~ literary magazines and websites ~
Call for work: Poetry Film Live
Poetry Film Live, the magazine for all things related to poetry film and video, is open for submissions. Please send poetry films and videos via the submission page. Previously shown work is fine, but please send your best work!
We also publish articles and essays, and reviews of poetry films. If you wish us to consider these, send us a message about your work or submit it directly through the submission page.
Poetry Film Live began in 2016 and we have been honoured to publish work from established and emerging poetry filmmakers. To our contributors and readers — thank you for your continued support!
New Liberated Words website
Congratulations to Liberated Words—Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English’s videopoetry- and poetry film-promoting organization—for their brand new website overhaul. It is now much easier to navigate, not to mention better looking than its predecessor. According to a post on their Facebook page, it’s the work of Peter Hunter. He adapted a three-column WordPress magazine theme, with a top navigation bar menu of major post categories that collapses behind a three-line “hamburger” icon on mobile view. The site loads quickly on my slow internet connection.
I’m relieved to see this, because previously I think new content was being added to the front page by editing and re-publishing it, which made for an incoherent archive and provided no way to subscribe to new content. Now there’s an RSS feed and everything, so I won’t have to worry about missing new posts… such as this introduction of two new members of their team, Caleb Parkin and Ursula Billington, or this piece on their judging of poetry films for the upcoming Newlyn International Film Festival. Well done.
Call for essays: Poetry Film Magazine
Aline and Guido at the Weimar-based website Poetryfilmkanal have released a call for contributions to the fourth issue of their digital and print magazine. The theme this year: Poetry film as art.
We are calling for contributions that deal – exemplary or in general – with the fine art aspects of poetry films. They can discuss individual installations or performances, focus on individual artists or events, investigate traditions of the film and art history or follow up on theoretical discourses. Possible questions could be: Are poetry films works of art or can they rather be regarded as media events in the first place? Is the work or the event character paramount? How is the performativity of the lyrical performance integrated into the closed form of the short film? (Performativity is characterised by the impossibility of repetition. Does this category apply to the medium of film at all?). In how far is the filmic level cracked open in order to go beyond its audio-visual unity? How do installations or interactive works deal with the connection of text, sound and the moving image? Which role does the spectrum of possible associations play when it comes to text-image-relations? We are looking forward to contributions that investigate the realm between performativity and mediality as exemplified by the poetry film.
Essays (10,000 characters long and no footnotes if possible) can be submitted until the end of July.
There’s a lot more to the call than that, so do click through (here’s the German version).
Lucy English shares lessons from The Book of Hours poetry film project
The latest issue of Poetry Film Live includes an extremely interesting new paper by Lucy English, “WRITING POETRY FOR POETRY FILMS: an exploration of the use of spoken word poetry in poetry films“. It joins a growing section at the magazine of essential papers on poetry film and videopoetry by the likes of Sarah Tremlett, Tom Konyves, Fil Ieropoulos, and Susannah Ramsey. The paper is much too long to quote in its entirety, but here’s how it begins:
The Book of Hours is an online collaborative poetry film project, which forms the creative component of my PhD in digital writing. I am making forty eight poetry films to correspond to four different times of day for all the months of the year. This structure has been based on the Medieval Books of Hours, highly decorated and beautiful collections of prayers and readings which followed the Christian calendar. My book of hours is secular but is meditative in nature and intends to create a reflective mood. All the poetry films have been made in collaboration with international film makers. (English, 2016)
For the critical component of my Phd I chart the development of the project and the collaborative process. I also examine what has informed the writing of the poetry for The Book of Hours. Although the poetry exists in a poetry film form it also exists as printed text, a collection of poetry, which will be published by Burning Eye in 2018. In this article I have tried to unpick my understanding of the writing of the poetry, from initial inspirations, to its development as a cohesive collection, and what sources I have looked to for guidance.
English goes on to talk about her background in the spoken word poetry scene, how she’s had to adjust her writing style “to find a contemplative form of spoken word that can be translated to poetry film”, why she chose to pattern her work after Medieval books of hours, and the challenges of writing ecopoetry in modern Britain, among other topics. I found her mix of academic and personal discourse engaging and her arguments persuasive. Do go read… and then visit The Book of Hours to catch up on new additions.
Call for submissions of poetry and film: Magma 71
The British literary magazine Magma Poetry is now soliciting work for Magma 71 — The Film Issue, guest-edited by Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, who are looking for both poems about films and film-poems themselves. There’s also an opportunity for poets to get their lyrical film-scripts turned into films.
As usual with traditional literary magazines, they’re insisting that the poems be complete virgins to publication, which I suppose means that the videos, too, must not have been shared anywhere before, not even on YouTube or Vimeo. But if that forces filmmakers and video artists to create brand new work, and possibly initiate new collaborations with poets in the process, so much the better! Here’s the call.
Closing date: 31st January, 2018
The submissions window for ‘Film’ is open from October 1st 2017 until January 31st 2018.
We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online. Poems may be sent via Submittable, or by post if you live in the UK. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.
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“My poetry seems to be something I make up as I go along. Certain movies strike me that way — going in and out of one’s dreams.” From “John Ashbery goes to the movies”
Whether it’s a film you always go back to, a director you follow, a cinema that holds a particular story for you, or a poem that simply reads like a short film, Magma 71 is set out to celebrate the poetry of cinema.
Take us with you to the movies. Send us your takes on Neorealism and Nouvelle Vague, Hollywood Golden Age or the cinema of today. Or perhaps you’d like to create your own film script, presented to us in the form of a poem. Send us your films noirs, your indies and your blockbusters. In short, make us believe in films that don’t exist and send us to watch the films that do. Show us the ways poetry and film are connected and explore with us whether it is even possible for contemporary poets to write without the cinema screen at the back of their mind.
We are also calling for submissions of film-poems. We are particularly interested in collaborative work between poets and filmmakers. The poems, as always, should not have been previously published, either in print or online. The chosen film-poems will be screened at Magma events, showcased on the Magma website, and the poem texts published in the magazine. We are interested in collaborations that challenge and converse with each other’s form rather than simply echo it. In other words, if there’s a moon in the poem, we probably don’t need to see it represented as a moon in the film.
Look out for regular updates during the reading/viewing period on the Magma website where we’ll be posting examples of recent film poems we’ve loved and discussing the boundaries between film poems and music video clips, from Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade all the way back to Bob Dylan’s 1965 Subterranean Homesick Blues.
We look forward to going to the cinema with you!
Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, Editors, Magma 71
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Magma Poetry in Collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and the Festival of Creative Learning
We are thrilled to announce our first collaboration for Magma 71.
More details here
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Wanting to submit to the Film Issue? You may submit:
Up to 4 poems in a single Word document
Up to 2 film-poems— each no longer than 2.5 minutes. (If your film is longer, please submit the first 2.5 minutes of it)
Note that if you submit film poems, you must submit the poem texts as well.
Go to Submittable for more details.
If you click the link for the collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, there’s news of an additional contest for poets:
During the Call for Submissions for Magma 71, we will choose a number of poems to be handed over to the University of Edinburgh filmmakers to create film-poems, using the written poem as a starting point. The film-poems will be featured on the Magma Poetry website as well as on the Festival of Creative Learning website.
The complete films will be showcased during the Festival of Creative Learning event or the Festival Pop-Up event in 2018, and at the magazine launch in London. The poets will be invited to read at the events.
If you would like your poems to be considered for this project, you will need to submit your poems no later than November 1st 2017. (Note that the closing date for the general Magma 71 Call for Submissions is January 31st 2018).
Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, Editors, Magma 71
Pretty cool.
Introducing the Film and Video Poetry Society
Over the past two years, a mysterious, L.A.-based group called the Film and Video Poetry Society have built up a tremendous following for their Facebook page, on which they regularly share a wide variety of poetry films and videopoems from around the web. I liked the results so much, I included the link among the short selection of recommended sites at the bottom of the front page of Moving Poems — the first and so far only time I’ve done that for a page on the ubiquitous but web-destroying colossus that is Facebook.
Well, as of August 1 I no longer have to do that, because at long last they’ve debuted their own web platform… and it’s a doozy. Features include a live, TV-like channel of poetry videos, a finishing fund and production assistance program for poetry filmmakers, poetry translation assistance, and even a plan for print publications. Perhaps of most interest to readers of Moving Poems, they are welcoming submissions of film and video projects up to 32 minutes long for a big annual symposium to be held on April 27th – 28th, 2018 in Los Angeles. It would probably be easiest if I just pasted in the text of their About page:
OUR MISSION
The Film and Video Poetry Society (FVPS) mission is to encourage film and video poets to further their ongoing explorations by providing a platform for these artists to activate, collaborate, discuss, and maintain creative work developed through the convergence of these art forms.
FVPS PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES
Finishing Fund
The first of our initiatives is The FVPS Finishing Fund and Assistance Program. This production award will assist film and video poetry projects that have started the creative process and seek additional assistance or funds to complete the final stages of production.Poetry Beam
We established an experimental distribution, archival, and publishing format for film and video poetry. Poetry Beam is focused on audience development, live streaming, digital curation, film and video exhibition, immersive technologies, and new methods of media licensing.Events
The Film and Video Poetry Society is dedicated to providing a platform for oral and written literature. We are doing this by coordinating international events such as poetry slams, readings, virtual panels, writing rooms, and pop-up poetry book-shops.Annual Symposium
FVPS is also organizing an annual symposium where we will host film screenings, workshops, and panels for a two day period each spring.Publishing
FVPS is currently adapting two poetry films into chapbooks and has published A Guide to Film and Video Poetry festivals!Translations
Finally, FVPS supports language diversity. Our efforts to assist poets and filmmakers to access wider audiences and festival markets include subtitling and closed captioning assistance for films of any language.
FVPS is developing a closed captioning app to offer video editors low cost multilingual translation on an academic level.The Film and Video Poetry Society embraces a demanding dream. We strive to balance our new world’s increased desire for visual content with our old world love for literacy, printed matter, and the poetic word.
We are deeply grateful for the poets and filmmakers who contacted us over the past year. The contributions of your work and the many ideas you have shared inspired our team to launch this platform.
Thank you for reading our mission statement and we encourage you to explore this website.
Click through to join their mailing list and check out the site.
A small disclosure: I have been in contact with someone (not sure who) from the FVPS a couple of times, and provided a critique of the site before it went public. They assure me they will reveal their identities soon, when they unveil a masthead. I am as always happy to welcome new websites and initiatives to the international poetry film/video fold, and I’ll be watching FVPS with particular interest given their evident good taste in poetry videos, their proven ability to generate social media buzz, and their physical location near the world’s most powerful center of cinematic production. I think their primary focus on filmmakers and artists makes great practical sense, because in my experience there’s much more openness to poetry film and videopoetry in those kinds of circles than (sadly) among poets.
Lucy English on poetry-film collaboration
The British poet and poetry-film scholar Lucy English has a very interesting essay in Sabotage recounting the genesis of her Book of Hours project and how she’s adapted her poetic style to the exigencies of collaborative poetry-film creation.
When I tell people I am working on a poetry film project they make the assumption that I am creating films of myself reading or performing poetry. This is a natural response as I am a spoken word poet and, typically, my work is delivered live to an audience. My desire to create poetry films has made me re-evaluate the type of poetry I write, what word choices to use and what form it takes. As I developed The Book of Hours I have experimented with the placement of spoken poetry in a poetry film and formulated definitions of how a ‘poetry film’ differs from other filmic interpretations of poetry such as films of poets reading their work or ‘film poems’; short poetic films. The poetry I have written for this project is leaner, and more focused. There is more ‘space’ within the words for the moving images to interact and more silence. In The Book of Hours I have attempted to bring the delicate poetry film form, which is a growing but niche area of poetry, into the populist and digitally distributed arena of spoken word.
Ó Bhéal director Paul Casey interviewed in Poetry Film Live
Poetry has been choking, gasping, and drowning because of the seventh art. Because of filmmaking.
The last hundred years of filmmaking has turned the world into visually oriented consumers who don’t read books anymore, or mull words over in their head, or allow their imaginations time to have some fun and think and be creative. Poetry films are opening that up to poetry again. It is going to draw a lot more people back to it; it’s going to make people aware of the intrinsic value of poetry. Poetry has rich kernels of immense potential that people are completely unaware of. I think that poetry films are going to do a lot with regards to that.
People are going to realise that because of the flexibility of the filmmaking aspect of it, they can now create completely new animals. People don’t realise it is a unique art form in itself. The fusion creates something else entirely. When that is realised it will become a lot more popular.
That’s Paul Casey, founder and director of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry reading series in Cork, Ireland that also sponsors an annual, international poetry film competition (which will open for submissions again on May 1). Last month, the shortlisted films from Ó Bhéal’s 2016 competion were screened as part of the Belfast Film Festival, and Helen and Chaucer from Poetry Film Live were there to take in the films and interview Paul. The result is worth reading in full. As a highly multilingual poet and a professional filmmaker, Casey’s perspectives on poetry film are extremely valuable. I like that he’s integrated poetry film screenings into the weekly readings, rather than reserving them for special occasions, I like his advice for poets at the end of the interview, and I love his answer to the question “What is a ‘good poetry film’?”
We are looking for the right balance. When you put the two art forms together there is the third thing that happens; you know when it has been achieved. It is difficult to describe.
Certainly what is true for filmmaking is true for poetry film. The first truth for filmmaking is that your foundation is the script. If that is a cracked foundation then the whole building will crumble. So the poem has to have integrity, it has to stand alone, it has to stand up for itself outside the film.
It is possible for a filmmaker to create visual art and for a poet to then interpret it in words, and then to create a poetry film in that way. But the most common place to start is with the poem first.
A lot of effort has been put into the poem. The filmmaker’s responsibility is to have the right kind of respect for the poem and to create a new way into the poem. The original poem ends up becoming more valuable because of the poetry film. You are creating a new dimension, a new way in, a new life for it.
The filmmaker does not usually have a lot of poetic insight. Their insight is in the poetry of the visual, so the collaboration becomes extremely important. If the poet and film maker aren’t the same person then the process of translation from poem to visual interpretation needs to be a collaborative one, so that the filmmaker truly takes on board what is happening in the poem and embodies, or at least has a good understanding of its mechanics. There are a lot of lazy filmmakers.
Go read the rest. And check out all the new posts at Poetry Film Live, which include another interview, with the poet Mab Jones, and six films.
Why don’t more literary websites feature poetry videos?
From a high point of semi-trendiness six or seven years ago, I’ve watched poetry videos slowly disappear from U.S.-based online literary magazines, where one would think they belong. Internationally, videopoetry and poetry film are in robust health, with more festivals, screenings, and critical attention than ever. I think it’s useful to consider possible reasons for this puzzling decline of interest if we’re going to have any chance of reversing the trend.
For one thing, it parallels a decline in the popularity of blogging, eclipsed by Facebook and other social media platforms. Independent bloggers really helped spread the word about videopoetry and electronic literature generally, though I always felt that the more serious writers were rather backward about getting online. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, there are probably more writers on the web than ever before… but I’m not sure they really understand that they’re on the web (as opposed to on their phone, hanging out with their friends). There’s much less of a push to find (or make) new material to share than there was back when people were concerned with producing quality content for their blogs; most social media shares are from other users on the same site. And the Facebook algorithm seems to suppress views of videos not uploaded to its own platform.
Another thing that’s changed in the past decade: Flash, once the darling of e-lit creators, has been virtually killed off by Apple’s decision to stop supporting it on iPhones and iPads in favor of HTML5. YouTube, Vimeo and the other big video hosting platforms made the switch in less than a year, but websites that had put all their eggs into the Flash animation basket—including Synesthesia and the great Born—were screwed.
So journal editors have a right to be frustrated by regular changes in technology. Online journals that had featured poetry videos pre-YouTube generally used embedded Quicktime players, for example. A few linger online, with blank holes where their videos once were.
Generally speaking, I think literary magazine editors are a fairly conservative lot (and one could easily build a case for this being an asset rather than a liability for the culture at large). Poetry videos were rarely a part of regular content; magazines such as Atticus Review, Gnarled Oak and TriQuarterly are the exceptions that prove the rule. Most editors, I suspect, viewed poetry videos as curiosities, supplements to the real content, to be posted on associated blogs only as long as they were the shiny new thing.
For some literary magazine editors, videopoetry and poetry film may never have crossed their radar in the first place, and many remain firmly wedded to the idea of poetry as text. The editor of one of the most widely circulated print and online poetry journals once told me that he simply had no interest in poetry apart from the (literal or digital) page. For many others, poetry videos are at best illustrations of texts rather than a new medium for poetry — an impression many poetry animations do little to dispel. Videopoetry or cinepoetry, by contrast, may seem too avant-garde for mainstream editors.
A lot of online literary magazines, or print magazines with online components, appear to be edited by folks who aren’t terribly tech-savvy, to put it kindly. Flummoxed by the challenges of presenting poetry in HTML with widely varied viewing environments, an increasing number of journal editors are opting to go PDF-only, which precludes any moving images. Others may simply not be aware of how easy it is to share videos these days, especially if they’re using WordPress (or other CMSs deploying the oEmbed API) with a responsive theme: just drop the YouTube or Vimeo URL into a line by itself, and let it re-size automatically to fit the space available.
I think there’s also a bit of a culture-clash between journal editors and the kind of poets and filmmakers who make poetry videos to be shared on the web. The overwhelming majority of U.S. poetry journals still require that all submitted or solicited content be previously unpublished, and once they publish it, they prefer that people visit their website to view it. Hosting video on one’s own website is complicated and expensive, but if you host it elsewhere, doesn’t that mean that people can share it anywhere? (No, but I’d wager most editors don’t realize that.) If you let the video producers upload it to their own YouTube or Vimeo accounts and embed that, can your journal really be said to have published it? But if you want to put your branding on videos and upload them to your own account, that may require creating a new editorial position, and in all likelihood you’re running a shoestring operation. Then, too, there’s the copyright permissions situation with remixed material: complicated, to put it mildly, and possibly not worth the risk.
And speaking of risk, many U.S. literary magazines are intensely competitive and therefore wary about anything that might damage their prestige. So are videopoetry or poetry film in general really a safe bet? If you don’t have anyone on staff with a background in film, why risk choosing videos that experts in the field may sneer at? Publishing authors whose books will go on to garner critical acclaim and awards is the overwhelming focus, and anything that gets in the way of that will not be looked on kindly.
So far I’ve speculated about possible factors influencing the demand side, but I think it’s also the case that the supply of poetry films/videos is still too small. It’s easy to follow Moving Poems and think wow, look how many poets are getting into videopoetry! But I’m afraid they’re a drop in the bucket. And in the U.S., at least, I’d suggest that this is due in part to the capture of poets by the academy. (Something I don’t decry in general, by the way: I’m happy for any system that employs poets, and MFA programs are turning out great numbers of highly skilled writers.)
As with everything else in this blog post, my “evidence” for this contention is anecdotal, based on personal experience and hearsay. Most academic poets I know do seem excited by the possibility of having their work translated into film/video, but they don’t have any idea how to make it happen. Why not? Well, for one thing, just like the editors I mentioned above, their first allegiance must be to print publication. Getting your work made into a film, even one that wins awards and gets screened around the world, doesn’t count for promotion or tenure at most (any?) universities. Given how much of their time is already taken up by teaching, why would they want to sacrifice valuable writing time just to learn how to make videos? Collaborations are a better bet, but American universities are pretty Balkanized, so there isn’t likely to be much communication between English and Film departments.
And finally, we come back to the inherent conservatism of poets. Writing students at most MFA programs of which I’m aware aren’t taught any other aspects of poetry unconnected with text composition, such as coding, audio production, or live performance techniques, so of course videopoetry and poetry film aren’t on the curriculum, either.
I have a number of suggestions about how to reverse this situation, at least from the demand side, but I’ll save that for a future post. In the meantime, I’d like to hear other people’s impressions and suggestions.
New content at Poetry Film Live and other websites
The editors of Poetry Film Live have just released their second issue, which in practice means that four new videos and an interview have been linked from their front page, below an introduction which I’ll paste in here as an added inducement to go visit:
This issue features poetry films from the UK.
The interview this month is with Adam Steiner. We spoke to Adam on the day Disappear Here was being launched. We particularly wanted to find out about the Disappear Here Project, which involved 9 poets, 9 filmmakers and 27 poetry films. We also talked to Adam about his not-for-profit publishing company, his time working for the NHS and his new novel.Antony Owen is the poet and performer of The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House. Samuel Vale House is next to the ring road in Coventry. It was directed by Adam Steiner and was the poetry film that led to the Disappear Here Project.
Act was written by Maggie Sawkins and was recorded for ‘Zones of Avoidance’, the live literature production which went on to win the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Act was filmed by Abigail Norris.
Rachel McGladdery’s poem My Dead Dad is a powerful and moving poem, filmed by Bryan Dickenson. The film gives space for the viewer to take in the words without distraction; Bryan’s aim was for the viewer to ‘defocus’ on the screen.
Martin Evans poetry film Numbers is intriguing – in the Welsh mountains is a numbers station broadcasting in Welsh. Martin explains how numbers stations were used in the Cold War to broadcast on short wave frequencies to spies out in the field. I’ll leave you to enjoy the film and ask the obvious questions ….
Next month there will be international poetry films by Cheryl Gross, Eduardo Yagüe and Lucy English, José Luis Ugarte and Patricia Killelea, plus an interview with Mab Jones who is one of the 9 poets who took part in Disappear Here.
I found the interview with Adam Steiner especially inspirational. Here’s a snippet:
PFL It was said that Disappear Here will ‘make people see the city of Coventry in a different light; whether they are new or have lived here for years. And will inspire others to write/read/experience poetry in its many forms; live and on the page, as well as sparking interest in the new and developing genre of poetry films’. To what extent have these aims been achieved so far?
AS Yes I do think we have done that, by working with great collaborators and the current audiences in Coventry and poets I know here in Coventry. And the people who run the monthly open mike nights are starting to get interesting guests from the midlands and beyond. It is a great way of having our poets working as ambassadors for the city and then poets from other places bringing their stuff here. It’s created whole new collaborations with people publishing other people. I don’t think it will bring loads of people putting pen to paper but I think it will shatter and reinvigorate some conceptions of poetry and what poetry can, or could be, in the future, especially with the films, which are a very accessible and immediate format. If you watch a poetry film, or see a great performance and it stays with you, if a line or two of poetry sticks, it has done its job – if your lines carry on through a person that’s all you can ask for as a poet.
I’ve been giving a lot of attention to Poetry Film Live because they’re new and deserve support, but be sure to keep an eye on other film/videopoetry-related sites, too, or you might miss developments such as:
- The Haus für Poesie (formerly Literaturwerkstatt Berlin) website has added a new section of pages to its ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival section embedding all the winning films (or trailers) available on Vimeo or YouTube for the complete run of festivals they coordinated, 2002-2014. Start here.
- So far the new website at zebrapoetryfilm.org has not followed suit. BUT the ZEBRA Poetry Film Club Vimeo channel continues to locate and add films from among all the films ever screened at ZEBRA, a huge undertaking that’s been going on for more than two years now (and which has made my own job as Moving Poems curator much easier).
- And the ZEBRA Poetry Film Club group on Facebook remains the number one source for international news about the genre. (They’re also on Twitter for the Facebook-averse.)
- The Vienna-based Art Visuals & Poetry website also regularly adds new content, especially in its Outstanding poetry films section, though it can be a little difficult to navigate. The easiest approach is to subscribe to their partial-content RSS feed for notification of new content, which seems to appear about two or three times a week.
- Poetryfilmkanal (Poetryfilm Channel), the other major German and English-language website for the genre, is worth visiting at least once a month for their Film of the Month feature. (For those with no German, like me, Google Translate is more than adequate these days for conveying the gist of German prose.) They’re currently soliciting essays on Typography and Text as Image for the third issue of their magazine.
- The website for the forthcoming VERSOGRAMAS documentary about videopoetry, directed by Belén Montero and Juan Lesta, recently added a page with links to all the videopoets who will be interviewed in the film. (At least, I think it was recent. Since it’s a static page, it didn’t show up in the feed.)
Here’s the latest VERSOGRAMAS teaser, for those who haven’t seen it. For a die-hard videopoetry fan like me, this is more exciting than the latest Star Wars movie trailer:
New essay on poetry videos and the evolution of language at Ploughshares
Ploughshares, one of the most prestigious American print literary magazines, has a new essay about poetry videos up on their blog, authored by one of their regular bloggers, Ruben Quesada, himself a competent maker of poetry videos. But for this piece, he chose to look at the work of other video-making poets — David Campos, Vickie Vértiz, and Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. I’ve seen various survey articles about poetry film/video appear in journals over the years, but “American Poetry: Video and the Evolution of Language” is more historically grounded and philosophically reflective than most. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The moving image is the antithesis to a static image and therefore closer to poetry than painting. For millennia, poetry has been the sister art to painting, but poetry is not composed of “static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes” (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination). Poetry is dynamic and to understand the varied human experiences one must examine the stories it tells. It is moving images, film, video that brings us closer to the life that is lived than painting. Video complements and translates the written word.
(Should we hold out hope that the Ploughshares blog or website will begin to feature poetry videos? Probably not. I keep hoping that other prestigious journals will follow TriQuarterly‘s lead, but instead the number of literary magazines carrying videos and other multimedia seems to be shrinking, I’m not sure why.)
Max Wallis to make videopoems as poet in residence at Grindr
Grindr has just hired its first poet in residence: British model and writer Max Wallis. Wallis broke the news himself via an article in The Guardian.
Poetry and sex have a long and venerable history, one often being used in the service of setting up the other. Catullus kicked things off, and Lord Byron, Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy, among others, have run with the ball since. The work of those poets is perhaps best thought of as the context for what I am doing now. Starting next week, I will be the gay social networking app Grindr’s first poet in residence, making a video poem each month to be flashed in the app and also on its new platform, Into. They will be directed by Ashley Joiner, whose documentary Pride? premieres at the BFI’s LGBT film festival in March.
The poems play on the essential themes of the app – relationships, our increasingly unsympathetic world and quite a lot of sex (topics that have been the subject of my last two books – Modern Love and Everything Everything). Each video threads into the next, telling a larger story about what is to be gay now (although I thought it best not to limit myself to what it means to be gay and on Grindr now – as that would mean a lot of requests to “send more pics” and any number of unsolicited anatomical images).
He goes on to describe the first poem in the series, which I hope to be able to blog here when it comes out, presuming it’s sharable on the open web. According to Mashable,
Grindr has yet to confirm a release date, stating “a few things are still in the works for the new platform.” Wallis plans to shoot the second and third films this Sunday.
This isn’t Wallis’ first poet-in-residence gig to involve videopoetry. In 2103 he made at least three videos as part of a residency with Harper’s Bazaar. Here’s one of them:
