~ April 2017 ~
Lament For Graham Parkinson by Karl Parkinson
An intense, affecting videopoem from Irish poets Karl Parkinson (text, voiceover) and Dave Lordan (video), along with musicians Conor O’Connor, Claus Jensen and Charlotte Hamel from The King Mob. Parkinson wrote about the making of the videopoem for The Irish Times. The poem came first, arising from his grief at the death of his nephew Graham from cancer at the age of 21.
Graham was my sister Elaine’s only child, and he grew up living alongside me in the same flat in O’Devaney Gardens, on Dublin’s northside. With him being an only child, and me having no brothers, we formed a very special bond during his short life. After his death, I wanted, as a writer, to create something beautiful and lasting in his memory, and eventually wrote a long elegiac poem about his fight with cancer, and also my own grief for his passing.
He studied the canon, re-reading the great “poem[s] of elegy and mourning, especially from one male on the death of another male.” The resulting poem
was first broadcast on RTÉ’s Arena arts show, on the first anniversary of Graham’s death, and recently published in my collection Butterflies Of A Bad Summer (Salmon Poetry). But I felt that the best way to honour Graham’s memory was to make a video poem, to take it to a larger audience, particularly those in my own community, the Dublin council estates, and inner-city working class, where to be honest poetry books are not big sellers.
[…]
The video draws on new technology and on the history of avant-garde cinema/film, especially modernist experiments of the 1920s and ’30s. It’s a 16-minute long piece in which we tried to push the video-poem tradition at least a small bit in the way of serious artistic expression. We hoped to merge the old poetic tradition of elegy and lament with the new and very exciting medium of indie video art, now open to almost any artist in the western world, at a relatively small expense, compared to what it would have cost 20 years ago. I feel, and hope, that we have done justice to Graham’s life, struggle and memory with something that may have a lasting appeal for others that have been affected by cancer, or any other life-stealing disease, or by the loss of someone young and dear to them.
THESAURUS dot COM by Kassy Lee
Narrative poetry film done right: Kassy Lee‘s quiet, devastating poem, which originally appeared in Apogee Journal, has been turned into a film by Michelle Cheripka for the Visible Poetry Project.
VERSOGRAMAS launches crowdfunding campaign to make a documentary about videopoetry
VERSOGRAMAS is “a transmedia project about videopoetry.” This brainchild of Galician writer and film producer Celia Parra Díaz, with directors Belén Montero and Juan Lesta, involves making the world’s first full-length documentary about videopoetry, but they need additional funds to cover the remaining 20 percent of their budget. So this past week they launched a crowdfunding appeal through Verkami. Here’s the appeal in video form:
Their page on Verkami answers all the obvious questions, such as what they’ll use the money for, when the work is likely to be completed, and which videopoets are included. Here’s the synopsis:
A woman remembers the past and writes some words on a film projected on the wall, while a voice over narrates the origins of videopoetry. She then walks through a broken line, surrounded by a dreamlike, abstract setting. She finds differently shaped and coloured boxes along the way, each one metaphorizing a concept. In the first one she finds fragments of videopoems related to Language. A voice over explains the beginnings of the genre. Then we see interviews of videopoets speaking about the importance of languages in written literature and explaining how they are transmitted via image and sound. Videopoems are screened behind them while they speak. The woman keeps walking and finds other little boxes corresponding to the Body, Love, Solitude, Society, Evil and Change. These are also metaphors of concepts such as: the evolution of videopoetry, the adaptation of written text, graphics and design, the communication with the audience, the place videopoetry takes, its continuous innovation and change, the problems with the definition of the genre and its future perspectives. A journey that provides answers to what videopoetry is.
This is a really exciting project and I think it deserves our full support. In just six days they’re raised €1,610 toward their €6,500 goal, with 34 days remaining, and the most popular pledge level appears to be €55, which gets you the opportunity to contribute a verse on the theme of love for a collective videopoem. What’s not to love? Here’s the link again.
Ó Bhéal director Paul Casey interviewed in Poetry Film Live
Poetry has been choking, gasping, and drowning because of the seventh art. Because of filmmaking.
The last hundred years of filmmaking has turned the world into visually oriented consumers who don’t read books anymore, or mull words over in their head, or allow their imaginations time to have some fun and think and be creative. Poetry films are opening that up to poetry again. It is going to draw a lot more people back to it; it’s going to make people aware of the intrinsic value of poetry. Poetry has rich kernels of immense potential that people are completely unaware of. I think that poetry films are going to do a lot with regards to that.
People are going to realise that because of the flexibility of the filmmaking aspect of it, they can now create completely new animals. People don’t realise it is a unique art form in itself. The fusion creates something else entirely. When that is realised it will become a lot more popular.
That’s Paul Casey, founder and director of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry reading series in Cork, Ireland that also sponsors an annual, international poetry film competition (which will open for submissions again on May 1). Last month, the shortlisted films from Ó Bhéal’s 2016 competion were screened as part of the Belfast Film Festival, and Helen and Chaucer from Poetry Film Live were there to take in the films and interview Paul. The result is worth reading in full. As a highly multilingual poet and a professional filmmaker, Casey’s perspectives on poetry film are extremely valuable. I like that he’s integrated poetry film screenings into the weekly readings, rather than reserving them for special occasions, I like his advice for poets at the end of the interview, and I love his answer to the question “What is a ‘good poetry film’?”
We are looking for the right balance. When you put the two art forms together there is the third thing that happens; you know when it has been achieved. It is difficult to describe.
Certainly what is true for filmmaking is true for poetry film. The first truth for filmmaking is that your foundation is the script. If that is a cracked foundation then the whole building will crumble. So the poem has to have integrity, it has to stand alone, it has to stand up for itself outside the film.
It is possible for a filmmaker to create visual art and for a poet to then interpret it in words, and then to create a poetry film in that way. But the most common place to start is with the poem first.
A lot of effort has been put into the poem. The filmmaker’s responsibility is to have the right kind of respect for the poem and to create a new way into the poem. The original poem ends up becoming more valuable because of the poetry film. You are creating a new dimension, a new way in, a new life for it.
The filmmaker does not usually have a lot of poetic insight. Their insight is in the poetry of the visual, so the collaboration becomes extremely important. If the poet and film maker aren’t the same person then the process of translation from poem to visual interpretation needs to be a collaborative one, so that the filmmaker truly takes on board what is happening in the poem and embodies, or at least has a good understanding of its mechanics. There are a lot of lazy filmmakers.
Go read the rest. And check out all the new posts at Poetry Film Live, which include another interview, with the poet Mab Jones, and six films.
Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf / The wolf fearing the wolf by Stefan Petermann
This stunning German poetry film from poet Stefan Petermann and director Juliane Jaschnow is the Film of the Month at Poetryfilmkanal, where it’s written up (in English) by Marc Neys AKA Swoon. He calls attention to
A poem that seems written for the film rather than the other way around. Unless they came together in the process of the making and collaboration, in which case they did a perfect job reinforcing each other ideas. The poem seems to struggle to comply with the imposed visual frame and rubs frantically against the borders of that frame. Like a caged animal looking for a way out. That struggle makes the poem stronger and gives it a strong sense of urge. A narrative poem full of imagination is visually retranslated in an original way.
The Shrouding of the Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
Filmmaker Devansh Agarwal and singer-songwriter Sonali Argade collaborated on a music video-like poetry film of John Webster’s 17th-century poem for the Visible Poetry Project. Argade is also the actress. Her musical interpretation appears to be a cover of the 1924 Peter Warlock composition, from his 3 Dirges of Webster, now in the public domain. Here’s a more standard performance by the Baccholian Singers of London:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzNavCXcghg
Wishes for Mom by Sojourner Ahebee
Sojourner Ahebee‘s words meet Reva Santo‘s filmmaking, with actress Alana Ogio and a score by Avila Santo, in today’s film from the Visible Poetry Project, a NYC-based initiative to produce a poetry film for every day of April. I’ve been remiss in sharing their videos here, but expect at least 75 percent of them to appear on Moving Poems eventually, because the quality has been really high so far, and they’ve been amazingly varied, as well. I also like the project’s openness to emerging as well as accomplished poets from all walks of life; they had an open call for submissions back in January.
You can watch all the videos on their website or Vimeo page, and/or attend one of the live screenings still upcoming in Brooklyn, Manhattan, upstate New York, or Beijing. Here’s how they describe the project on their About page:
The Visible Poetry Project brings together a collective of filmmakers to create a series of videos that present poems as short films. Drawing from works created by renowned poets, including Neil Gaiman and Tato Laviera, as well as emerging poets, the Visible Poetry Project strives to make poetry accessible, exploring how we can recreate and experience poems through the medium of film.
Throughout the month of April – National Poetry Month – we will release one visual poem each day at 9 AM EST. An exercise in translation and a reclamation of both poetic and film discourses, the resulting thirty videos will explore how we read, interpret, visualize, and hear poetry.
The Visible Poetry Project is no longer accepting submissions from poets and filmmakers for the 2017 series. We will reopen for 2018 submissions in December 2017. If you would like to be involved with the Visible Poetry Project, or have any questions about our organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com.
Coventry Glossolalia by Martin Green
An experimental videopoem from Martin Green (text, voiceover) and filmmaker Emily Wright, one of the 27 poetry films produced for the Disappear Here project focused on the ringroad around Coventry, UK. Every week another three films appear on the project blog, together with biographies of those involved. This was my favorite of the three films by Green and Wright featured on April 2; I thought that the recitation of vehicle registration plate codes as if they were text gained a peculiar pathos from the conjunction with a stained-glass-like video collage of the ringroad map.
Wright’s bio states that “Brutalist architecture is a strong inspiration for her work as she is interested in drawing attention to anything unpopular and unloved.” And Green is described as more of an artist than a poet, whose “work explores joining sculpture, writing and performance together.” (This is especially evident in “T“.) Read — and watch — the rest.
Mondes / Worlds by Jean Coulombe
It never fails: I take a week off and a tsunami of great new material hits. Let’s start with this videopoem by Québécois poet Jean Coulombe (text and images) and Gilbert Sévigny (montage and video treatment), with piano by Vincent Gagnon. It’s one of several recent additions to the Coulombe Larose-Samson (AKA CLS Poésie) Vimeo page. I especially like the contrast between the contemplative pacing of words and images and the frenetic soundtrack here.
