~ July 2024 ~
Call for Work: REELpoetry Festival 2025
REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2025 is open for submissions. The organizers say that “By popular demand, we’re extending the submission time to six months.” The festival will take place “online March 31- April 4; in person APRIL 5-6; with online workshops April 7-11.” They also note some other changes:
NEW! What could be better than videopoetry to engage coming generations of tech savvy youth. We’re delighted to support poets and filmmakers 18 and under at the festival with a new FREE “Young Creatives” program. If you’re a parent or a teacher, please encourage your kids to submit to this free program. See Rules & Terms for details specific to this program.
NEW IN 2025! We’re thinking about categories differently, and curious to see how one category where the poet and filmmaker are the same person and another where the poet and filmmaker are different plays out. Five notable international curators and presenters who have participated in our past festivals will be judging the submissions. They can’t wait to see your work!
Visit FilmFreeway for all the details.
Janet Lees on collaboration in poetry film
Visit Liberated Words for a lengthy, fascinating essay by award-winning videopoet Janet Lees: “Joint forces: collaborating in poetry film.” Here’s a taste:
My Instagram tag is ‘everything is poetry’. Writing this piece, I’ve been thinking of changing it to ‘everything is collaboration’. I love what the poet Matthew Rohrer says about poetry: ‘I’ve come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration’. He talks about collage poetry, ekphrasis and ‘collaborations with the voices that I heard on the brink of dreaming’. He asserts, ‘There is no creation out of nothing on this Earth. There’s only making new things in collaboration with other things.’
I’ve sometimes said that I stumbled into making poetry films and then stumbled into collaboration. Recently I’ve come to realise that this is not true (top fact: the Estonian word for making poetry is lluletama, which also means to lie). As a child I drew, painted and wrote poetry and stories as a matter of course. From the moment I was given my first camera, my beloved Grandad’s box Brownie, at the age of 11, I took a lot of photographs too. I listened to music endlessly as a teenager – not all of it great, but most enduringly Kate Bush, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and other similarly poetic songwriters. So there was some early cross-fertilisation going on between the three key elements of a poetry film: words, visuals and sound/music.
Call for Work: Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2025 & Artist-in-Residence Program
Now in its eighth year, Cadence Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions from July 1st 2024 through January 15th 2025. The hybrid festival, which features screenings, workshops and discussions on poetry film, will take place in person in Seattle from Apr 25–27 & online Apr 25 – May 4. Selected video poems receive an artist’s payment.
According to Rana San, Co-Director/Co-Curator of the festival, “Participation in Cadence is open to work that is new or old, short or epic, premiere or seasoned traveler. If it combines text and moving image, we want to see it!”
The festival’s description is worth highlighting:
“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.”
Cadence also puts on a Virtual Poetry Book Fair during each festival, the most recent of which is still available online.
Additionally, artists can also apply for the Cadence Artist-in-Residence program, which “provides resources and tools for the development of a new video poem to screen at the festival.” Launched in 2019 and open to Seattle-area residents, the program accepts applications from individual artists or collaborative teams. Those selected are granted access to the Northwest Film Forum’s film equipment and editing lab. The deadline for residency applications is December 15, 2024.
An online archive of selected award-winning videopoems from the festival is available on their website for those interested. However, screening the films requires ticket purchase from Northwest Film Forum’s Eventive virtual cinema. Some filmmakers recently selected for Cadence have made their work available on other platforms, such as “Only” (2023) a film by Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş based on a Rebecca Foust poem, featured previously on Moving Poems.
The annual festival is organized by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San and hosted at the independent film and arts nonprofit, Northwest Film Forum, founded in Seattle in 1995. Cadence has become a fixture on the video poetry festival circuit so send in your work!
Submissions for the 8th Annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival are accepted through Film Freeway.
Endlings by Angela France
UK poet Angela France reads her poem “Endlings” in a film directed by Helen Dewbery for Nine Arches Press. “Endlings” was nearly the title poem for France’s latest collection, Terminarchy (2021), as she noted in an interview:
I came across the word ‘endling’, which means the last of any species, a while ago. For a long time this collection was going to be titled ‘Endling’ but then a poet in the USA brought out a collection with that title and there is also a series of fantasy books and a computer game called endling. The other word for the last of a species is ‘terminarch’. I didn’t like terminarch as much at first, it had an ugly sound to my ear. Adding a ‘y’ softened the sound and suggested a different direction; we are used to talking about patriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, perhaps we should think about whether we are heading for terminarchy.
I liked the sound of the word endling but also thought a lot about what it means to be the last. The strongest, most urgent drive in nature is to reproduce so an endling is driven into hopelessness. The endlings in the poem ignore their prey because of that ‘older, greater need’ and only find release, and peace, in death.
I suspect most of us could name at least a couple of extinct animals, such as the Tasmanian Tiger (the thylacine) but when I started researching the species lost in the last few years, I was astonished, and saddened, at the number of them. Some of the names were just wonderful, such as the ‘Gloomy tube-nosed bat’ and the ‘Darling Downs hopping mouse’. They didn’t find their way into this poem but they have remained in my memory, perhaps for another time. There is a very particular grief, for me, in discovering these things after they have left us.
The form of the poem is a loose terza rima, with slant rhyme. I like this form because of its subtle music and also because the interlocking rhyme scheme can have the effect of looking back while stepping forward. I usually prefer slant rhyme because I find full rhyme can fall very heavily on the end of the line unless it is used with great skill.
I feel I should explain something about Sparrow who appears at the end of this poem. William Sparrow was a historical character in my last book, The Hill. He was one of the ringleaders of the local riots over the closure of rights of way on the hill, in 1902. He was a road-sweeper and was literate, witty, and furious, writing daily letters to the newspapers. He has insisted on having a voice in this book but he is not now William Sparrow. He is not Sparrow the man, nor is he sparrow the bird, but something else entirely and he speaks up in a few poems through the book. I am not sure what he is except that he seems to take the role of an ecological conscience. Here, he weeps for all we have lost and are losing, the hopelessness of not having an ark.
In Conversation – Angela France
