~ literary magazines and websites ~
Swoon interview and the upcoming ZEBRA festival
Erica Goss’ Third Form column for October features an interview with the amazing Marc Neys (a.k.a. Swoon) and a look ahead to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival this month in Berlin.
I enjoyed getting a bit more of Marc’s backstory than I knew before:
Although his work has the look of a seasoned professional, Swoon started making his distinctive videos only two years ago. “I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid,” he told me when we talked in August. “When I was fourteen, I told myself I would make a film someday. I watch movies with an eye to the way they’re made. It drives my wife crazy, but I’m always pointing things out to her when we watch films together, especially if the film isn’t very good.” Swoon’s experience – from running “the smallest theater company in Belgium” – just he and his wife – to playing in a band and singing in English when he was sixteen – come together in his poetry videos.
His remarks on craft and technique were also interesting:
Craft is very important in Swoon’s work. “I spend a lot of time looking at footage, but I have an eye for what I want. A bad film can make a great video poem – it’s in the editing.”
He’s made most of his videos with “a cheap DV camera and some cheap German editing software. I need to upgrade my equipment, but I’m worried that better equipment will make me lazy. With my old equipment, I’m forced to be a better filmmaker. I want people to be impressed with my eye, not the camera’s.”
As far as what the video shows, Swoon advises, “Videos should not just show what’s going on in the poem – as in, the poem mentions a leaf falling and sure enough, you see a leaf falling. I want something that takes more imagination.”
Be sure to read the whole thing and watch the embedded videos.
Moving Poems and Motionpoems profiled in Connotation Press
I was pleased and honored to have been interviewed by Erica Goss for her second column on videopoetry at Connotation Press, along with poet Todd Boss, the founder of Motionpoems. Todd and I do have some differences in perspective, but Erica highlights our areas of agreement — especially our interest in widening the audience for poetry.
It’s always useful to see one’s work through another’s eyes. What struck me in Erica’s description of Moving Poems was her quite reasonable analogy between author-made videopoetry and self-publshing, which had for some reason never occurred to me before.
Since the site focuses on poets and poetry, the videos Dave shows must include the poem’s text, whether spoken or as a visual element. This is a site for DIY, creative types, and therefore Dave features many poet-made videos. (Poets are well-known for self-publishing; Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense, and gave away more copies than he sold.)
I guess I am so focused on the creative side of things, and so accustomed to looking at the web through a blogger’s eyes, that the act of uploading to Vimeo and YouTube just seems like a natural and necessary final step of making a video these days. I am of course aware that some poet-filmmakers market their work on DVDs, and so don’t upload more than a sample to video-sharing sites, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
But this has me thinking, because I’ve always considered author-made videopoems the ideal to strive for, and I most admire those poets who have taught themselves filmmaking in a serious way (or were smart enough to take film in college). Is it possible that in a literary culture in which self-publication is significantly less prestigious than publication by others, that the poet-filmmakers I so admire are at a disadvantage?
New column on videopoetry/filmpoetry at Connotation Press seeks submissions
The innovative online magazine Connotation Press has just launched a new column dedicated to videopoetry and related forms called The Third Form. It’s authored by San Francisco Bay-area poet Erica Goss, who writes:
My intent with this column is to open up a conversation about video poems. Every month I will feature a selection, so if you make video poems, please send me your work. We’ll post several submissions here. I will explore other topics such as the origins of video poems, their significance as an art form, screenings at festivals, and in-depth interviews. I’m also interested in the technical aspects of making video poems, so feel free to send me any craft tips you’ve picked up, whether they deal with cameras, software, royalty-free film footage, or sound.
Goss devotes the rest of her inaugural column to a brief survey of the field, sharing a few films and videos that illustrate the diverse range of approaches one encounters on the web these days, and I was pleased to see some of my favorites among those she cites. I like her conclusion:
In 1969, William Carlos Williams wrote that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words” and “as in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.” A video poem is also a machine, small or large, and capable of transporting the viewer to a new place of understanding.
I’ve updated the list of Journals that publish poetry videos to include The Third Form.
New list of journals that publish poetry videos
I’ve added a new page here gathering links to journals that publish poetry videos. As it says at the top of the page, it’s a list specifically of places where filmmakers and videopoets can submit unsolicited work: online journals, webpages of print journals and similar venues. I hope to keep this updated with new journals as I become aware of them (and regularly prune out those that stop publication), so please keep me apprised, via comments or email (bontasaurus[at]yahoo[dot]com), of any others I should add.
This joins two other lists of resources on the site, the list of poetry film festivals and web resources for videopoem makers, which includes links to free audio, film footage and the like.
Looming deadlines: litlive.ca videopoetry contest (July 1) and Co-Kisser Poetry Film Festival (July 3)
Don’t miss two great opportunities to showcase videopoetry/filmpoetry, both from the frozen north. The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance, litlive.ca, is paying actual money for three winners of its inaugural videopoetry contest. Entries may originate from any part of the world, but must be received no later than July 1. Meanwhile, the Co-Kisser Poetry-Film Festival is in its second year of hosting
an annual Poetry-Film Festival at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Co-Kisser is a local Minneapolis arts organization, but our festival showcases poetry-films from Minnesota and all over the world. The festival has open submissions and we’re looking for films that are inspired by poetry, based on poetry, and about poetry and poets. Live action, animation, short and feature films share an evening with live poetry readings, Q&A with filmmakers and poets, and live music.
Submissions are due by July 3. Here are the guidelines.
Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” featured as a “last poem I loved” at The Rumpus
The popular arts and culture magazine The Rumpus has a regular feature called “The Last Poem I Loved,” and the April 26 installment, by Dena Rash Guzman, focuses explicitly on the film version of a poem. This is of note not simply because it will be widely read, but because such detailed and highly personal reader/viewer responses to videopoems are far from common.
I didn’t really read the poem. The poem is a movie, too. I heard and saw and loved the poem.
It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. That reads as little bit new age, but I can explain the metaphor no better than Schomburg does in his poem-film. It is his own. It could be a redneck metaphor, or a hippie one, an academic one, or a Freudian one. Sometimes a metaphor is just a cigar.
I mean only to say, I met this poem at a time when it might have saved my life and I have returned to it many times since for CPR.
Call for submissions of videopoetry: Poetry International
Poetry International, a mainly print journal published annually at San Diego State University in California, is soliciting for submissions of “cinépoetry.”
We are looking for artistic, experimental, and challenging film/video interpretations of poetry that explore the intersection of poetic and cinematic expression. Selected work will be published online in the cinépoetry section of Poetry International.
Entries must be submitted on DVD (NTSC or HD only) or CD (.mov format only). Please note: videos in any format not mentioned above will not be accepted.
Running time for entries should not exceed 15 minutes. All entries must be in English.
All work submitted must be original. If portions of the submitted work contain material from third parties, author must have and be able to provide written permission to use such material.
Videopoetry makers Swoon and David Tomaloff featured at CoronationPress.com
Check out this terrific interview with Belgian filmmaker Swoon and American poet David Tomaloff about their recent collaboration on a triptych of videopoems. I loved learning about their collaborative process and how they thought of each other’s work, and as an amateur maker of videopoems I was especially impressed by some of Swoon’s thoughts about his approach, such as:
I love working with found material. Trying to give images, shot for a whole other purpose by someone you don’t know in a place you’ve never been, a new life and, more important so, a new meaning, is very liberating. It gives you a weird sense of power. Even the material I shoot myself is often not shot directly for a specific film. I try to build a library of images, shot by me and found footage, where I can wander around in when making a new film. On the other hand, it’s also very nice if I can shoot images the way I want them to be for a specific idea and poem.
Read the rest (and watch the triptych).
Introducing VidPoFilm
I am announcing the birth of a new online journal: VidPoFilm.
VidPoFilm explores the poetics of video and film poetry and offers critiques of works in this genre.
I am both curating and editing the material at VidPoFilm. So far, I’m posting my Video and Film Poem Fridays articles.
VidPoFilm is open to submissions — only articles on other video and film poems, this is not a self-promotion site for me or any other video or film poets — but I won’t have a description of my requirements ready for another month or two. Articles can be pre- or co-published in your own blogs, this is preferable in fact. My only rule, so far, is one article per year per video or film poet. Brilliant work is being produced world-wide in this field and I do not foresee running out of material. I’ve put up a loose “About” page and welcome comments and questions, which will help me to articulate what the journal is and seeks.
Subscribe by RSS feed to the site. Blogger offers a state-of-the-art blog that enables you to watch the videos in your Readers. VidPoFilm is about disseminating video and film poems far and wide while offering a way to ‘read’ them. The stats on the videos and films discussed is more important than the stats on the journal site, so please watch the films — they are ‘top notch’! These flicks are the crème de la crème.
Interview with “How Pedestrian” curator Katherine Leyton
Nic S. at Voice Alpha interviews Katherine Leyton, who stops people on the street and gets them to read poems on camera for her site How Pedestrian.
The visual element of the project, of course, was the main idea. I wanted to bring poetry to people in pubs and streets and taxis around Toronto, capture it on video and post it online. However, the visual aspect of a poem itself is also very important, and I think to fully absorb a poem you need to actually read it; this is why I decided to post the work next to the video. I really wanted the viewer be able to read along.
One of the most surprising results of the project so far has been the overwhelmingly positive public response.
The enthusiasm with which pedestrians agree to read for me is astonishing. I would say that out of every ten people I ask to read a poem, nine say yes. When I started, I never expected a 90% response rate, which speaks of my own misperceptions about the way the Canadian public views poetry. People are willing and curious, they just might not be inspired to seek it out on their own – they need a push. Many of my readers want to discuss the poem or poet with me after they read, and almost all are fascinated by the project.
