coming out of a world of allusions that are located in poets. So, no matter what I’m working on, I like to call it poetic in some way, because the poets that I’ve read and that I love, their work tends to infuse it.

In a more recent conversation with Lauren Berlant at BOMB Magazine, Rankine discusses her collaboration with Lucas on the Situation videos.

The scripts in chapter six seemed necessary to Citizen because one of the questions I often hear is “How did that happen?” as it relates to mind-numbing moments of injustice—the aftermath of Katrina, for example, or juries letting supremacists off with a slap on the wrist for killing black men. It seems obvious, but I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions that indicate the lack of recognition of the black body as a body to the creation and enforcement of laws. Everyone is cool with seeing micro-aggressions as misunderstandings until the same misunderstood person ends up on a jury or running national response teams after a hurricane.

The decision to exist within the events of the “Situation videos” came about because the use of video manipulation by John Lucas allowed me to slow down and enter the event, in moments, as if I were there in real time rather than as a spectator considering it in retrospect. As a writer working with someone with a different skill set, I was given access to a kind of seeing that is highly developed in the visual artist, and that I don’t rely on as intuitively. My search for meaning—“What do you think that means?”—is often countered with a “Did you see that?” from John. That kind of close looking, the ability to freeze the frame, challenges the language of the script to meet the moment literally second by second—in the Zidane World Cup piece, for example—to know as the moment knows, and not from outside. The indwelling of those Situation pieces becomes a performance of switching your body out with the body in the frame and moving methodically through pathways of thought and positionings.

The photographer Jeff Wall writes about moving into moments of eroding freedoms. He describes racism as “determined by social totality” that “has to come out of an individual body.” In his photographs he brings his lens to existing “unfreedoms.” I am interested in his decision to reenact, to stage moments that happen too fast for the camera to capture. On some level he can’t let what he saw go: “Did you see that?”

The difficult thing about this “immanence” or indwelling is that it holds and prolongs the violence of supremacist spectacle in a body and shuts it down in other participatory ways. The reality, moment, narrative, or photo locks down its players and gets read as a single gesture.

Read the rest.

One Stop by Robert Peake

On 29 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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We often, perhaps inevitably, envision history unfolding as a sort of cartoon, and our perceptions of combat these days are liable to be colored by video gaming. This new film-poem by Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier turns that on its head, with live-action footage of World War II glimpsed from a present-day machinima world, through the windows of a moving train. See Peake’s blog for the text of the poem. He adds:

Our recent film-poem collaboration “One Stop” was nominated for best music/sound at Liberated Words III in Bristol, where it premiered. The original soundtrack was composed and performed by Valerie Kampmeier. The film commemorates the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. […]

I sourced archival colour footage of WWII, and composited this into an animation that I created using Blender 3D. I recorded journeys on the tube with an X1 Zoom, and mixed this under Valerie’s music and my voice reading the poem.

There’s a decade-long tradition of using machinima in cinepoetry (the term usually preferred by filmmakers in that tradition), but it’s not well represented here at Moving Poems because I don’t often find the results terribly compelling. I’m not sure how much Peake was influenced by that tradition, but his use of machinima here was ingenious, I thought. Kudos also for finding a new twist on the footage-from-a-moving-train motif so prevalent in poetry films.

Incidentally, there’s a lovely interview with Robert Peake at Geosi Reads conducted by Ghanaian blogger Geosi Gyasi. In one exchange, Peake talks about the Transatlantic Poetry on Air series of live video readings he coordinates. Then he reflects on technology and poetry in general:

Geosi Gyasi: As a technology consultant, do you think technology has influenced poets and poetry in any particular way?

Robert Peake: I think it has influenced the audience for poetry by shortening our attention spans, and I think poetry is always influenced by its audiences. That said, technology may also be the saving grace of contemporary poetry, because even as the fan base has dwindled since the advent of rock-n-roll, the ability of poets and poetry-lovers to connect and engage all over the world has expanded. The global audience for poetry today is therefore many times the size of what many poets enjoyed as a regional audience one hundred years ago. I think it is therefore a kind of “Invisible Golden Age” for poetry–with more availability than ever, despite the perception of scarcity.

Read the rest.

The Poetry Storehouse First Anniversary Contest

On 28 September, 2014 by Nic S. with 0 Comments - calls for work, contests

Poetry Storehouse logo(Reblogged from The Poetry Storehouse.)

The Poetry Storehouse opened its doors on October 15, 2013 and since then has amassed a fabulous collection of poems and audio-visual remixes based on those poems, thanks to a more than 100-strong (and growing) community of poets, remixers and readers.

Creative energy is never created from scratch, nor does it ever die, but continually morphs from form to form as each of us is inspired by what has gone before us and in turn inspires what comes after us. Unique for its three categories of contributors – poets, remixers and readers – who engage with each others’ work with always interesting and frequently stunning results, the Storehouse embodies that continual passing on of the creative baton.

Join us in celebrating these awesome community achievements by participating in the Poetry Storehouse First Anniversary Contest as either a remixer or a poet, details below. Deadline for all contest submissions is midnight EST on Sunday October 19, 2014.


FOR REMIXERS
Create a remix (a video remix, an art collage, a soundscape, a sound collage, or surprise us) in response to any Storehouse poem currently up at the site. All contest remixes must be created on or after September 22, 2014. If you would like a reading by a specific Storehouse reader for the poem you select, email nic_sebastian at hotmail dot com and we will see what we can do for you.

Audio-video judges – Marc Neys (aka Swoon), Erica Goss and Dave Bonta
Art judge – Peter Ciccariello

The winning remix, depending on its format, will be featured by The Poetry Storehouse, Moving Poems and The Third Form.

Contest submissions – please email nic_sebastian at hotmail dot com with a link to your submission or to discuss the best format for your submission.


FOR POETS
Write a poem in response to one of these three videos by Storehouse remixers:

Poetry judge – Jessica Piazza

Our judge, working with a panel of screeners, will select one poem for each of the three videos and all three clips will be finished by the original film-maker to incorporate the selected poems. The three finished clips and poems will be showcased both at The Poetry Storehouse and by our contest collaboration partner, Menacing Hedge.

Contest submissions – please use our submissions manager and submit in the ‘Poetry Storehouse 1st Anniversary Contest‘ category.

Video clip by Eduardo Yagüe
http://vimeo.com/106044618
back to video list

Video clip by Marc Neys

back to video list

Video clip by Lori Ersolmaz

back to video list

Poetry film festival news: Ó Bhéal releases shortlist; TARP plans 24-hour-long festival

On 27 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - contests, festivals and other screening events

O Bheal 2014 competition logoThere was poetry film festival news out of Ireland and Lithuania this week. Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, due to be screened on October 18-19 in Cork, released its shortlist.

The competition shortlist of thirty films which follows, will be screened in two parts, at the Smurfit Theatre in The Firkin Crane, Cork. These have been chosen from over eighty submissions of poetry films completed in the last two years, from twelve countries – Ireland, England, Canada, USA, Ukraine, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Lebanon, Isle of Man and Macedonia/Croatia. The Ó Bhéal panel of judges will select one overall winner, who will receive the IndieCork festival award for best poetry film, at the awards ceremony. This year’s judges are Paul Casey, Stephen O’Riordan, Rosie O’Regan and Rab Urquhart.

And a post in English at the TARP website outlines the programme for this year’s festival.

Every year the audiovisual poetry festival TARP challenges itself and the audience – this year they will present a unique format of an event. Once the festival lasted for a month and visited the bigger cities in Lithuania, the only festival for interdisciplinary poetry will last for twenty four hours this year – from 9 am on 11 October until the same hour on 12 October in various places in the capital city.

TARP logoThe programme includes a preview of the 2014 ZEBRA festival due to take place in Berlin a week later, hosted by ZEBRA director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, as well as the opening of an international exhibition of graphic type animation, concerts, performances and more — check it out. It’s full of ideas that other festival planners might benefit from.

Organizers of the audiovisual poetry festival TARP have the right to surprise. Maybe the day has twenty five hours, maybe not read but performed text can have a completely different meaning.

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Your Memory is My Freedom by Marie Silkeberg

On 26 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Another innovative, harrowing videopoetry collaboration between Palestinian-Syrian poet Ghayath Almadhoun and Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg. This time the text and reading are Silkeberg’s, but they are both credited with the editing (“montage”) and camera work. Agneta Falk-Hirschman supplied the English translation. The music was “stolen from the Internet,” according to the credits, and the footage of the Syrian revolution is also “from the Internet.”

A Day in Ohio by James Reiss

On 25 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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A one-minute videopoem that still somehow manages to seem very spacious. It’s the work of filmmaker Lori H. Ersolmaz, reader Michael Dickes, and poet James Reiss. The poem was first published in Esquire, and Dickes and Ersolmaz found it at The Poetry Storehouse.

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Jubilee by Traci Brimhall

On 24 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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A Moving Poems original, made with a text from The Poetry Storehouse, my own reading, some gorgeous free footage by Jeff at Beachfront B-Roll, and Creative Commons-licensed music by SonicSpiral*Selections s on SoundCloud. I must admit that this was a case of my falling in love with the footage first and then hunting for a poem to fit it (and the Poetry Storehouse archives are large enough now for that to work). But Traci Brimhall is a first-rate poet, and I’m very pleased I was able to work with one of her poems. Thanks also to Poets & Writers for sharing it on their video blog last week.

Like the other videopoems I’ve made lately, this has closed captioning, which can be turned on via the button on the bottom right. To see how Brimhall arranged it on the page, though, please refer to her page at the Storehouse.

My Geology by Sheila Packa

On 23 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A text from Sheila Packa’s new book Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range.

These poems are about the Iron Range in Minnesota, the Vermilion Trail, and they are stories of travel and derailment about mining, radical politics, unionizing, accordion music and strong women. The book brings together history, geology and the community of people with iron in their veins.

Video artist and cellist Kathy McTavish, Packa’s regular collaborator, describes this as “a screen recording of a database driven web film,” and Packa talks about how that intersects with her writing style in a post at her blog:

I strive to re-create the flows of the northeastern Minnesota landscape, and I borrow metaphors that express the pattern of change in individual stories and narrative poems: the erosions, floods, migrations, lightning strikes, industrialization, excavation, mining, roads, and harbors. Night Train Red Dust will become part of a new transmedia media project, and I can’t wait to get started! […]

My Geology is a poem that taught me how powerful is our landscape. I placed it first in my book, Night Train Red Dust. The places where we walk enter into us; in my case, as a child, I walked across the vein of iron and taconite on the Iron Range. There is an ASCII art image behind the video in My Geology that rotates on a near/far axis, evoking a map or contract or a train car. In this section, numbers were entered into the input box, and they cascade like taconite down a chute into the hold of a freighter. […] The music used found sound (a soprano sax, both notes and the musician blowing air through the instrument) and cello by Kathy McTavish.

I’ve also been encountering the text incrementally in a dedicated Twitter feed, @nighttrainred — another example of Packa and McTavish’s interest in innovative technological reproductions of “flows.”

To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane

On 22 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is “Proem,” the famous introduction to Hart Crane’s book-length poem The Bridge. The poem has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, committed to memory before I even knew what half of the words meant. What great nostalgic pleasure, then, to watch this animated version by Suzie Hanna with a reading by Tennessee Williams in the soundtrack! I think this is an excellent example of how animators can get away with something that directors of live-action poetry films usually cannot: direct illustration of a text. Well, in part that’s because there’s rarely anything “direct” about good animation, which is almost by definition an order of magnitude more abstract than a live-action illustration would be. In addition, poems like this one, where the language is intensely rich and far from the vernacular, can really benefit from a visual connection to the narrative thread (to the extent that there is one). Not every casual consumer of poetry is as comfortable with bafflement as are those lucky few of us that grew up with difficult poems, and so I think a good animation can get people to lower their guard.

At any rate, here’s what that the folks from Liberated Words posted at Vimeo about the animator:

Professor Suzie Hanna has been teaching in Higher Education for over two decades, specialising in the subject areas of animation and sound design. During this time she has developed international academic and industry networks, as well as maintaining her own creative practice. She engages in diverse collaborations with other artists, performers and academics to create original films.

Her current research includes the creation of animation from documentary material, and the study of parallels in animation, poetry and sound design. Suzie also designs and animates commissioned innovative theatrical and site specific animation ranging in scale from puppet theatre to architectural projection. She presents papers at international symposia and industry seminars as well as contributing to academic journals and other publications.

The soundtrack is by Tom Simmons, and led to the film taking 1st Prize for Best Music/Sound at Liberated Words III, judged by Rich Ferguson and Mark Wilkinson. It also won 2nd Prize for Best Editing. In a post at a closed group on Facebook, Sarah Tremlett quotes Ferguson and Wilkinson:

We found the visual treatment in Proem to be arresting and original; clear in its intentions and unified in its design as it evolved visually throughout the piece. A balanced and elegant pairing of spoken words and moving pictures.

Hanna’s description from her own upload of the film to Vimeo is also worth quoting:

Suzie Hanna animated the film using hand cut stencils imitating some graphic aspects of contemporaneous 1920s New York artists who were in Hart Crane’s coterie, such as Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley. She also referenced Vorticism to capture vertiginous aspects of the verse. The voice of Tennessee Williams, who was an ardent admirer of Crane, is taken from a 1960 recording. Tom Simmons has built this into a resonant dramatic soundscape which interprets the materiality of the bridge, the surrounding land and waterscape and the ‘prayerful’ qualities of the Proem. He embeds sonic references to Hart Crane’s ‘shamanic process’ in which the poet played records on his Victrola, including Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, loudly and repeatedly, whilst drinking heavily and typing phrases in manic bursts.

Hanna, Simmons, and producer Sally Bayley all teach at British universities, Hanna at Norwich University of the Arts, which features the film on its website and adds some information in a news story:

The work is part of an ongoing collaboration with Dr Sally Bayley of the University of Oxford and Tom Simmons of the Royal College of Art researching into representation of poetic metaphor. […]

Proem has been selected for screenings at the Laugharne Castle Poetry and Film Festival Wales, the Filmpoem Festival in Antwerp, Belgium and the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival and conference in Bristol. In March Professor Hanna and Dr Bayley gave a masterclass titled ‘Poetry in the Making’ at the Oxford Literary Festival.

An article on ‘Thinking Metaphorically and Allegorically: A Conversation between the fields of Poetry, Animation and Sound’ by Professor Hanna, Tom Simmons and Dr Bayley was published in 2013 in the Journal of American Studies, and a further installment has been commissioned for publication in 2014.

The film is also due to be screened at Visible Verse in Vancouver next month.

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Liberated Words offers unprecedented online access to the content of its festival

On 21 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events

Liberated Words logoPoetry film festivals vary tremendously in their web presence, some little more than a Facebook page or a mention on the website of a related organization. Given that many are run by just one or two over-worked volunteers, it’s not surprising that putting content on the web would take a back seat to the immense logistical challenges of soliciting and judging submissions and planning the actual, meat-space festival. But for those with paid staff, interns, and/or crazy people who never sleep, bigger things are possible. I’m not sure whether that characterization applies precisely to the organizers of the Bristol, UK-based Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival, which just wrapped up its third annual event this weekend, but they are definitely raising the bar on how poetry film festivals share information and content.

First, information. For the second year in a row, Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English have produced a lengthy (58-page), full-color brochure and published it online via Issuu. (See also the 2013 brochure.) Illustrated by stills from the films and photos of some of the participants, the brochures contain detailed descriptions of each film and the people who made it — in many cases, information not found elsewhere in the web, to my knowledge (at least, not in English). So I learned some new things even about films and filmmakers I was already familiar with, to say nothing about work I hadn’t seen yet. This year’s brochure also includes statements from the organizers of four other, cooperating festivals: TARP, Zebra, Visible Verse, and VideoBardo. I especially appreciated VideoBardo organizer Javier Robledo’s essay (pp. 32-34), a wide-ranging exploration of where poetry film fits in the history of human use of written and spoken language, moving images, and audiovisual media.

As for the films, 21 of them have now been uploaded to the Liberated Words account on Vimeo. I’m not sure why they switched from YouTube, where the 2013 festival films are archived — possibly because so many professional filmmakers prefer Vimeo. But in any case, I applaud their decision to upload their own copies to the web rather than simply organize the various creators’ uploads into a channel or album. This way, their archives are secured against videos going M.I.A. (in contrast to the Moving Poems archives, as I was just complaining yesterday). Presuming the festival continues for a number of years, this online video library should become a very valuable resource indeed — especially given all the information about the films available in the brochures.

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2014 Visible Verse program

On 20 September, 2014 by Heather Haley with 2 Comments - festivals and other screening events

Ladies & Gentlemen! Announcing the 2014 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL program:

  • On a Prophet | David Richardson/Kathleen Roberts. Spencer, Indiana 2014.
  • Indefinite Animals | Martha McCollough. Boston, MA 2014.
  • In The Turning | Sarah Tremlett. Bath, England 2014.
  • Genocide Is My Man United | Kevin Barrington. Dublin, Ireland 2014
  • Proxy Bounce | Ian Keteku. Toronto, ON 2014
  • Out of the Forest-Sleight of Tree | J.P. Sipilä. Helsinki, Finland 2014.
  • words/birds | vvitalny. Brooklyn, NY 2012.
  • PROEM to Brooklyn Bridge | Suzie Hanna/Hart Crane. Norwich, UK 2013.
  • Again and Again | Igor Andreevski. Amsterdam, Netherlands 2014.
  • 1962 | Diana Taylor/Robin Kidson. Bristol, UK 2013
  • The Killing | Swoon/Howie Good. Mechelen, Belgium 2013.
  • Je tombe | Svitlana Reinish, Elena Semak. Kiev, Ukraine 2014.
  • Penelopiad | Jade Anouka. London, UK 2012.
  • In Hell | Michael Murnau. London, UK 2012.
  • Ella (Her) | Javier Reta. Madrid, Spain 2013.
  • If I Can Sing a Song about Ligatures | Abigail Child. New York, NY 2009.
  • What The Flute Wants to Sing | Karin Hazé/Moe Clark. Haida Gwaii, BC 2013.
  • Reservation | Kevin Barrington. Dublin, Ireland 2014.
  • The Elephant is Contagious | Simon O’Neill/Eabha Rose. Dublin, Ireland 2014.

INTERMISSION

  • Back to You | Karen Mary Berr. Paris, France 2013.
  • Keepsake | Elizabeth Johnston. Montreal, QC 2013.
  • Equus Caballus | H. Paul Moon/Joel Nelson. Elko, Nevada 2013.
  • Embroidered | Andy Bonjour. Steubenville, Ohio 2014.
  • Babel Death Star | Jeff Cruz/Kirk Ramdath. Calgary, AB 2014.
  • Kenneth Patchen | J.R. Phillips. Los Angeles, CA 2009.
  • WALLS | Walter Forsyth/Andrath Whynacht. Dartmouth, Nova Scotia 2013.
  • Florid Psychosis | Othniel Smith/Bill Yarro. Cardiff, Wales 2013.
  • My Dolls | Pete Burkeet/Melissa Barrett. Columbus, Ohio 2014.
  • Aylool MacKenzie’s Convenient Skytrain Deppaneur | Tom Wiebe/Lyle Neff. Vancouver, BC 2014.
  • My Country | Jelena Sinkik/Ralph Stevenson. Maroubra, Australia 2014.
  • America | Sophie LeNeveau/Allen Ginsberg. Jupiter, FL 2012.
  • Late | Keith Sargeant. London, UK 2014.
  • Prism | Jamey Hastings/Price Strobridge. Colorado Springs, CO 2013.
  • Tasting the End | Dean Pasch. Munich, Germany 2014.
  • Deathless Man | Lena Samoylenko. Kiev, Ukraine 2014.
  • Some Trees | Kurtis Hough/John Ashberry. Portland, OR 2014.
  • Marianne | Richard O’ Connor. New York, NY 2014.

7 pm, Sat, Oct. 18 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada

Visible Verse logo

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Of poetry-video links new and old

On 20 September, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events, site news
Vimeo's dead video notice

The haunted forest: Vimeo’s dead video notice

One of the most often neglected tasks in maintaining a website like Moving Poems is keeping the links up-to-date. Link-rot is a constant threat to the usability of resources such as our general links page or our list of web resources for videopoem makers, not to mention the post archives themselves. With the latter, my traditional approach has been to unpublish posts whenever I discover that the embedded video has disappeared from YouTube or Vimeo and I can’t find another copy to swap in. But recently I’ve had a change of heart and decided that from now on I’m going to let such posts stay up, since they do still have documentary value.

Keeping a links page fresh obviously requires regularly adding new links as well, not to mention reassessing links to older sites as they change focus or become less valuable for whatever reason. So there are several new links on the main page to explore, and a couple of things that got bumped.

But the biggest change is a new page for poetry film festivals — the list was just getting too big and unruly for inclusion on the main links page. I’ve split it into two sections, “New and ongoing festivals” and “Inactive and historical festivals.” The latter list doesn’t include every poetry film festival ever, just those that were held at least twice. Again, I think there’s documentary value in preserving such a list. I’ve included a link to George Aguilar’s fascinating account of his involvement with the Poetry Film Festival/Cin(E)-Poetry Festival in San Francisco, which deserves special mention as the world’s first annual poetry film festival, running from 1975 to 1998. The continued popularity of Aguilar’s coinage cin(e)poetry or cinepoetry attests to its influence, especially on college campuses where compilations from the festival were often screened.