~ February 2019 ~
St. Umbilicus by Cindy St. Onge
Portland, Oregon-based poet Cindy St. Onge is no stranger to Moving Poems, but mostly as the maker of her own videos. This one’s the work of Australian filmmaker Marie Craven, herself a Moving Poems regular, and I love the way she both literalized and extended the poem at the same time. She posted some process notes on her blog last May which are worth quoting in full:
‘St. Umbilicus’ is from a poem by Cindy St. Onge, and is one of my shorter video pieces. As well as a poet, Cindy is a maker of videopoems I admire. She also gave her voice to the soundtrack of this video. This is the second video I’ve made from Cindy’s poetry. The first was ‘Double Life‘. The collaboration was closer on ‘St. Umbilicus’ and grew out of personal chats we had recently on Facebook and via email. These led to me expressing an interest in collaborating further, to which Cindy agreed. The poem is about the navel and its bodily reminder of our connection to our mother. To express this, I chose a very close, still image of a navel to be a ‘frame’ for a series of central images featuring mothers and children. The still image, which rotates slightly throughout the piece, was found on creative commons licence at Flickr. The artist is Linnéa Sjögren. The moving images contained within it are from ‘Scenes at the Beach Club‘, a 1927 home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I selected historic images here to emphasise the timelessness of the theme. Music is by Chris Zabriskie, his ‘Prelude No. 12’ from the ‘Preludes’ album.
Semechki (Семечки) by Eta Dahlia
Be sure to click the CC icon for English subtitles.
A fascinating collaboration between Russian poet and filmmaker Eta Dahlia and UK poet and artist Iris Colomb. It grew out of a residency at the Center for Recent Drawing, one of “a series of experimental translations of Eta Dahlia’s minimalist Russian poems into gestural drawings,” Colomb writes, which were
entirely process-led. I made use of my limited knowledge of Russian, allowing me to experience the poems phonetically without semantic bias. Translating the poems’ sounds into gestures became the basis of my systemic approach.
I listened to each poem repeatedly for an hour, interpreting each sound as a separate movement tracing a line. Throughout this process my repetitive gestural sequences produced an increasingly intricate network of lines, generating a tightly layered shape. My movements evolved with each iteration, the drawing itself exposing their range.
The resulting compositions became complex maps of my changing perception; areas and textures displaying different levels of conviction and doubt, making these drawings both translations and documents of performance.
The video was featured in 3:AM Magazine last September as part of their Duos series.
Now we are ten
Moving Poems was founded on February 23, 2009. The very first post featured a clay-on-glass animation of the Emily Dickinson poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” by Lynn Tomlinson, which I’d found on YouTube. Tomlinson had made it back in 1989, so quite by chance in my very first post—in which my main intent was to honor and invoke the spirit of one of our greatest poets—I also gave a nod to the pre-digital era, which now seems terribly remote.
Meanwhile, Tomlinson has built up quite a reputation as an animator. I’m grateful that she eventually discovered my post, read my complaint about the low-resolution of the YouTube version, and took the time to upload a higher-res video to Vimeo, so I could swap that in. So many of the older videos I’ve shared on Moving Poems have simply vanished, victims of deleted video hosting accounts, copyright complaints, mad housecleaning impulses… you name it. For a while I was using a dead-links plugin to find and remove those posts. But at a certain point I realized that the historic value of keeping a record of who made what and when outweighed the annoyance to visitors from search engines landing on video-less posts.
It’s kind of an archaeological thing. A long-lived blog or website is just like an ancient city built over previous versions of itself—dead links, missing embeds and all. Moving Poems has its ruins, but they’re part of the attraction! Maybe. Anyway, the point is we all fall apart as we age.
At the moment, Moving Poems and its sister blog Moving Poems Magazine (founded in 2010 as Moving Poems Forum) are doing OK except for the fact that neither has HTTPS authentication (because the current webhost charges too much money for SSL certificates), so I probably only have a year or two to remedy that before some browsers will start refusing to follow links here. Meanwhile, some regular readers of the weekly emailed version of the feed probably forget about our web presence altogether, while other former visitors rarely leave the enclosed commons of social media any more, and forget that there used to be such a thing as the open web. Will any of us be here in ten years? Who knows? Sic transit gloria interneti.
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Here’s an interview I did with Quail Bell Magazine last month, all about videopoetry and poetry film. I talk about the relationship between videopoetry and the internet, how I curate videos for Moving Poems, and what the future might hold for the genre. Check it out.
Call for entries: Cadence Video Poetry Festival
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke recently contacted me to let us know about a videopoetry festival that she’s helping to organize in Seattle, and due to a snafu in communications, I’m a little late in getting this news out. But there’s still time: the deadline for submissions is March 1. Chelsea wrote:
Verse meets visuals in motion at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in April 2019. Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by NWFF, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, throughout National Poetry Month. Entering its second year, Cadence is growing considerably to fill a gap in the presentation of video poetry in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring four screenings, one each Thursday of the month, the festival’s inaugural Artist in Residence, generative workshops for youth and adults, and a juried selection of open submissions, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the oft overlooked medium of video poetry.
Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.
The website adds:
Video poetry is language as light. As an art form, video poetry is lucid and liminal—on the threshold of the literary and the moving image. It articulates the poetic image visually, rather than metaphorically—it shifts words from page to screen, from ink to light. A video poem makes meaning that would not exist if text was without image, image without text. It is language-based video work or a video-based poem. Video poetry is a literary genre presented as visual media.
Which is a damn good definition, I thought.
Cadence Call for Entries
NWFF is accepting video poetry submissions for inclusion in the April 18, 2019 screening of Cadence Video Poetry Festival. We are looking for works no longer than 5 minutes that fit within the following categories of video poetry:
- Adaptations/Ekphrasis: Videos created to bring new meaning and dimension to pre-existing poetry. Any poems used for this purpose must be in the public domain or else used with written consent of the author.
- Collaboration: Video poems created in collaboration between a videographer or video artist and poet.
- Video by Poets: Poets creating video from, or as, their writing.
- Poetry by Video Artists: Video artists using text visually or through audio intrinsic to the poetic meaning.
Cadence Video Poetry Festival proudly accepts entries via FilmFreeway.
Submission deadline: March 1Please direct questions regarding submissions to NWFF Artistic Director Rana San at rana@nwfilmforum.org.
The screening of selections from this open call for entries on April 18 is just one of four Cadence screenings, and the two workshops also sound very worthwhile, one on April 6th, and another on April 13 for teenagers. See the website for details about all those events.
This is actually the festival’s second year. In 2018 there was a call (which I missed) for entries from filmmakers in the northwest region.
Motionpoems announces Epiphany Awards for poetry filmmaking
A press release from Motionpoems.
Motionpoems is thrilled to announce the first ever Epiphany Awards: an annual awards program recognizing outstanding international contributions to the field of poetry filmmaking. As the world’s most robust poetry film producer, Motionpoems is thrilled to recognize and support poetry filmmakers with this exciting new series of awards.
A Motionpoems Epiphany Award—aka, an Eppy—is open to any poetry film not produced by Motionpoems, Inc., and will be awarded annually by a rotating jury of Motionpoems collaborators. Honors will be conferred to work deemed uniquely innovative or important in three categories: Adaptation, Production, and Innovation. The inaugural Epiphany Awards will be presented to six top-winning films during a Motionpoems screening, and winners will be invited to attend. Winning films will be awarded laurels, a $500 prize, and recognition across Motionpoems social media channels.
Entrants can submit up to three eligible films on Submittable by April 1, 2019, with an entry fee of $5 to cover administrative costs. We will accept films previously released or distributed online or elsewhere. Eligibility: Films of any length, based on a poem or poems, crediting all collaborators, and completed within two years of the entry deadline are eligible. By entering the contest, Motionpoems is granted the right to screen and share the work, and the entrant attests that relevant rights to show and distribute the work have been obtained.
The jury for 2019, selected to represent diversity and prestige, will be revealed after the awards are announced. For complete information, please visit us at motionpoems.org or our Submittable page.
Having begun as a collaboration between animator/producer Angella Kassube and award-winning poet Todd Boss in 2008, Minneapolis-based Motionpoems has grown into a 501c3 nonprofit arts organization with over 120 films in circulation with hundreds of cast and crew from around the world. Currently producing its ninth season of poetry films, Motionpoems has a longstanding record of partnering with top quality for-profit and nonprofit publishers, film companies, and literary organizations.
Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon
Layla Atkinson directed this vivid animation of a poem by Siegfried Sassoon that insists on the importance of remembering the horrors of war in peacetime. The animators are Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits, John Harmer, Rok Predin, Jocie Juritz, Jacob Read, and Clelia Leroux; see Vimeo for the rest of the credits. The Trunk Animation Production Company website provides detailed production notes. Here’s the middle part:
Being that the poem obviously has a dark subject matter, we wanted to find a balance so that an audience would be able to enjoy the film, relate, and hopefully retain Sassoon’s warning, without being either too harrowing, or too warm.
We worked with the amazing Julian Rhind-Tutt on the voiceover, and he played with the delivery of different lines to help ground each scene in a reality.
The visual narrative has a cyclical structure that as we progress, slowly erases reality as memories take over, only for our main character to make a firm decision to regain control and pull themselves back into the here and now.The poem was written in 1919, and we took influence from cubism, in so much as we wanted to tell multiple stories and ideas at once from different viewpoints. Layla also approached the overall look and feel using a mixture of different textures and materials to build up visual layers.
Ultimul balaur / The Last Dragon by Radu Stanca
A poem by 20th-century Romanian poet and playwright Radu Stanca is reimagined as a film by actor Lari Giorgescu and director Andreea Dobre from Three of Swords Productions, who specialize in “Unhinged cinematic fantasies. Mood and magic. Deep dark fears.” See Vimeo or their website for the full credits.
The horror/fantasy film vocabulary isn’t always a good fit with poetry film, but this succeeds admirably, I thought. Three of Swords Productions describe it in a blog post as “the first extravaganza in our series of poetry films: an actor we love + a poem we love = magic ✨”
The Opened Field by Dom Bury
Devon-based poet Dom Bury‘s poem won the 2017 National Poetry Competition sponsored by the UK Poetry Society, and the judges said:
The darkly allegoric winning poem surrounds six boys in a field enacting a disturbing coming-of-age ritual, and is told with a driving rhythm and mantra-like repetitions. The poem interrogates themes of unchecked masculinity, exploring our destructive relationship with each other and with the natural world. The barbaric impulses enacted are interwoven to offer us a sombre and precisely wrought ecological and social fable for our times.
This film interpretation by Helmie Stil takes, perhaps unavoidably, a somewhat illustrative tack while remaining suggestive and allusive in all the right ways, so that the poem doesn’t feel pinned down, as it easily could have felt with a more conventional approach.
Newlyn Film Festival deadline extended to February 28
The deadline for submission of poetry films and other shorts to the 2019 Newlyn Film Festival, originally set for December 30, 2018, has been extended to February 28. Visit FilmFreeway for all the details.
I should also mention that there’s an excellent interview on the Liberated Words website with last year’s winner, Dave Richardson, conducted by Sarah Tremlett: “Unchartered Terrain: The Personal Within.” I was especially interested to learn that Richardson’s first poetry video gig was making Flash animations for the late, great online magazine Born. It’s an influence that persists in his videopoetry to this day:
DR: My journalism training in college told me to cut and cut to what matters. When I started to do that with the more poetic stuff, it felt more authentic, like my real voice. I try to keep it simple so that I am not trying to over-write. Many times I stop with the second draft of the text, just to not over-think.
ST: In relation to that, often you have different text on screen to the voice-over – is this something deliberate and is there a point behind this? It is difficult to get this right and quite an art.
DR: I did some experiments with Flash years ago, where I was randomly coding phrases to interact with randomly loaded images, and I was enthralled with the endless results and connections that were unexpected. That randomness, just a quality of unexpected relationships between image and text — I try to recreate that in my work for fun, for the pleasure of seeing what might surprise me. It makes new meaning for me. And then I edit.
Read the whole thing. A genuinely illuminating conversation.
American Arithmetic by Natalie Diaz
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
Mohammed Hammad‘s polyvocalic film of a poem by Natalie Diaz — the first of two of her poems included in Motionpoems‘ Season 8, “Dear Mr. President” — is everything a socially engaged poetry film should be, giving the viewer a powerful sense of the political and cultural contexts from which the poem emerged. There’s a very good interview with Hammad in Director’s Notes; here’s a snippet:
How did your conceptualization of Natalie Diaz’s poem evolve from an initially abstract narrative to its current form and how do you feel the use of portraiture and mixed format cinematography strengthened your interpretation of the poem?
I initially had a visual treatment that was more abstract and super ambitious production-wise relative to the budget we were working with. Part of the initial concept was to film portraits of residents of the reservations. After much consideration and a push from my producers, we decided it would be best to have the film feature portraits of indigenous people living in a city to better relate to Natalie Diaz’s depiction. We felt it would create moments of intimacy that would contextualize the statistics mentioned in the poem.
I felt that the camcorder footage would add that extra layer of intimacy between the film and the viewer, to show a more intimate perspective of the illuminating conversations happening behind the scenes.
From its opening moments, American Arithmetic’s soundtrack is peppered with a multitude of vocal fragments discussing the hostile environment encountered by the Native American community. Could you tell us more about the process of building the film’s soundtrack?
The more I embraced the portraiture treatment of the film, the more the pieces of the puzzle came together more, especially with regards to the audio part of the film. It just made sense to add snippets of our subjects’ interviews and to weave together a collection of reflections, each contributing to the conversation on what it’s like to be a Native person in America today.
Read the rest. And do read Diaz’s poem in its original form on the Motionpoems page.
