~ conferences ~
Review of Poetry Film screening at the MIX conference
Bath Spa University, July 2017
Revolution, Regeneration, Reflections. These were the themes chosen for the MIX 2017 conference to celebrate the human capacity for renewal and experimentation combined with deep thought and to look at where creative writing, storytelling, and media creation intersect with and/or are dependent upon technology. The programme featured a mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions, workshops and poetry film screenings.
Artists/poets and digital writers were asked to submit poetry films/film poems/video poetry responding to these themes. Nineteen poetry films from the international submissions received were screened throughout the duration of the conference.
The selection was curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and co-founder of Liberated Words, and Zata Banks, founder of PoetryFilm, an influential research arts project and film screening series.
I wondered if the themes of revolution, regeneration and reflections were too optimistic in theme. Perhaps war, power, consumerism, genocide, apocalypse, violence and chaos are nearer to what governs our thoughts at present.
Some of the poetry films covered predictable ground: love, word play, abstracts and introspection. Other films braved the realms of suicide, oppression, humour and sustainability. Some were cleverly and/or beautifully designed, others revealed their workings (you almost saw the filmmaker at work).
The curation itself was expertly put together. The viewer could watch to the end without feeling bombarded or overwhelmed, while at the same time feeling they had traveled; a journey which was troubling at times, more re-assuring at the end. We were taken from political marginalisation and resistance to universal sustainability in 19 films.
The first film, If We Must Die by Othneil Smith, used imagery from a 1970s Blaxploitation film to highlight resistance and a 1919 sonnet written in response to attacks on African-American communities, and began:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
The last film, Kate Flaherty’s A Mouse’s Prayer, with a delicate voice and a mouse’s prayer to the moon, ended:
O moon, you see me
when others do not,
you know my brown fur’s sheen,
and you reflect for me
my own great smallness
in your immensely
dark and speckled sky.
At the end of the first film and the beginning of the last film, the viewer literally looked into someone’s face. This created an intimate space, connected the viewer to the personal and forged the link between responsibility and hope.
Whilst I watched, I kept thinking: this is a poet’s curation (but then, what is a poetry film if it’s not poetry?). There were no long distracting pages of seemingly endless credits, no words were trying to compete with images and there were no excessive soundtracks. Almost all the films selected had near equal elements of sound, image and text.
Selecting for a poetry film curation isn’t just about choosing the best films submitted. The films need to sit alongside one another to flow, illuminate, juxtapose — the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.
I was able to recognize Zata’s experimental film choices that invited us to focus on semiotics. The meaning making systems in the elements that make up the films (sound, movement, etc). In Matthew Griffith’s Pain in Colour, we were asked to find meaning through colour, movement and sound but with no words.
But can you have a poem without words? I’m not sure. But I know you can have a ‘poetic experience’ and Pain in Colour offered up its own meanings within the whole curation. I’m not sure it would have done so on its own. I would prefer to see it in a gallery space, where I may be less self-conscious of finding a specific context and meaning.
The territory of poetry film is still being mapped. And as I watched the films the nagging question hanging in the mainly empty auditorium was ‘What is poetry film?’ The curation didn’t direct me to the answer. But it led me to wonder if poetry film needs to be more confident in embracing its own genres (whether that is seen as another type of art film or an entirely new genre of poetry), and then we may be nearer to developing clearer analytical language and critical discourses.
In the middle of the curation, the background evangelist in Cindy St. Onge’s Road to Damascus and the end line in Dave Bonta’s Grassland, “I’ll break like bread at your table”, gave a jolt toward the anxieties of faith and a hope for something more, and was a reminder that the curation was a journey from resistance to sustainability.
Angie Bogachenko’s version of Oracle of a Found Shoe and the collaboration between Cheryl Gross and Lucy English, Shop, both animations, demonstrated that animation works when the images and words work together, where you can’t see the seam between the two. Both showed the strength of the poem and the skill of the animator.
I noted that 11 of the 19 films, by nature of the poem or the choice of presentation, had a strong performance element. This reflects the balance of new work that I have seen emerging elsewhere. Poetry film is an ideal medium to embody spoken word poetry, and as a genre I think it will bring an immediate and urgent contribution to the field.
By design or chance, the curation at MIX 2017 brought a rhythm, line by line, film by film, that on a large scale was sustained to the end. The themes created a forward momentum — and that reflects the journey of poetry film itself.
Poetry Film screenings at the MIX conference, Bath Spa University, July 2017
2017 is a year which marks many significant anniversaries; political, sociological and creative. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Disputation to the church door in Wittenburg. Jane Austen died in 1817. 1917 marked the start of the Russian Revolution. In 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released by the Beatles and kicked off the Summer of Love, and in 1977 everything went punk.
To celebrate the human capacity for renewal and experimentation combined with deep thought, the themes for MIX 2017 are revolutions, regenerations, reflections. We asked artists/poets and digital writers to submit poetry films/film poems/video poetry responding to these themes. Twenty films have been selected from an international cohort and they will be screened in our Viewing Theatre throughout the duration of the conference.
This selection has been curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, co-founder of Liberated Words which creates, curates and screens poetry films, and Zata Banks, founder of PoetryFilm, an influential research arts project and film screening series.
The selected films reveal the energy and commitment to the poetry film genre by its practitioners, and explore the different approaches to combining words with moving image. Some of our filmmakers are well known and have received many accolades; others are new to the field.
Revolution
Othneil Smith, If We Must Die
Tommy Becker, Song for Disobedient Youth
Lemar Barrett, Electric Roses
Jordan Caylor, Untitled
Helen Dewbery, The Goose
Manuel Vilarinho, No Pais Dos Sacanas
Regeneration
Jim Pomeroy, Words
Marie Craven, Anatomy
Cindy St. Onge, Road to Damascus
Dave Bonta, Grassland
Matthew Griffith, Pain in Colour
Reflections
Damon Moore, The Multi Storey Car Park in Trenchard Street
Shuhei Hatona, Seventh Window
Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, Illumination
Sophie Seita, Objects I Cannot Touch
Angie Bogachenko, Oracle of a Found Shoe
Cheryl Gross, Shop
Fin Harvor, The Carpet 1
Andrew Demirijan, I Tremble with Anticipation
Kate Flaherty, A Mouse’s Prayer
More information about the films and the film makers/poets will be posted on the MiX conference website.
Call for poetry films: MIX 2017 conference
Bath Spa University’s bucolic Newton Park campus may seem an unlikely venue for an important international conference on writing and technology, but apparently it has “the best specialist digital and studio resources for teaching in the South West [U.K.] – equal to anything found in top commercial organisations and broadcast companies.” The MIX 2017 conference sounds truly interdisciplinary, with “a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions and workshops. Alongside scholars and researchers, artists, creative writers and creative technologists interested in literary forms are welcome to submit proposals.” More to the point for our interests, the organizers have issued a special call for poetry films.
CALL FOR POETRY FILMS
MIX 2017: REVOLUTIONS, REGENERATIONS, REFLECTIONS
BATH SPA UNIVERSITY, NEWTON PARK CAMPUS. 10-12 JULY 2017
The themes for this year’s conference are revolutions, regenerations, reflections. We would like to encourage artists/poets and digital writers to submit poetry films/ film poems/video poetry to be screened during MIX in our Viewing Theatre at Newton Park campus. Poetry films/ film poems/ video poetry is an emerging genre that fuses the use of spoken-word poetry, visual images, and sound to create a stronger representation and interpretation of the meaning being conveyed.
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR FILMS
Short films should be submitted via email using a direct link to Youtube, Vimeo or an open link to Dropbox or WeTransfer. The email subject line should read ‘Your Name; Poetry Film Submission’ and the body of the email should include a 50-word description of the film.
Maximum 2 submissions per artist, these can be sent in the same email. This email should be sent to mix@bathspa.ac.uk by Wednesday 1st March.
The films will be selected and curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and Zata Banks (founder of PoetryFilm research art project https://poetryfilm.org)
VIEWING THEATRE TECH SPECS
4K HD projector and 5.1 surround sound
REQUIREMENTS
- Poetry films/ film poems/ video poetry up to 3 minutes.
- Submitted via email using a direct link to Youtube, Vimeo or an open link to Dropbox or WeTransfer.
- Email subject: ‘Your Name; Poetry Film Submission’; and the body of the email should include a 50-word description of the film.
- No more than 2 submissions per artist, these can be sent in the same email.
- Films must relate in some way to the conference’s themes: Revolutions, Regenerations and Reflections.
- English language or with English language subtitles.
- Deadline: Wednesday 1st March 2017.
If you would like to attend the conference please click on the ‘Bookings’ tab.
In Retrospect: a Manifesto and its Underpinnings
Last summer, I was invited to present a keynote address to the Poetry/Translation/Film conference organized by the University of Montpellier. Like a tour guide, I selected 19 videopoems, introducing each one. The venue was the Utopia, an aging, funky little cinema.
A few months ago, the organizers contacted me that they intend to publish a book of the proceedings and they were going to include my Manifesto, translated into French. Could I add a text “in which you look back on what you wrote then, say if there is anything you would revise if you were to rewrite your manifesto now, tell the reader of any developments between now and then, and what you foresee for the future?”
The questions were apt, as it occurred to me that it was around this time, 5 years ago, that I began writing what turned into the Manifesto. So here it is.
For those who may have trouble accessing Academia.edu, here’s the same PDF, uploaded with Tom’s permission to Moving Poems. —Ed.
Multimedia-related panels at AWP 2016
The annual AWP conference is the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America, with more than 12,000 attendees and some 550 on-site panel discussions, readings and other events, to say nothing of the numerous off-site events. This year, it will be held in Los Angeles, so you’d think there might be at least one panel on poetry film, but I couldn’t find any in the online program. As with AWP 2015, however, there are a number of panels with at least some bearing on multimedia, cross-genre collaborations, and the like. Here are some I spotted (click through to read about the presenters):
R185. The Poetry of Comics
Room 411, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
12:00 pm to 1:15 pmThe combination of text and image holds the power to create indivisible meaning on the page. Just as poets ground their work in the arrangement of words, ordered by such elements as sound or sense, most cartoonist-poets gravitate toward comics’ foundational device of juxtaposition. The tradition of comics has created generous, exciting spaces for the poetic, lyric, and hybrid. In this panel, artists showcase and read from works that live at the intersection of the visual and the poetic.
(The above is one of at least three poetry comics-related panels on the schedule.)
R227. Visual Arts in Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition Classrooms
Room 510, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmWriters and teachers of poetry, fiction, plays, and screenplays discuss their use of visual arts in creative writing, literature, and composition classrooms. Moving beyond ekphrasis, these educators and writers describe assignments that promote parallel thinking, metacognition, and creative problem-solving via various mediums and games at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
R204. Poetry, Politics, and Place: A Reading and Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Luis J. Rodriguez, Sponsored by Poets House
Petree Hall, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmThese leading poets read their poems and discuss their poetry-activism in New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and around the country. Each engages poetic practice and community building with projects that expand poetry’s place in our lives and culture: Griffiths through photography, Nye through writing for children, and Rodriguez through publishing projects and political organizing. The transformative power of poetry brings these three together to talk about how we can make a better world.
(Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an accomplished videopoet.)
F119. Necessary Hybridity: The Politics & Performance of Making Multigenre, Multimedia, Multiethnic Literature Visible
Room 502 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 amHybridity in literature is often thought of as a kind of cross-pollination that leads to “vigor.” But what happens when hybridity is considered through the lens of political and aesthetic necessity? From queer politics to POC feminism to postcoloniality, hybrid forms have been a critical part of making visible otherwise illegible experiences. Join five writers as they explore the significance of hybridity to queerness, trans culture, black bodies, mixed-race narratives, and erased histories.
F249. Comics, Films, Songs, and More: Multimodality in Creative Writing and Composition Courses
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pmOur students function as visually literate composers, engaging with writing and reading across multiple modes of communication. Hear from a panel of instructors that embrace their students’ comfort with multimodality by teaching in multimodal formats and assigning both composition and creative writing assignments that push students outside their comfort zones and into the types of writing they’re most likely to encounter on the job.
S125. Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Beyond Mere Description
Room 505, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
9:00 am to 10:15 amContemporary ekphrasis has been described as a form of critical meditation that mixes commentary, homage, resistance, argument, and self-criticism, but what does it look like in practice, especially given digital tools? And how does one push beyond mere description or instrumentalization of the work of art? These panelists present examples from their own work and offer practical exercises, with an emphasis on digital technology, for community, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms.
S215. Why We Innovate: The Case for Hybrid Genres
Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pmEditors of and contributors to Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres discuss writing and teaching hybrid literature as innovative acts of artistic, social, and cultural criticism, and as radical self-creation. Panelists discuss why writers mix forms and provide ideas and examples for crafting and teaching hybrid genres, focusing on blendings of visual, performative, lyrical, and narrative techniques.
S253. From Page to Screen: Exploring Successful Adaptation with Industry Insiders
Room 501, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Saturday, April 2, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pmAuthors have more opportunities than ever to bring their works to the screen, but the complexity of that process has increased exponentially. This panel, presented by the Authors Guild, explains film and television adaptation through the insights of those best equipped to reveal its secrets: authors whose works have been adapted; producers and agents who select, sell, and develop books for Hollywood; and industry executives (HBO, Lionsgate) who oversee that lucky, and laborious, journey.
Incidentally, the AWP website does have a videos section, with “Videos of select featured presentations from the more than 550 events offered at the AWP Conference & Bookfair.”
Videopoetry and poetry-film events for June
June 5 in Tampere, Finland
Video Poetry Workshop by Swoon (fully booked)
During the workshop day attendees will compose one finished video poem, which will be presented the next day during the video poetry showcase at the Annikki Poetry Festival.
June 6 in Tampere, Finland
Video Poetry Showcase @ Annikki Poetry Festival
Finnish videopoet J.P. Sipilä has curated a videopoetry showcase for the festival. He has selected ten interesting videopoems from artists around the world.
The video poems will be shown nonstop in the underground gallery from 11 am to 8 pm.
June 6 in Boston
Martha McCollough videopoem screening at Away Mission Opening Reception, Atlantic Works Gallery
Martha McCollough ventures into new media (macro lens photography,) new subject (text as image,) and new scale. She will also be showing several video poems. McCollough is a videographer and writer who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Her videopoems have been exhibited internationally, and have appeared in Triquarterly, Rattapallax, and El Aleph
June 8 in Rotterdam
Poetry on / as Film with IFFR @ 46th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam
On Monday, 8 June, Poetry International and the International Film Festival Rotterdam jointly present, for the first time, an evening film program at Cinerama. Poetry on / as Film includes the premieres of two exceptional poet-documentaries: John Albert Jansen brings the life of German-Romanian Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller to the screen, and Wim Brands and Peter Gielissen compose a poignant portrait of the Dutch poet Roni Wieg. Additionally, under the name Poetry Shorts, a selection of short films and animated poems will be screened, including work from the festival poets Tonnus Oosterhoff, Pierre Alferi and Yanko González.
I see that the festival also has a brief video trailer.
June 10, 17, 24 & July 1 in Buenos Aires
Seminario de Videopoesía. Un lenguaje entre la palabra, el sonido y la imagen en movimiento.
Four-week course taught by Javier Robledo. Registration closes June 8.
June 13 in London
Mahu in Video at the Hardy Tree Gallery.
The emerging medium of poetry film or cinepoetry, crossing poetic principles with video art has often been overtaken by limited, dualistic collaborations. This evening aims to screen the more complex understandings of this new potentiality, another weapon in the pocket of the contemporary poet – the moving image. Co-curated by Dave Spittle & Gareth Evans
– Films from Joshua Alexander, David Kelly-Mancaux, Simon Barraclough, Caroline Alice Lopez, Robert Herbert McClean & more
June 18-19 in Montpellier, France
PoeTransFi (Poetry/Translation/Film – Poésie/Traduction/Film) Conference
The aim of this conference, which could also be entitled “The film as poem, the poem as film: A spectrum of translations”, is to revisit the inter-relations between poetry and film, envisaged under the angle of translation, in a broad sense of the term. We would like to pay special attention to questions of rhythm and montage, starting from the work of film directors and film editors who wrote about the topic in recent years, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky and Walter Murch.
June 21 in London
PoetryFilm Solstice at The Groucho Club.
Submissions may still be welcome for this event. Here are the guidelines.
Recent talks on filmpoetry and videopoetry: Alan Fentiman, Tony Williams, Ross Sutherland, Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas
Terra Incognita: Mapping the Filmpoem is a beautifully shot conversation between filmmaker Alan Fentiman and poet Tony Williams. Two years ago, they collaborated on a documentary about the link between walking and poetic inspiration called Roam to Write, which is also very worth watching. As for Terra Incognita,
This film paper was shown at the “Topographies: places to find something” conference at Bristol University on 15th May 2015.
This is the beginning of an ongoing discussion. We would welcome any comments or suggestions for other film poems to look at. [link added]
https://vimeo.com/127866132
And here’s a very different talk: Ross Sutherland‘s Thirty Poems / Thirty Videos: End of Residency wrap-up for The Poetry School. I’ve been sharing some of those videos at the main site, but you can watch them all in chronological order at the Poetry School blog or in reverse chronological order at Sutherland’s Tumblr.
It’s instructive to compare these two videos. Right away, the difference in production values should clue us in to the gulf that separates these two aesthetic philosophies. Fentiman is a trained filmmaker, as shown by the care taken even to coordinate their wardrobe with the background, while Sutherland’s vlog-style video seems relatively unpremeditated and completely unedited, with the annoying result that the sound and picture get badly out of sync by the end of it. But Sutherland’s background as a maker of poetry videos is in literal videotape:
So in some respects, the aesthetic differences between these two talks, both in their style and in their substance, can be ascribed to the distinction between poetry film and videopoetry often drawn by Tom Konyves, for example in his recent essay, “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen“:
The way I see it, the writer who uses “poetry film” automatically designates the work as more film than poetry. I myself began to create what I called “videopoems” when I was more a poet than a video artist, so I naturally considered these works as “poetry”.
However, it’s not quite that simple, because none of these gentlemen seems quite ready to think of a film or a video as a poem per se; some of Sutherland’s videos are mere illustrations of pre-existing texts, while Fentiman and Williams speak favorably of Alastair Cook’s Filmpoem model, which goes part-way toward Konyves in its embrace of the centrality of poetic juxtaposition of images and text. But most interesting of all, I think, is the fact that the talks converge in emphasizing the positive results that can come from working ekphrastically: starting with film footage or found video and writing a text in response. So more than anything, I think, the differences here reflect a difference in venue and audience. Sutherland is making web videos for a younger audience weaned on YouTube remixes, vlogging, and live performance poetry, while Fentiman and Williams are oriented toward the film world with its focus on art houses and festivals, and perhaps share a preference for more mainstream, page-poetry.
Incidentally, for those who’d like to see Sutherland in person, there are still tickets available for the second run of his Standby For Tape Back-Up performance at London’s Soho Theatre, July 6-11.
Bridging the gap between these two talks is a third pair of talks given by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas in late April at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, as part of the Text(e) Image Beat videopoetry exhibition. These however are available not in video form but as a PDF. LeBlanc alludes to the influence of yet another audience and medium: television.
Creators are now presenting their texts visually and / or performing their poems. Many have realized that messages can be effectively conveyed using the multimodal character of video poetry. Similarly to advertisements created for marketing campaigns, these works are characteristically short, less than 5 minutes in duration. You have probably all seen the new ads that read like poetry, drawing you into new lifestyles through product placement. Picture the mood and a message without the bottom line and you might be closer to the concept of video poetry.
She goes on to say:
While many of the historical examples of text(e) / image / beat used in combination do come from advertising / product placement / war propaganda, the tools and techniques out there for relaying messages have become highly accessible for artist use in this new century. In the late 1990’s when access to digital tools opened up, artists stepped in to embrace the possibilities for expanding their use. While New Media currently tends to imply experimental computer programming, video use in storytelling continues to hold interest.
Whether working with images, text and sound or all three, these media tools offer the possibility of bringing something that has escaped from the marketing machine we are all rolling with, and sometimes under. It is the possibility for impacting an internal change through a product that is not defined by its bottom line. It might be through ideas embedded in a world apart from imagined clichés. It might be an opportunity to change the pace, which at times might be useful for resetting the clock.
Do read the whole thing. Brief as it is, her talk opens up new avenues for thinking about videopoetry, at least for me.
As for Dugas’ talk, “DONNER UN SENS AU MONDE ENTIER,” I don’t know French, so I’m not entirely sure what he said, but I gather from Google Translate that there’s some emphasis on the influence of video art, the relationship with political and environmental activism, and the central role of the digital revolution. His conclusion:
Lorsque j’ai commencé à écrire de la poésie, j’ai aussi commencé à expérimenter avec le super-8, créant des bandes sonores en direct pour mes films. Le mélange du texte, de l’image et de la musique semblait une opération naturelle, mais aussi magique. Il ne s’agissait pas seulement d’un va-et-vient entre le texte, l’image et le son : la nouvelle entité devenait une traverse pour découvrir quelque chose de nouveau. Nous savons maintenant que l’espace entre les disciplines est fragile, que les murs sont maintenant pénétrables et nous sommes reconnaissants pour cette évolution des choses. Nous pouvons enfin voyager d’un genre à un autre pour essayer de donner un sens au monde entier.
[When I began to write poetry, I also started to experiment with super-8, creating soundtracks live for my films. The mixture of text, image and music seemed a natural process, but also magical. It was not just a back-and-forth between text, image and sound: the new entity became a crossbar for discovering something new. We know now that the space between disciplines is fragile, the walls are now penetrable, and we are thankful for this evolution of things. We can finally travel from one genre to another to try to make sense of the world as a whole.]
AWP 2015: videopoetry- and multimedia-related panels
With more than 12,000 attendees, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs or AWP conference is by far the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America. This year it’s being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to Motionpoems, and if you’re attending, be sure to check out the Motionpoems display at the book fair.
Visit us in Booth #1036! We’ll have:
- a preview of Season 6, produced in partnership with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
- free lesson plans with prompts by Janet Burroway
- more information on our Big Bridges contest
- and much, much more!
(That’s from their email newsletter.)
AWP is this very week, April 8-12, so I’m a little late in getting this out, but I was excited to see nine different panel discussions that are directly or indirectly related to videopoetry and multimedia. I think this is as good an indication as any of the growing literary prestige of multimedia experimentation. Only two of the following panels conflict with each other, so if you’re attending, be sure to check out as many of these as you can. (I’ll be happy to post reports if anyone wants to write them.) Click on the titles for more information, including biographies of the panelists.
R204. Hypertext: Bookish Writing for a Digital Age
Room 200 H&I, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Susannah Schouweiler, Halimah Marcus, Dustin Luke Nelson, Jamie Millard, David Doody
Panelists will speak to the interplay of medium and message as lit mag fare and literary journalism migrate from print to web-based platforms. We’ll highlight new forms of online storytelling and innovations in meaningful reader engagement in this new wave of bookish writing, marked by an increasingly interdisciplinary way of writing and publishing inclined toward more inclusive critical conversations and contributions by “professional” journalists and critics, writers and readers alike.
R237. Reimagining the Author: Pedagogies of Collaboration, Chance, and New Media in Poetry Workshops
Room 205 A&B, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Timothy Bradford, Susan Briante, Joseph Harrington, Cheryl Pallant, Grant Matthew Jenkins
Collaboration, digitization, automation, and conceptualization are just some of the ways traditional notions of authorship can be reimagined in the classroom. Panelists will discuss how rethinking these notions can unlock students’ creativity and critical thinking about their own writing, and they will share lesson plans geared toward helping community, undergraduate, and graduate students generate innovative work and practice new methods they can later apply in more traditional assignments.
R280. Ut Cinéma Poesis: Using Film in Poetry Workshops
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Thursday, April 9, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: James Pate, Sandra Lim, Lisa Fishman, Arda Collins, James Shea
Pasolini wrote poetry. Frank O’Hara made a film. Poetry and film have long found inspiration in one another. This panel of five poets explores ways to use film (Bergman, Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Trecartin) in poetry workshops. How can film lead to writing exercises and discussions about poetic form, image, repetition, sound, and juxtaposition? We also address new, evolving technologies, such as iMovie and the iPhone, and consider how they might be used in a poetry class.
R234. The Essay Blinks: Multimedia Writers on Crafting the Visual Essay
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Sarah Minor, Mark Ehling, Amaranth Borsuk, Eric LeMay
As literary publishing adjusts to the presence of both small-scale presses and web-based magazines, more publishers are adapting to and even selecting for writing that experiments visually. But what makes a multimedia essay? And what makes a good one? Specifically, which techniques render multimedia elements inextricable from rather than extraneous to a text? On this panel, four writers focus on the craft of visual texts and address how ancient essay forms are thriving in the newest media.
F204. Word Meets Image: The Video Essay
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Friday, April 10, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Ned Stuckey-French, Eula Biss, Kristen Radtke, John Bresland
New technologies (iPhones, editing software, YouTube, etc.) have made possible a new literary form—the video essay. This panel will investigate the video essay, including its relationship to other genres (e.g., print essays, graphic memoirs, film, documentaries, etc.), the relationship of text to image, video essays in the classroom, collaboration, curating essays for online magazines, developing scripts, editing, and the use of animation, sound, found footage, titles, and other techniques.
F274. Writing with Media: Poets, Printers, and Programmers
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Friday, April 10, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Kevin McFadden, Todd Boss, Katherine McNamara, Lisa Pearson, Steve Woodall
The art of the book in the digital age is the art of collaboration. Writer, poet, printer, programmer, filmmaker, animator, composer, publisher: all play vital roles in new media, widening the role of authorship. This panel of writers who are also editors-printers-filmmakers-programmers-publishers demonstrates, on screen and on the page, the emergence of the book as a total work of art, from text to voice, photo, scan, and video, forming a unified expression where codex meets multimedia.
S172. Literature On Air
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panelists: Marianne Kunkel, Jeffrey Brown, Don Share, Michael Nye
The panel will explore innovative ways in which the literary arts have achieved renewed life through various broadcast media, including video, vimeos, and the exciting rise in literary podcasts. Editors of Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Missouri Review, and PBS NewsHour will discuss strategies, challenges, and opportunities that come with creating on-air media platforms for the literary arts and what these productions mean for their vision for their pages.
S204. Video Poems and Cross-Genre Collaboration: A Conversation and Screening with Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich, and Trevino Brings Plenty
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Jocelyn Hale, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, National Book Award-winning author of The Round House, collaborates on video poems with her sister Heid and an all-indigenous filmmaking crew including musician-poet Trevino Brings Plenty and filmmaker Elizabeth Day.
S284. Creative Writing in the Digital Age
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Saturday, April 11, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Joseph Rein, Doug Dechow, Janelle Adsit, Trent Hergenrader, Michael Dean Clark
Digital technology has a profound and ever-increasing impact on creative writing; however, this impact is often overlooked in the traditional creative writing classroom. This panel addresses creative solutions to utilizing technology in traditional and hybrid genres, from digital poetics to social media to game theory. The panelists discuss traditional, hybrid, and online-only classrooms, and how instructors can integrate digital tools to enhance creativity both in process and product.
News roundup: Text(e) Image Beat exhibition, “Send and Receive” videos, Facebook video embedding and more
The videopoetry exhibition Text(e) Image Beat, curated by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas, is now showing at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It runs through May 1.
With: Heid E. Erdrich + R. Vincent Moniz, Jr + Jonathan Thunder; Hannah Black; Matt Mullins; Martha Cooley; John D. Scott; Tom Konyves; Swoon (AKA Marc Neys) + Howie Good; Michel Félix Lemieux; Kevin Barrington + Bruce Ryder; Maryse Arseneault; Fernando Lazzari; Matthew Hayes + Sasha Patterson + Lee Rosevere.
[…]
The call for Text(e) / Image / Beat did not specify particular themes. Through the necessity of paring down the choices and assembling a flow of works that complemented and gave space to each other, we became aware of recurrent elements. In spite of the fact that the videos originate from many distinct locations, ideas of awaiting / finding miracles and mysteries of living, are frequent. Each work exhibits innovation and imagination, calling upon a wide range of skills to layer meaning. Slam poetry, rants, softly spoken words, hand written notes, and remixes are all used to articulate.
Click through to read the rest of the detailed and annotated curators’ commentary.
*
I discovered this week that videos of presentations from the “Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” conference at FACT in Liverpool have been posted to the web at artplayer.tv. The videos are embeddable, but with code that will probably not show up in feeds or email, so I will just link to the presentations here. Check out presentations by: Suzie Hanna; Zata Kitowski; Marco Bertamini; Deryn Rees-Jones; Jason Nelson; George Szirtes; Judith Palmer; and Roger McKinley (the host). They’re all worth your time, but I found Rees-Jones’ talk to be especially thought-provoking. (See also the earlier report at Moving Poems Magazine: “Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views.”)
*
News emerged this week from Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, that Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. Venturebeat reports.
A lot of poetry videos, especially of the more rough-and-ready sort (e.g. self-recorded recitations), are only uploaded to Facebook, so it will be helpful to have the freedom to share them on sites like this one. But Facebook launching a proper video hosting platform isn’t necessarily something I welcome, given the corporation’s poor track record with privacy and its ambition to swallow up the independent web, which Facebook succeeds in reproducing about as well as the Mall of America reproduces an agora.
*
More details are emerging about Media Poetry Studio, the multimedia poetry summer camp for girls in Silicon Valley. The website now lists the time and location (July 20-31 at Edwin Markham House in San Jose’s History Park at Kelley Park, home of Poetry Center San Jose). And a March 27 article in the San Jose State University newspaper Spartan Daily interviews camp organizers Erica Goss and David Perez:
In terms of tuition, Goss said the program is “pretty reasonable,” costing $799 for two weeks.
The three poet laureates started planning the camp last spring.
“We had to secure funding, we had to write grants, we had to come up with curriculum—which we’re still working on—we had to find a place to do it and a fiscal sponsor since we’re not a nonprofit,” Goss said. “There’s lots of work and we’ll be doing it right up until the day it starts.”
Goss said they want to be able to give each student individualized attention so there is room for about 20 young women.
The Indiegogo campaign is now 62% funded, with $3,075 raised toward a $5,000 goal.
*
And finally, speaking of Erica Goss, she has an essay in The Pedestal Magazine about her experience at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October.
Erica Goss: Video Poetry Summer Camp for Girls & San Francisco Writers Conference
I hope to light some creative fires this summer at Media Poetry Studio, a camp for teenaged girls I’m running with David Perez, the Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, and Jennifer Swanton Brown, the Poet Laureate of Cupertino. Here’s the video from our IndieGoGo campaign:
Getting girls to participate more fully in technology and expressive writing
The camp is the result of a brainstorm between David Perez and me. I ran a poetry-writing summer camp in 2013 in San Jose, and I wanted to do something like that again, but with video poetry. I was aware that Alastair Cook and Marc Neys had taught video poetry to children, with very successful results. Since I’ve taught mostly teens, I imagined a camp for students of that age group. David took it a step further: why not run a camp for teen girls? It would combine art, writing and technology, and serve an audience that might otherwise not have this kind of experience.
Studies show that girls generally outperform boys academically until middle school, when they fall behind. This is exactly the same time that boys leap ahead of girls, exploring, taking risks, and experimenting with technology. We wanted to do something about that, using video poetry as our medium. Video poetry, a blend of art, writing, and technology, will teach our students many new skills: filming, photography, editing, story-boarding, and how to envision their poem as visual art. They will also be able to share the films they make with their friends and family.
The three of us have worked extensively in teaching, writing and performance to students in middle and high schools. David is also a filmmaker and photographer, and has made his own video poems. (As the columnist for The Third Form, I’ve watched hundreds of video poems, and commented on many, but I’ll be teaching poetry.) Jennifer Gigantino will teach video editing, videography and special effects. Jennifer Swanton Brown, co-founder and Poet Laureate of Cupertino, has worked in the classroom teaching poetry to children since 2000 as part of California Poets in the Schools, a 50-year-old arts organization. We also have spoken-word poet Kim Johnson on board, a performer and youth poetry instructor.
We aim to get our students out shooting film and taking pictures on the first day. Our curriculum will be mostly hands-on, with demonstration and guidance from our staff. We’ll have the girls create video-haikus to start, and then longer works as they gain skill and confidence. They will be engaged in a course of study that will encourage them to participate more fully in technology and expressive writing.
When poets see video poems for the first time
Technology and expressive writing were evident on February 13, 2015, when I participated in a panel titled “Powering Up Your Poetry with Film” at the 2015 San Francisco Writers Conference. Among panel sessions with titles such as “The World of Romance Fiction” and “The Elements of Killer Thrillers,” a group of poets gave the outsider art of poetry film their full attention. I was one of three panelists. The other two, poets Joan Gelfand and Chris Cole, are well-known in the Bay Area arts scene, as is our moderator, Rebecca Foust.
Although we did not prepare as a group beforehand, Joan, Chris and I agreed to introduce our work with little explanation, letting the films speak for themselves. It’s fairly difficult to describe video poetry to someone who has never seen it before. It’s better to just show the film and answer questions later, allowing the first-time viewer his or her own discovery. And that’s how we ran the panel: a short intro, the films, and then an extended Q&A.
Chris Cole made several short films, which he calls “journal entries,” as complements to his novel, the speed at which I travel. He used still shots, his own and public domain images, combining them with narration to create highly watchable, well-edited visual collages:
http://youtu.be/hZR64UwX5WA
http://youtu.be/MhJZCPA-t_4
Joan Gelfand’s video was based on her poem, “The Ferlinghetti School of Poetics,” a poem from her 2014 book, The Long Blue Room. It is not ready for release yet, but Joan promised that it’s coming soon. A Hollywood filmmaker created the video for Joan, and it’s a compelling blend of images, both moving and still, and sound.
I showed the video poem “Arrhythmia,” which Swoon made using my poem, some film I shot of my son drawing, and Michael Dickes’ narration:
The audience for the panel leaned forward in their seats, clearly impressed and—as Rebecca, our moderator stated—“intruded upon.” In general, when poets see video poems for the first time, they are both amazed and empowered: amazed because they’ve never seen anything like a video poem before, and empowered because they immediately want to make their own (or have someone make one for them). That’s how I felt the first time I stumbled across Moving Poems a few years ago, and I recognized the combination of excitement and enthusiasm that sparks creativity.
Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views
I was happy to see a comprehensive, 17-page report [PDF] on the Feb 5 Send and Receive conference about “Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) from the poet John Davies, A.K.A. Shedman. His highly literate and personal take on the conference gives one a good sense of the sorts of issues under discussion and the often conflicting opinions of the participants. Davies also did his own research on poetry film to flesh out the article, which he titled “Send and Receive: misaligned model or magnificent mix?” It concludes with a brief description of each film shown. Check it out.
Davies includes his reactions to two presentations that are also online. Zata Kitowski has posted her talk [PDF] on the semiotics of poetry film at the PoetryFilm website. And while it doesn’t relate to poetry film per se, George Szirtes’ presentation on how he uses Twitter and Facebook to draft poems is nevertheless very interesting, and may be read on his blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).
Szirtes also shared some informal reactions to the conference, including the poetry films, in a post on Facebook that’s fully public (i.e., you don’t have to be a Facebook friend of a friend, or even a logged-in user, to read it). Although his assessment of the films was a bit less critical than Davies’, they agreed on which was the stand-out: Dream Poem by Danny Caswell Dann Casswell. “The Dream Poem won it for me, because the idea of the poem was the idea of the film—the one was the other,” Szirtes writes. And Davies called it “superb – witty, clever but thoughtful animation that played with the media. A true poetry film with the right mix and balance.” Unfortunately, I can’t find any trace of this film on the web. Hopefully that will change at some point. It’s available to view on the PoetryFilm site.
News round-up: FACT symposium, Tang Dynasty poetry films and more
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), which describes itself as “the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool,” will be hosting a day-long symposium on February 5: Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century. I’m not sure why it’s scheduled for a weekday rather than the weekend, but it certainly sounds interesting. The topic is somewhat reminiscent of the colloquium discussion at the most recent ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Hopefully they will avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into there by defining their terms (such as “platform”) a bit more clearly.
FACT, in association with the University of Liverpool, PoetryFilm and The Poetry Society, is pleased to invite you to imagine the future of poetry at our symposium Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century. With presentations from artists, scientists and thought leaders, the day examines innovative platforms involved in contemporary poetic practices.
How has the digital age changed the way in which poetry is written, performed, communicated and received? Further exploring themes demonstrated in Torque Symposium: An act of Reading, the day will focus on the prevalent difficulties, dialogues and collaborative possibilities that new technological avenues have revealed in the world of poetry.
The symposium will include three distinct discussion areas, with audiences invited to join facilitated discussions after each segment. Confirmed speakers include George Szirtes (poet and translator), Deryn Rees Jones (poet and director of Centre for New and International Writing), Zata Kitowski (Director PoetryFilm), Marco Bertamini and Georg Meyer (Visual Perception Labs UoL), Suzie Hanna (animator) and Jason Nelson (hypermedia poet and artist, Australia).
More information TBA soon.
*
A news story from October, recently posted to the ZEBRA Facebook group by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, also caught my attention this week, about a very ambitious plan by CCTV and the China Central Newreels Corporation to make 108 short films based on Tang Dynasty poems. I can’t embed the English-language newscast video here; click through for that, because it includes brief scenes from a couple of the films. Here’s a bit of the transcript:
“I think film communicates Chinese traditional culture in a very powerful and vivid way. I think it will really help young people appreciate the beauty of Chinese poetry,” said President of Beijing Film Academy Zhang Huijun.
The production team carefully selected 108 poems to be adapted into short films. It explores the works through story-telling and recreating the life of the time. Each film is about 15 minutes long and involves top Chinese actors and directors.
“We selected the best poems. We also selected them based on whether it is easy to make them into a story. That is vital for the short film,” said deputy director of China Central Television Gao Feng.
The initiative aims to promote China’s rich heritage in literature, especially among the younger generation. 70 of the total 108 short films have already been completed, with the rest scheduled to be finished before the end of this year.
The organizers have also invited 108 young singers to perform the theme songs for the films. They are also planning to produce picture-story books based on the poems. The goal is to eventually promote the entire collection of poems from the Tang dynasty.
By “the entire collection,” I suppose they are are referring to the famous and ubiquitous anthology of 300 Tang poems, though that would of course involve also making films out of short lyrical poems lacking in strong narrative elements.
I must say the emphasis on story-telling, popular appeal, and “recreating the life of the time” worries me. I don’t want to pass judgement before seeing any of the films, but experience with big-budget poetry films made elsewhere makes me fear that these films will add little or nothing to the poems and risk achieving the opposite of the project’s stated goal: rather than making poetry more appealing, they will communicate the message that it needs to be sexed up and turned into glossy period drama in order to hold anyone’s attention.
I hope I’m wrong, and that these films do challenge audiences and help translate ancient poems into a new idiom. Because Classical Chinese texts do in fact need to be translated in some way in order to be comprehensible to a speaker of a modern Chinese language such as Mandarin. It’s easy to see how film could assist in that regard, because the Chinese characters are a strong bridge to the ancient language. Calligraphy or type animations similar to what Nissmah Roshdy did with classical Arabic in The Dice Player could help bring the texts across without resorting to actual translation into Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Alternatively or in addition, subtitling into modern languages could be used with the original language in the voiceover. Traditional poetry recitation, a stylized and beautiful art, could be incorporated into the soundtracks.
As for the imagery, I do think it’s a mistake to leave out all contemporary references, which might well serve as further bridges, adding depth and nuance. One element of Classical Chinese poetry that’s in danger of being lost even to modern Chinese intellectuals is their wealth of allusions to older poems and other texts — the vast libraries that were committed to memory under the Confucian educational system. I wonder if it might not be possible to somehow work a few of those allusions in through film collage techniques? At the very least, filmmakers could strive for a roughly equivalent level of allusive depth by incorporating references to well-known movies, pop songs and the like. I’m simply worried that too conservative an approach risks dishonoring the spirit of the texts. It would be as if Tang Dynasty poets composed only gushi and never experimented with the then-daring jintishi. If they’d been that allergic to innovation, we wouldn’t still be reading their poems today.
*
The January issue of Poetry brings news of a poetry film still in production, an English-language documentary tentatively titled Las Chavas focusing on girls on a Honduran orphanage who are learning to write poetry in English and Spanish, with the aid of an American Episcopal priest and the poet Richard Blanco. A brief essay is followed by a selection of the girls’ poems. Check it out. Honduras has always punched well above its weight where poetry is concerned, so I’ll be looking forward to the film.
*
The Athens-based collective + the Institute [for Experimental Arts], sponsors of the annual International Film Poetry Festival, have launched a new website to replace their old Blogspot site. It’s certainly easier to navigate, not to mention better looking. The Festivals link in the header takes one to a gallery-style archive of posts about the poetry film festival.
