Perhaps a more accurate title for this conversation would read, “From the Artist’s Canvas to the Page to the Screen and Back Again and then to the Screen Once More,” but such a title would be unwieldy. Still— this fluid and fascinating movement between mediums lies at the heart of Sarah Tremlett’s latest project, a print anthology, Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow II/Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen II (ekphrastic poetry + films/cine + poesía ecfrástica).

The book is a multimedia, bilingual collection of poems accompanied by QR codes linking to streaming videopoems. Acclaimed poetry filmmaker Csilla Toldy also contributed her expertise to the project as co-director of Poem Film Editions. Featuring the work of 22 poets and filmmakers, these texts and films are mostly inspired by the painting, “Huapango Torero” by contemporary nonbinary Mexican artist Ana Segovia. The book is the first release from PoemFilm Editions, Tremlett’s new publishing platform dedicated to the art of poetry film. Additionally, a Spanish edition of the book (with additional text) is coming out in November, published by Chamán Ediciones, and will be launched at the upcoming MALDITO Videopoetry Festival in Albacete.

Tremlett’s Frame to Frames II call for ekphrastic poetryfilms was part of a curated program for the 2023 FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival in Mexico City. It was an invitation for the creation of new videopoems with Segovia’s painting serving as the point of inspiration. The painting, vivid in color and emotional tone, is a response to the gendered politics of machismo and the animal welfare concerns of bullfighting practices. Since FOTOGENIA, the collection of videopoems has been traveling the festival circuit, with selections screening at the 9th Weimar Poetry Filmtage in April 2024 and REELpoetry 2023.

There is also a bilingual documentary (made for REELpoetry 2024) on the making of the Frame to Frames II project with five of the videopoem artists. The doc is available for viewing here: https://vimeo.com/929116208.

What makes this collection so unique, besides the QR code-based format, is its emphasis on the ekphrastic videopoem. According to the Poetry Foundation, ekphrasis translates to “description” in Greek. Ekphrastic poetry embodies the “imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture… the poet may amplify and expand its meaning” (322). The videopoems featured in Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow II/Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen II (ekphrastic poetry + films/cine + poesía ecfrástica) do just that. Just as Ana Segovia’s painting, “Huapango Torero,” serves as a filmmaker’s portal for new meanings, this anthology is likewise a portal as the reader is encouraged to move seamlessly between the page and streaming online content via QR codes. Not only is this collection truly innovative and collaborative in spirit, taken as a whole, the book reaffirms the contemporary relevance and ever-evolving nature of the ekphrastic as creative incitement and provocation. And while a curated program for a poetry film fest might be ephemeral or inaccessible for those not in attendance, this anthology brings the poetry film festival directly to the reader in a way that hasn’t quite been done before. The Spanish translations by Camilo Bosso also allow for transnational and transcultural dialogues between artists, poets, and filmmakers.

Although this new anthology is a testament to the collaborative spirit that has become the hallmark of the videopoetry community, the project was ultimately spearheaded by poet, filmmaker, and videopoem theorist Sarah Tremlett. Sarah is quite active in the contemporary poetry filmmaking world, known widely for her organization and online platform Liberated Words CIC. Described by Karina Karaeva as a “visual philosopher,” Sarah’s original videopoems have taken top honors at poetry film festivals around the world, and she has also served as jury member and judge for such festivals as REELpoetry and LYRA, among others. She is the author of the seminal study, The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection (2021, Intellect: University of Chicago Press), which includes the voices of over 40 contributors. Described as an encyclopedic and rigorous investigation of the genre, the book is a one-of-a-kind exploration of videopoetry’s formal characteristics framed by the lyric voice. I recently had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts on ekphrastic videopoetry and the new anthology with Sarah, which are excerpted below. Segments of the following interview draw from her scholarship in The Poetics of Poetry Film as well as her own creative process and years of poetry filmmaking experience.

PK: Do you consider the ekphrastic poetryfilms featured in the new anthology to be adaptations of Segovia’s painting? Or are they something more? Why or why not?

ST: Before focusing specifically on ekphrastic poetry films, in their construction, poetry films can exhibit many types of (often app-based) adaptation: where still photographs become animated or coloured and layered with other photographs; a musical score that is remixed; a poem where the lines are altered to fit the film; a montage of many sources combined to create a single film; a drawing that is layered into another time and place. You could argue poetry film is adaptation. Others take a postmodernist stance arguing that all is intertextual, a continuous flow of material reinventing itself.

Ekphrasis itself can be argued to be happening in many poetry films themselves. Every filmmaker who selects a poem by a poet to develop it in their own way can probably be considered to be committing ‘reverse ekphrasis’, though often not deliberately.

The importance of the relationship between the original artist and their respondee in the ekphrastic work sets it apart from other types of adaptation. The central point is that the second artwork is a reply that implies co-existence of perspectives (however abstracted) and also if reimagining, rather than directly representing, extends the original to create a ‘between’ space with its own characteristics. As I write this, I am reminded of the reverse ekphrastic response a filmmaker might make to a poem by another poet, too. Meriel Lland, filmmaker of the winning Frame to Frames film A Love Spell Cast in Petals, also emphasised how she had thoroughly researched the subject, and she felt she was in dialogue with the artist through her response, and I think this is something that is important to remember.

PK: In The Poetics of Poetry Film, you write, “Quite often the poetry film is realized as it is written: poem, then film, with soundscape design completing the picture; but of course, life is rarely this compartmentalized” (40). How does the ekphrastic encourage the liberation from compartmentalization within the creative process? And what are some of the ways in which the poetryfilms in the new anthology “resist the representational” or embody the “the brilliance of intensional, unique symbols” (5)?

ST: I am not sure that I can definitively answer it does, but here are some thoughts. It was you, Patricia, who noted that you wouldn’t have made your ekphrastic poetry film without this ekphrastic prompt and maybe counter intuitively, that is one way to create liberation from a particular personal approach. Since you are also an auteur poetry filmmaker, standing outside your comfort zone and eliciting something unknown from inside could be really important for you to develop your practice

As mentioned, the ekphrastic poem is somehow (to varying degrees) a ‘co-existence of perspectives’ (Cunningham, 2011). If you are a poet who usually collaborates with the same filmmaker, the terms have altered. The original context, voice and subject matter of the source artist have firstly entered the thought processes of the poet, and secondly cannot help but suggest a different type of dialogue between poet and filmmaker, maybe as if a third voice is present, an inclusion of ‘other’? Ultimately, the source artist has to be taken care of in some way, accorded a position, directly or indirectly; by reference or inference. There is also the aspect of the different types of source that might liberate new approaches and thinking: whilst many worked to paintings, Martin Sercombe with poet Thom Conroy chose an AI artwork and Javier Robledo an Argentinian visual poem. So, yes, actually I do think ekphrasis does liberate the artist from a standard practice into unknown territories.

The festival painting (Huapango Torero by non-binary Mexican artist Ana Segovia) is wholly representational, and was selected by over half the artists in the book. This painting where a boy holds a flower up to a bull, is a call to end animal cruelty, machismo and bullfighting. It revises an original work where boys used to go into bulls’ fields at night to practice bullfighting. The highly political subject of animal cruelty though, on the one hand encouraged the visual depiction of animals – the bull – but on the other, an unwillingness to show the gory details, the actual killing, the bloodshed. Filmmakers chose different ways to negotiate this.

In It Ain’t Wot it Seems, Penny Florence adapted direct images from Segovia’s painting that became layered with each other, alongside the bilingual, moving text of the visual poem (also a visual poem on the page).

The winning film, A Love Spell Cast in Petals, by Meriel Lland was many layered and directly representational, including images of bulls, a carving of a bull, and a powerful poem that confronts the subject with depth and emotional strength; a call for change – an end to cruelty to animals.

Janet Lees found the painting too complex to work to, and so based her film on the extraordinary poem ‘Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca’ by Elena K. Byrne and Lois P. Jones which was based on the painting Huapango Torero. Whilst she included some images of toreadors, the main subject matter was a Mexican dancer in slow motion, which the poets viewed as a feminist parallel in rhythm to the toreador’s movements with his cape. This revisioning can be seen as a filmic intensional undoing of the performative machismo of death and killing through celebratory joy and the feminine.

In Huapango Torero, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg created an ekphrastic animation of Segovia’s work… as they say “in an intertextual way.” Ideas flow and reinvent each other, a poem is influenced by another poem, and a song, or Ana Segovia’s paintings reappear in different locations and guises in the narrative.

In A New History, your film, Patricia, is about ending cruel stereotypes and a new beginning towards animal-human relationships. You talk to the boy in the painting; and the really meaningful and beautiful line ‘as the hoof takes the hand to show us all another way’ ending with ‘not every dance must end in death … a new history awakens.’ Here the painting is visible in your poem but not in the film at all. It is a reverse ekphrastic transfer via text alone.

Beate Gördes based her images directly on the bull but there was no verbal poem at all.

In Crystal Flower Carlos Ramirez Kobra from Mexico made a film that included images of bulls but associated the poem with the death of his mother and her village home.

Alejandro Thornton from Argentina focused on the title Huapango Torero and filmed a dancer’s bare feet stamping out the Huapango dance, whilst the words Resist / Exist appear in coloured smoke, but no bull in sight.

My own performative poetry film includes a mime artist who is both man and bull at one and the same time, to show how little difference there is between us, and how if you taunt a man he will react just the same as a bull. The mime artist was made up with a curly moustache (echoing bull’s horns) and accompanied by silhouettes of the shapes they made in performing, which appear bull-like. The poem is an Italian sonnet in two halves; in the first the man is full of his own importance, and in the second half this is dissolved by the arrival of a fly. The Spanish voiceover and the music tell the narrative very clearly, of the fate of the bull, but we don’t actually see one at all.

Finn Harvor was inspired by Huapango Torero but only in terms of an association between the hot summers in both Mexico and Korea. His film focused on the South Korean landscape and the sun, without referencing the narrative in the painting at all.

Of the artists who chose their own artwork, some were directly representational as in Colm Scully’s Interior Group Portrait of the Penrose Family which was exactly that, and the poem affords a deeper look into their lives through touching on actual events; or Tova Beck Friedman’s The Fall of Lilith painted by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier, where Beck-Friedman examines with a feminist critique a deeply patriarchal approach to narrative

Ian Gibbins responded to Judy Morris’ illustrations of plants, where, after each Latin name of a plant a stream of consciousness description erupts that expands across numerous associations, and I feel is truly intensional.

Csilla Toldy’s poem ‘This Yard’ was a response to another poet and their poem, as she says in a double ekphrastic process.

PK: You have asserted that “Poetry film-making is largely attuned to and in a philosophical dialogue with the world” (323) and can “create radical change for humanity and the planet” (322). How does this new anthology contribute to that philosophical dialogue or create change?

ST: In general, since the rise of digital media and the Internet, the chance for different voices to speak out has emerged, through genres such as poetry film. And these voices have only grown, year by year. Unfortunately for the planet, the environment has become a central issue, and the poetry film community worldwide is voicing its distress. For me, organizing poetry film events and or publishing books means I can share these voices, and particularly encourage a diverse lens.

PK: What were some of the unique challenges or revelations that arose during the completion of this first publication from PoemFilm Imprints?

ST: I knew that asking artists to create work that tries to offer ideas for political change would be difficult, especially coming from left field, but I feel that the responses were extraordinary, brave and memorable. The question is – how to create an artwork that speaks to us both politically but also creatively, reflectively and aesthetically without making us turn away, or reject the work for other reasons, too. Every artist in this collection achieved that very difficult double act, and I applaud everyone who took part.

I have worked in publishing on and off for many years, so I knew what I had to do in terms of production, editing, proofreading, paper selection etc. etc., and I have been curating poetry film screenings since 2012, so in general not many areas were a surprise. However, I specifically wanted it to be bilingual, to include Spanish readers, and to show the comparative musicality – euphonious or sonic patterning – rhythm, syntax etc. between the two languages. I am learning Spanish, and I had worked with translator Camilo Bosso before, and through him I discovered a lot about the language and honing the exact translations in the process. This was time-consuming but has been richly rewarding!

Maybe the biggest revelation is that although I kept thinking it was taking too long to produce, since I had announced it in December in Mexico, the fact that it only took six months, for a 116-page, bilingual anthology with links to films was amazing. If you look at academic publishers and their long schedules I feel really pleased about that.

Csilla Toldy, my co-director also has been very helpful and given great publishing advice and a second pair of eyes, which are really needed at the start of a company.

In terms of the aims of Poem Film editions, it was also essential to source an environmentally aware printer, (for the book and even bookmark); it is important to me that the books follow through in my eco credentials, and environmental beliefs.

What has also been wonderful is the reception it has had, both from contributors and readers. It is especially gratifying to hear praise first hand, as I travel around on my tour presenting the book: so far FOTOGENIA (Mexico city), REELpoetry (Houston online), Weimar (Germany), and Leeds Trinity ekphrastic symposium (UK). However, I really would like more of the contributors to come along, although many aren’t in the UK. The next one is at Bristol Literary Film Festival on October 27th.

PK: Is there anything else you’d like to share about ekphrastic videopoetry, your own creative process, or any other comments or contributions by filmmakers featured in the book?

ST: In terms of my own practice, I personally have worked with ekphrastic poetry films before, as in Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia (based on the painting Ophelia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) which takes a feminist stance against the position of the model and abuse of power, and there are others that are upcoming. My latest film Flight which is from the commissioned poetry (with images) collection The Unexhibited, due later this year, includes some fragments of my early Neo-Expressionist paintings, alongside those of the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon. The film centres on drone footage of the coast of Cornwall, and this is also a reference to Lanyon who in his later years flew a glider and made glider paintings (actually dying from a gliding accident). It also includes a reference to an ekphrastic poem I wrote ‘The (Last) Green Mile’ (based on one of his other works) in Transitional anthology by the Otter Gallery workshops, Chichester University, 2017.

I would finally like to add something of the reality of the working process of Bull, my own poetry film response to Huapango Torero which gives an insight into a dramatic, scripted (though without dialogue) performative poetry film. I conceived the narrative and concept (and lighting), which was interpreted by my daughter Hatti aka XaiLA who is a performance and makeup/ special effects artist in LA. My other daughter Georgie directed onsite, with a script (sent by WhatsApp) by myself. Hatti has never taken on this role before, and together they interpreted what I wanted and then some, as there was the added factor of a subtle, strangely dark humour brought to the performance. It was also determined by the clothes and makeup and the small space to film in (a small studio apartment), which in some ways also added to the sense of being trapped, whilst feeling like an experimental, cabaret-style venue. I found the Spanish band Lapso Producciones whose evocative, bitter-sweet cabaret-style music fitted both parts of the Italian sonnet structure and the Spanish voiceover artist Helena Amado brought a subtle sense of delightful irony to the narrative to complete the picture. I think this film shows how each person, each creative practitioner contributed an important part of the final result.

All the contributors have been wonderful, and supportive and view it as a unique and timely project that they are proud to be part of, so I can’t really ask for more than that. It was a leap of faith, a leap in the dark and I really had no idea that it would achieve what it has, when I think back to last summer when I began requesting films. At that stage a book hadn’t even been thought of.  Looking back, I think it was the quality of the films and the poetry that inspired me to expand the concept from a prize and screening to an intermedial project. I have been told it is a first in the field and if so, I am extremely happy!

As Janet Lees mentioned in the video documentary on Frame to Frames, in poetry films the poem often passes you by, but here you can stop and pause and go back to the poems and read them in either language at your leisure. So, there is not only the comparison between the painting and films but also the comparison between the poems on the page in English and Spanish and also the poems as they appear in the films.

What I would like to say is that this project is also very different in that the ‘book’ is more than simply a book. It is a central hub with bilingual poems and explanatory synopses, and the poetry films are extensions of that, if you like, via QR link. It affords a different type of (varying chronologies) audience experience for the reader/viewer.

PK: Do you plan on organizing additional ekphrastic videopoem series in the future?

ST: You ask about more Frame to Frames events. Readers of Moving Poems can always submit ekphrastic poetry films to me. I will build a collection and it could serve for the next edition which will be down the line. 

For press, further details regarding readings and screenings, or if you wish to submit ekphrastic poetry films for future events see poemfilmeditions@gmail.com.

 To purchase the book please go to Poem Film editions at:  Liberatedwords.com/store