~ Video Library ~
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser
Julia VanArsdale Miller of Manual Cinema directed this affecting film, which includes shadow puppets, live actors, and animation by Lizi Breit. Here are the full credits.
In this startling animation of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars),” two lives unfold in split screen, one during the tumultuous world events of 1968, the other 50 years later against a new landscape of uncertainty and ever-present digital technology.
The film was produced by the Poetry Foundation just last year, part of a new focus on poetry videos on their website, which I was excited to discover recently. When I started this website ten years ago, the Poetry Everywhere series of animations produced by the Poetry Foundation (in association with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) was one of the major caches of poetry animations on YouTube, and though they were made by university students and therefore not as sophisticated as the series of Billy Collins animations that had been produced by JWTNY a few years earlier, they were plentiful and my standards were low, so they had a lot to do with turning Moving Poems from a short-term gallery into a long-term blog. I’d always hoped that the Poetry Foundation would devote more of its considerable endowment to producing poetry films some day. It looks as if that day might finally be here.
seed by Asim Khan
One of a series of videopoetry collaborations between the UK poet Asim Khan and video artist and experimental animator David C. Montgomery. Watch the others at Asim’s Vimeo page. The soundtrack on this one is courtesy of Maja Jantar (voice) and Kristof Lauwers (electronics).
When You Are Quiet by Laura Theobold
https://vimeo.com/288588097
This quietly terrifying 8mm short by Andrew Theodore Balasia is a video trailer for Laura Theobald‘s new book, What My Hair Says About You, from Sad Spell Press. According the publisher’s description,
These poems break down the self—plucking the sun out of the sky, throwing bones at the void—while courting issues of identity, gender, sex, love, and loss in biting, blunt vernacular. What My Hair Says About You is a jilting confessional debut, with an ear pressed to a flowery, bone-littered floor.
Financial Consequences: International Multimedia Poetry Festival in London
Financial Consequences
International Multimedia Poetry Festival
Saturday 9 February 2019
STARTS 16:00 ends 23:00
FREE entrance / doors open at 15.45
organized by
+the Institute [for Experimental Arts] – Athens, Greece
supported by
London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Anthropology
location of the festival:
LSE Saw Swee Hock Centre
1 Sheffield Street
London WC2A 2AP
“Financial Consequences – International Multimedia Poetry Festival” challenges perceptions of economic crises and provides a new point of view via a wide variety of media. For the last 10 years, we’ve seen entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, technocrats and politicians dominate public opinion; now it’s time for poets to explain to all of them the social impact of their decisions and their politics. The social awareness and sensitivity of poets — in collaboration with video artists and musicians — invited from countries crushed by the economic crises offer us the best possible view of the invisible sites of social life, and offer us the opportunity to understand and realize the financial consequences of economic crises in the everyday lives of all of us, especially of people trapped in suffering.
The Institute for Experimental Arts was founded in 2008 in Athens, Greece as a non-profit platform for creative expression and research in the fields of theater, performance art, digital media, installation, poetry and art theory. The Institute is committed to being an open meeting-point for poets and writers, directors, actors, theater engineers/technicians, performance artists, photographers, video artists, and writers who develop new analytical tools for contemporary art, media and communications.
Part A: Introductory Lectures
Saturday 9 February 2019 at 16:00 (duration: 30 minutes)
Lecture by the world-known professor of Anthropology David Graeber (London School of Economics): “How social and economic structure influences the Art World”
Influential anthropologist David Graeber, known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years, speaks about the correlation between the cultural sphere and society. The intellectuals and the artists create an imaginative way to criticize the economic system in any era. Art can overcome hegemonic frameworks and acknowledge other possible worlds, offering us the opportunity to better understand marginalized social entities. Social exclusion is the process by which individuals or people are systematically blocked from, or denied full access to, various rights, opportunities and resources that are normally available to members of a different group, and which are fundamental to social integration and observance of human rights within that particular group (e.g. housing, employment, healthcare, civic engagement, democratic participation, and due process). As the economic crises go deeper in time more people face the effects of exclusion. Art and social sciences can give voice to the voiceless. Young, socially aware poets especially can give us a clear view of the real social effects of financial changes.
Lecture by Tasos Sagris: “Poetry and Revolt- Political Art in the 21st Century”
Theater director, poet, and activist Tasos Sagris, art director of the Financial Consequences festival, is best known to English-speaking audiences for co-editing the book We are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, will introduce us to a new way of understanding political art in 21st century.
Part B: Video Poetry Zone
(duration: 2 hours – starts at 16:30)
A compilation of the outstanding video poems from the last seven years of International Video Poetry Festival will be screened. A unique compilation including cinematic visual art based on poetry by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania). The programme will include the most social aware video poems among hundreds videos from the International Video Poetry archive.
The International Video Poetry Festival is an annual festival held by the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, Greece over the past seven years as a non-profit, free-entrance event. Approximately 1200 people attend the festival every year. The International Video Poetry Festival attempts to create an open public space for the creative expression of all tendencies and streams of contemporary visual poetry. Multimedia poetry nights and video poetry shows can bring new audiences in contact with visual art and contemporary poetry, to open new creative dimensions.
UK: Maciej Piatek. Helen Dewbery. Adrian Carter UK/ISRAEL: Yael Ozsinay. Nir Philosof. Maayan Moreno Erlich. Shimi Asresay. Noa Evron. Inbal Ochyon. Valery Yuzefovic. Dekel Oved. Sivan Kotek. Dan Berger. Inbal Breda. Adva Rodan. Tal Rachmin. Talia Randall FRANCE: Eric Sarner AUSTRALIA: Maria Craven. Radheya Jegatheva. Jason Lam USA: Dave Bonta. Hieu Gray. Liza Seidenberg. Jonathan Reyes. R. A. Villanueva RUSSIA: Inga Shepeleva GERMANY: Von Kuesti Fraun. Julian Weinert SPAIN: Igor Luna PORTUGAL: Manuel Vilarinho CANADA: James Pomeroy ITALY: Francesca Bonfatti BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA: Amina Avdic ISLE OF MAN: Janet Lees TURKEY/UKRAINE: Lokal Anestezi IRAN/UK: Roxana Vilk COLOMBIA: Catalina Giraldo Velez UK/ZAMBIA: Fiona Melville
MORE INFO: find bios, videos, photos, info about the participants and general programme of VIDEO POETRY Zone HERE.
Part C: Multimedia LIVE Performances
(duration: 4 1/2 hours – starts at 18:30)
Poets, musicians and visual artists create a vibrant atmosphere with multimedia poetry readings and live poetry performances. Spoken Poetry has been growing in popularity over the last few years. A collection of contemporary poets from countries faced by financial crises are taking on an important social role in our times. Poetry communities preserve the possibility of mutual understanding by reading and performing it.
Poetry responds to economical crisis, social exclusion and conflict — all the challenges society faces. Poetry has a special role under difficult financial and political conditions. Matthew Zapruder, in his essay “Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis“, finds guidance in the thought of Wallace Stevens:
Poets, according to Stevens, help us live our lives, not by telling us what to think, or by comforting us. They do so by creating spaces where one individual imagination can activate another, and those imaginations can be together. Poems are imaginative structures built out of words, ones that any reader can enter. They are places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.
Poetry Performances Live Concerts
SISSY DOUTSIOU – GREECE
LUNA MONTENEGRO + ADRIAN FISHER – CHILE / UK
TASOS SAGRIS + WHODOES – GREECE
LUCIA SELLARS – BOLIVIA
ULLI FREER – UK
POPPY DELTA – GREECE
NEFELI VOUTSINA PETSIMERI – GREECE
JUSTIN KATKO – USA
LARRY COOL – GREECE
GIZEM OKULU – TURKEY
ROBERT KIELY – IRELAND
The Poetry of Arab Spring
ELIZABETH TAPINI reads poems from a series of revolutionary, social uprisings that enveloped several Arab countries after 2010, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain.
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Motionpoems’ latest release is based on U.S. poet Maggie Smith‘s viral poem. As director Anaïs La Rocca explains,
In the summer of 2016, Maggie Smith sat in a Starbucks in Bexley, Ohio, and wrote a poem. “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” it began. Smith had no idea that she was setting down the first lines of a work that would seize the mood — and social-media accounts — of so many people in the tumultuous year that was 2016.
A year later, Director Anais La Rocca teamed up with Maggie Smith to bring this poem to life in the short film “Good Bones”.
Good Bones is a heartfelt work that grapples with pain, injustice, unfairness and disillusionment— all in a fantastical story told through the eyes of a six year old girl and the voice of her mother.
Written, directed, produced and post produced by an all female team, this film embodies the power, strength and courage within women, and our responsibility to pass on and teach this courage to our little girls.
In the film, the mother takes on the role of a real estate agent: “I am trying/ to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real s***hole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”
For the text of the poem, see Waxwing, where it originally appeared — or get hold of Smith’s 2017 collection, also titled Good Bones.
Never Say Never Say Never by Patrick James Errington
From British director Adele Myers, a film based on a poem by Patrick James Errington. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
Savouring their last moments, a couple struggle with letting go. They must, but breaking up is hard to do.
This short film is based on an original poem written by Patrick Errington. The poem was commended in the National Poetry Competition 2016, Poetry Society (UK). This film was commissioned by FilmPoem and original adaptation was produced entirely in Fujairah UAE.
The actors are Layla Al Khouri and Sanoop Din. For a full list of credits, see Poetry Film Live.
Rise by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana
Climate activists and poets, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana, travel to the latter’s home of Greenland to recite their collaborative poem, Rise, on a melting glacier that might threaten the former’s home nation of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
Dan Lin directed this poetry film for 350.org, which, oddly, only allows the Vimeo upload to be viewed on their website—which is unfortunate, because it includes subtitling options in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, and Japanese. The above YouTube version, which Bill McKibben shared at The Guardian along with an accompanying essay, is unlisted but—at time of publication, at any rate—shareable. The former link includes some background by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner:
With the last few poems I’ve written, I’ve tried to balance the piece by grounding it in some sort of legend … For this particular poem, I struggled with finding the right legend. … The legend I ultimately chose was “Ao Aorōk In Io̗kwe” a legend from Ujae that was transcribed by Heynes Jeik. The Marshallese version of the legend is below. There is no exact translation at this time, but here is my own (somewhat rough) summary:
The legend features sisters from Ujae who loved and respected each other very much. One day they decided to have a juggling competition around the entire island. They began their juggling competition – when the eldest reached a certain spot by the edge of the reef, she dropped the shells rock she was juggling, and she suddenly turned into stone. The younger sister, who was following close behind, noticed this strangely shaped rock – when she came closer, she saw that it was her sister. In her grief, she decided to drop the rock she was juggling as well, choosing to turn to stone, so she could stay by her sister’s side. The moral of the story is the love that connected the two sisters.
I asked the group I was skyping with a few questions – why did the elder sister turn into a stone at that specific spot? Was that spot magical? They weren’t sure. But one of the members from the Curriculum Assessment Team offered that she noticed we have many stories that featured the creation of stone, or people turning to stone. We reflected on this a bit, and an observation was offered that stones are permanent – they never disappear, and that stones are a part of our culture as well. After our skype session, I received a message from Heynes Jeik: “…Ij bar kakememej iok bwe ekkar nan jar ke roritto ijoke, rej ba deka ej motan manit in ad, em aolep men ko bunnid rej erom deka, ej einwot juon men eo epan jako nan indeio.” Which loosely translates to, “I just want to remind you that according to our elders, stone is a part of our culture, and everything becomes stone, it’s something that will never disappear.”
I ultimately chose this legend because it features sisters, which I felt fit nicely into the concept of me and Aka as “sisters of ice and snow/sister of ocean and sand.” I also appreciated the concept of stone – the concept of permanence against the destructive forces of climate change. My friend, Lyz Soto, who regularly edits my work, helped me think it through further “the idea of choosing stone so you can always be a part of your home.” This, ultimately, became the declaration I chose to focus on – choosing stone to always be a part of our home.
Read the whole essay at 350.org, which also includes bios of the poets and filmmakers and the full text of the poem. And here’s how McKibben’s Guardian essay begins:
I’ve spent 30 years thinking about climate change – talking with scientists, economists and politicians about emission rates and carbon taxes and treaties. But the hardest idea to get across is also the simplest: we live on a planet, and that planet is breaking. Poets, it turns out, can deliver that message.
But they don’t watch impassively. Both are climate activists, and both have raised their voices in service of their homelands. Jetnil-Kijiner, 30, has been at it for years – she’s performed her work before the United Nations General Assembly and the Vatican. Niviana is newer to activism – just 23, she recited a poem at a recent Copenhagen climate protest, where she met a well-known glaciologist, Jason Box, and he, in turn, organised the complicated logistics of this glacier expedition.
