I was pleased to see this inclusion among the workshops and panels scheduled to coincide with the 2019 Sabateur Awards ceremony, to be held on May 18 at Impact Hub, Birmingham, UK:
2:30-3:30pm Poetry Film: The Power of Collaboration, a panel run by Lucy English, Helen Dewberry, and Sarah Tremlett.
This panel investigates the rapidly growing genre of poetry film, and how it is expanding through social media sharing and poetry film making workshops. Spoken word poet Lucy English, and film makers Helen Dewbery and Sarah Tremett, discuss the collaborative process in the creation of The Book of Hours and share some of the challenges and benefits of cross genre art forms.
The Book of Hours was created by spoken word poet, Lucy English and 27 collaborators from Europe, America and Australia. The Book of Hours is a re-imagining of a medieval book of hours and contains 48 poetry films. The project has been twice longlisted for the Sabotage Awards and was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize. Individual films have been screened at a variety of international short film festivals.
Founded in 2011 by Sabotage Reviews, the annual Saboteur Awards include some genuinely interesting categories, with a public nomination process that may or may not make it more egalitarian—which seems on the face of it an odd concern for an essentially competitive undertaking, but literary prize culture always invites a certain amount of anxiety and discomfort, so such gestures toward populism can help dispel that.
Since the vast majority of Moving Poems’ readership is from outside the U.K., it might help to put this in anthropological context. From what I can determine, the U.K. literary scene appears to be largely centered on a bewildering array of prizes and honours, which poets must compete for in order to make themselves more attractive to potential publishers and to assert dominance over fellow poets. This is not surprising given the intensely hierarchical and competitive nature of British tribal culture, especially among the Oxbridge moiety, many of whose members come from the traditional warrior elite. The size and popularity of the literary prize system may also partly be explained by the awkward nature of British courtship practices and intimate relationships more generally, which historically has led individuals to attempt to demonstrate romantic fitness and/or filial piety through grotesque and extreme efforts, helping to launch a colonial empire and the industrial revolution. So, for example, the newly appointed poet laureate, Simon Armitage, cited his indebtedness to his parents in his first statement to the press — and had his qualifications for the job ritually questioned by members of the Oxbridge moiety, disturbed perhaps by his northern and working-class background (though too constrained by linguistic taboos to say so directly).
All that said, I still don’t understand why Lucy English’s Book of Hours project has failed to win in the collaboration category for the Saboteur Awards—not once, but twice. This more than anything indicts the prize system for me, though it’s cool that they have this festival to help broaden the conversation.
A couple of recent posts at Poetryfilmkanal unveiled a unique focus for this year’s Weimar Poetry Film Award and screening. First they announced the programme, which includes some portions in English:
Poetry films from Spain and Latin America
This year, the Weimar Poetry Film Award aims to be a forum for the Spanish-language poetry film scene. With a selection of short films from Spain and Latin America we try to present important positions and centers of the Iberoamerican video poetry. We also want to ask how to improve the visibility and perception of poetry film in Latin America. A main focus will be on Colombia.
Guests: Timo Berger (Berlin), Luis José Galvis Diaz (Colombia), Sonja Hofmann (Cologne), Belén Montero (Spain), Celia Parra (Spain), Cecilia Traslaviña (Colombia).
[…]
The poetry film, one likes to say, is almost as old as film history. From the beginning we find adaptations of poems in the moving image. At the same time, film history was also influenced by poetry in other ways. Many filmmakers were inspired by poets and poems to develop a particularly poetic imagery. But what is this »Cinema of Poetry« (Pasolini) offering for the poetry film genre? Can and should one attach to the poetic auteur cinema in the cinematic adaptations of poems? The lectures by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel (Berlin), Theresia Prammer (Berlin), Lia Martyn (Potsdam), and Tom Konyves (Montreal / Canada) are dealing with the avant-garde film, Pasolini, Tarkowski, and the fundamental questions about the relationship between poetry and film.
[…]
Colombia is the host country of the 20th backup festival. With a selection from the program of the Bogotá Short Film Festival, we are giving an impression of what is waiting for you at the next festival. The anniversary backup will take place from November 27th to December 1st 2019.
[…]
The third edition of the poetry film program »lab/p« has been realized as an Egyptian-German coproduction of OSTPOL Leipzig and Fig Leaf Studios Alexandria. Inspired by the topic »Identity« authors and filmmakers created jointly in 6 international teams 6 short films.
The animation and experimental films of»lab/p 3« take us – each with its unique artistic signature – on an adventure beyond the common aesthetics. They invite us emotionally, politically, ironically and playfully to reflect upon »Identity« in an intercultural context.
[…]
All Friends of poetry and short film can experience again at our award ceremony, what is going on in the contemporary poetry film scene. Our one-hour program features nominated films selected from 250 international submissions. The Spanish poet and producer Celia Parra will read, as poetic opening, from her new book of poetry Pantallas/Screens. The award ceremony will be presented by our jury team Belén Montero, Sonja Hofmann, and Timo Berger. Afterwards, we are offering drinks and Colombian live music in the lounge of the Lichthaus cinema.
[…]
Screening of the documentary Verses & Frames (Spain 2017, 75 min)
Verses & Frames, produced from Galicia (Spain) has been considered the first documentary in the world about the international videopoetry scene. Its intention is giving voice to some of the main videopoets and portraying the emotions that videopoetry arises. Verses & Frames is an emotionaly journey towards the discovery of an increasingly popular artistic phenomenon. Poets and filmmakers share how they see life through this genre and help answer the question: what is this videopoetry thing?
(Click through for times, dates and locations.)
Another post on Poetryfilmkanal this past week introduced the jury for the 2019 competition: Belén Montero, Sonja Hofmann, and Timo Berger. Montero is the director of the documentary on videopoetry mentioned above, Versogramas (which I reviewed last year), and the other two are experts on Latin American poetry, literature and film — a perfect fit for this year’s focus. Check out their bios.
This is a very ambitious and exciting line-up, and I’d encourage anyone who can make it to go. Weimar is a lovely small city, not to mention a site of pilgrimage for devotees of Goethe and Schiller, and the new Bauhaus Museum has just opened in time for the 100th anniversary of the 20th century’s most influential design movement.
I’m pleased to see that the Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition is back for another year. Submissions opened on May 1 and close on August 15. The 7th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition is organized as usual in association with the IndieCork festival of independent film and music, which will be held on October 6 to 13 in Cork, Ireland.
2019 is Ó Bhéal’s tenth year screening International poetry-films, and seventh year featuring this competition. Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival in October. One winner will receive the Indie Cork / Ó Bhéal prize for best Poetry-Film.
2019 Judges: poet/filmmaker Colm Scully & poet Stanley Notte
The submission deadline is August 15th, 2019.
Guidelines
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm@obheal.ie – including the following info in an attached word document:
- Name and duration of Film
- Name of director
- Country of origin
- Contact details
- Name of Poet
- Name of Poem
- Synopsis
- Filmmaker biography
- and a Link to download a high-resolution version of the film.**
** If you are sending a vimeo or youtube link, etc, please ensure that the download button is enabled.
You may submit as many entries as you like. Films must interpret, or convey a poem which must be present in its entirety, having been completed no earlier than 15th August 2017. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require English subtitles. The final shortlist will be announced here during September.
Shortlisted films also appear in Ó Bhéal’s poetry-film touring programme, at a number of film and literary festivals, to date including the Clare Island Film Festival, Belfast Film Festival, Stanzas in Limerick, the Cyclops festival in Kiev, Poemaria in Vigo, the Madeira Literary Festival (2018), Salerno Letteratura (2018) and Cadence: Video Poetry Festival in Seattle (2019). Shortlisted entries are also screened throughout the year from Ó Bhéal’s competition shortlist archive (in random), at the start of each Ó Bhéal poetry evening.
Best of Luck!
Ignition Press is a publisher of poetry pamphlets (which is what chapbooks are called in the UK) recently launched by the Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes University. I’ve just learned about a cool contest they’ve set up to generate filmpoems for their initial crop of pamphlets. The prizes aren’t terribly big, but I know a lot of poetry filmmakers are mainly just looking for good texts to work with, so I expect this will be a success, and I would encourage other poetry presses to try something similar. Check it out:
Make a short film about a poem published by ignitionpress and win recognition and prizes!
The films should last 2-5 mins & be about one of the five following poems
(apart from that you have complete creative freedom):
‘//’ by Mary Jean Chan (available here)
‘reasons for leaving home’ by Belinda Zhawi (available here)
‘Moss’ by Natalie Whittaker (available here)
‘Half Measures’ by Patrick James Errington (available here)
‘We are to blame for the decline of the giraffes and only we can save them’ by Lily Blacksell (available here)
You can find the individual poems at the links above and all five here.
What is a poetryfilm? Alastair Cook, Filmmaker and Director of Film-poem Festival, says: ‘A poetry film is a single entwined entity, a melting, a cleaving together of words, sound and vision. It is an attempt to take a poem and present it through a medium that will create a new artwork, separate from the original poem.’
Inspiration & examples of other filmpoems can be found here.
Prizes: £50, £30, £20 Amazon vouchers
Major exposure: the winners’ films will be shared on our website, social media and could be shown at events organised by, or involving, ignitionpress.
Deadline: Friday 7th June, 5pm. To enter, please submit your poetryfilm to Niall Munro at p0076993@brookes.ac.uk If the file is too large to e-mail, share it via Google Drive or another file sharing service.
Winners announced: Friday 14th June.
Judges: Niall Munro, Director of ignitionpress, and interns.
ignitionpress is a pamphlet press based at Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. Find out more about the pamphlets and the poets here. All poems are copyright, but the poets have granted permission for filmmakers to use their work.
Questions? Please contact Theodora Vida (15094967@brookes.ac.uk) or Niall Munro (p0076993@brookes.ac.uk).
The main ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is held on even-numbered years in Münster now, under the aegis of Filmwerkstatt Münster, but its original founders in Berlin, Haus für Poesie, remain an active partner, and in February even announced a whole new competition, to be screened on off years in Berlin. I reported on that back in March, but had to rely on Google Translate to make sense of it. At some point in the interim Haus für Poesie posted the call-out to the English version of their website, and it seems only fair to pass that on now as well:
Since 2002 the international ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has been taking place every two years. In 2019, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is inviting entries for its first competition to find the best poetry films from Germany! Eligible for entry are short films (co-) produced in Germany in or after 2016, which are based on poems and are no more than 20 minutes in duration. All languages are allowed. The competition winners will be awarded prize money.
A programme committee will select films for the German competition and for all the other festival programmes from among the entries. The winning films will be chosen by a jury comprising representatives from the worlds of poetry, film and media. ZEBRA is also inviting you to make a film interpretation of this year’s Festival Poem, ‘*** [dieses regionale getreide]’ ([native vegetation a natural resource]) by the poet Daniel Falb. The directors of the three best film interpretations will be chosen by the programme committee and invited to come to Berlin where they will have the opportunity to present their films at the festival and discuss them with the poet.
The Festival Poem may be used only for the purpose of film interpretation within the scope of this call for entries. For any other use at other festivals or on other platforms, etc. the film makers must obtain the rights from the rights holders. Text and audio of the poem together with translations can be found here.
Closing date for entries: 15. July 2019 (date as postmark)
Conditions of participation and registration form: ZEBRA-2019-entry-form.pdf
We’d love you to take advantage of the elegant submission service provided by FilmFreeway:
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is organized by the Haus für Poesie.
Just signal-boosting some news from the latest Art Visuals & Poetry Newsletter:
The deadline of the major competition [for] German speaking countries has been extended to May 20. The next Poetry Film Festival Vienna will take place from November 29 to December 1, 2019 at Metro Kinokulturhaus. There is also a intercontinental poetry film competition called SPECIAL AWARD after a given festival poem by Sophie Reyer. The festival offers this poem as a free sound recording under Creative Commons including English translation. Check the rules & guidelines of submitting to the Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival Vienna.
In addition to the competitions, the international programme of the Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival 2019 is dedicated to the host country USA. The American poetry film specialist Todd Boss will travel from Minneapolis to present his production label Motionpoems. So far Motionpoems has produced 120 film adaptations of poems. The non-profit production label recently launched the largest international poetry film competition in the USA, the EPIPHANY Awards.
Alongside Todd Boss, leading German curators Thomas Zandegiacomo del Bel and Winfried Bettmer will be guests at the international Poetry Film Festival. This international get-together of important curators was made possible by the support of the American and German embassies in Vienna, for which we would like to express our sincere thanks! With its international focus, the Vienna Poetry Film Festival has once again established itself as the second largest poetry film festival in the world after ZEBRA Berlin.
We are looking forward to welcome you in Vienna!
The deadline for the Special Award is much later—August 30, according to FilmFreeway.
Motionpoems, the nonprofit organization that has been producing award-winning films with texts by American poets for a decade now, today announced that the premiere screenings of their ninth season will be held on Friday, May 10, 2019, from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm, in the Pillsbury Auditorium at the Minneapolis Institute of Art:
Motionpoems, the world’s largest producer of poetry films, will launch its highly anticipated ninth season at Mia, featuring the work of award-winning emerging poets and an international group of filmmakers in this world premiere public screening.
Season 9 poets: Dom Bury, Lyrik Courtney, D. Gilson, Jackson Holbert, Rachel Inez Marshall, Meghann Plunkett, C. Russell Price, Analicia Sotelo, Brian Spears, and Emily Jungmin Yoon; and filmmakers: Maeyen Bassey, Richelle Chen, Fergal Costello, Sean Donnelly, Kenneth Kegley, Kristian Mercado, Ged Murray, Malin Sandberg, Zanete Skarule, Helmie Stil, and Najeeb Tarazi.
Motionpoems is a small, Minneapolis-based nonprofit arts organization with a vast reach. Founded in 2008, they have produced over 120 poetry films with filmmakers, cast, and crew from all over the world. Partnering with top-quality for-profit and nonprofit publishers, film companies, and literary organizations, Motionpoems is dedicated to creating opportunities for artists to collaborate in innovative, hybrid ways. For more information, visit www.motionpoems.org.
Please join us for a night of poetry, film, and conversation!
Select one of two screening times and take in a panel conversation before or after:
6:30 p.m. Motionpoems season 9 screening
7:30 p.m. Poet and filmmaker panel discussion
8:00 p.m. Motionpoems season 9 screeningThis event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. A separate ticket is required to attend each screening as well as the panel conversation.
Reserve tickets online here, or call 612.870.3000.Please reserve a ticket to save your seat, then feel free to join us for an after party at Black Sheep Pizza on Nicollet Avenue.
Those of us who can’t attend this or other screenings will have to wait for the films to appear on their website or Facebook page, usually at a rate of one a month.
Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor to artists, writers, and other creative people. He’s the author of five collections of poems, La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere (AKA Felt’s First Folio from The Typewriter Underground), The Book of Clouds, Boys in the Woods, The Underwater Typewriter, and Pillow Talk; an e-book, Intentional Practice and the Art of Finding Natural Audience; and two spoken word albums, Marker and Parker, with the late jazz pianist Don Parker, and Night Work. He has been the Narragansett Beer Poet Laureate and a Poetry Whore with the New York Poetry Brothel—which Time Out New York described as “New York’s Sexiest Literary Event,” and has performed everywhere from the Bowery Poetry Club and the American Poetry Museum to the San Francisco 40th Anniversary of Punk Rock Renaissance.
As an immersive theater producer he created the Boston Center for the Arts’ CycSpecific “Speak-Easy” and Salon Poetique: A Gathering of the “Tossed Generation.” He has also been MC and co-producer, with Aaron Shadwell and Brendyn Schneider, of The No Hipsters Rock ’n Roll Revue, and co-producer, with Karen Lee, of Burlesque for Books.
His latest project, The Typewriter Underground, is a bit like the sorcerer’s apprentice, spawning not only a print publication—the aforementioned La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere (Amazon), but also a number of films, live performances, and even a thriving online community of fans taking on the roles of living characters in its universe—a brilliant example of life imitating art, since the central conceit of this collection of verse fragments and collages is the spontaneous emergence of a subcultural phenomenon. According to the publisher’s description, the verse fragments appearing in La Commedia have the quality of the early gospels—personal accounts of authors who lived contemporaneously with the Underground, and were among its early apostles.
Marc tells me that the Typewriter Underground is at its heart an invitation to participate in an open world of infinite jest. But when I interviewed him by email earlier this week, it quickly became obvious that he’d put a lot of serious thought into the larger issues at play here.
When did you first start working with film- and video-makers, and how did that come about? It looks from your website as if that interest somewhat predated the Typewriter Underground.
It began when I wrote a poem called “Woodshed” that functioned as a musical score when turned on its side. I shared it with Peg Simone who’s a multi-talented recording artist, filmmaker and publisher. She loved the poem and the challenge of translating its score into an arrangement, and a recording. The music Peg recorded inspired her to create an absolutely mesmerizing stop-motion video of the same name.
My next foray into this world was with Jenn Vee, a wonderful visual poet working out of Oakland California. I met Jenn when she videotaped a reading I did for Nomadic Books. A short time later, I invited her to direct a film of a poem from my collection, The Underwater Typewriter. Jenn created a remarkable video called Broken Lines. Her film hooked me on this sort of collaboration, because she made the poem entirely her own, visualizing it in a novel way that lent depth, resonance and meaning to the underlying text.
When Jenn reads Broken Lines in voiceover, her character becomes the poem’s fictive “I.” In doing so, she dramatically expands its possibility space. She gives us a female voice narrating the experience of a female character. One watches without any inkling that the poem on the page is by a man, voiced when I share it at readings at readings in a distinctly male voice. The film makes “Broken Lines” her story. There’s something wonderfully expansive about that.
For the Typewriter Underground, which came first, the texts or the films? If the former, were there instances when they were modified by the exigencies of filmmaking?
The texts definitely came first. I wrote them with the hope that they would stimulate activity by filmmakers and other artists. Regarding your second question, the simple answer is, yes, the poems were modified. The interesting bits are why and how.
In Ellen Hemphill’s and Jim Haverkamp’s remarkable films Manicotti and The Danger Meditations, from Archipelago Theatre/Cine Productions, the filmmakers hew strictly to the text. Yet the poems are inevitably modified by their translation of the poems from words on the page to words-in-air. The narrator’s pacing and emphasis in these films sharply reduces the range of possible interpretations available to the viewer, because the vocal component of the film is a reading, not the poem itself. The relationship of voice-over to visual imagery further bounds the interpretive space of the poem. In the film, the poem is more fully imagined than on the page, making it both more accessible, and more limited because its setting and characters are explicitly defined on screen. The film perhaps, though, is more provocative, more memorable and more emotionally connected, as a consequence of its direct appeal to the senses.
Eric Edelman’s animations of the first two verse fragments from the Typewriter Underground modify their source poems quite differently. In each of these films, text from the poems is displayed visually, rather than delivered by voice-over. A Clack in the Tunnel opens with the poem’s first stanza traveling onto the screen from right to left like a pronouncement from the Oracle.. It hovers shakily long enough for the viewer to read and partially digest its contents. Later on, the poem’s second stanza rises from the bottom of an arched window casement and remains long enough for the viewer to make some sense of it. In the film these stanzas are represented as sentences, disregarding the line breaks that I employed in the poem. Edelman’s use of the text in this instance adheres strictly to its original content, but not to its form. Perhaps more significantly, the film visually incorporates only the first two stanzas of a nine-stanza poem.
While I would describe the visual representation of the text directly employed in the film as a modification of the original, I would characterize its use by the filmmaker as an appropriation. Edelman appropriated the elements of the poem that enabled him to realize the film’s purposes as he saw them, rather than simply seeking to realize the poem qua poem in animated form. Via appropriation of critical elements, Edelman, like Simone and Vee, takes ownership of the poem, and yet, his nominally incomplete rendering accurately establishes for the viewer the fundamental meaning that required nine stanzas of text on the page.
Edelman’s next film, Typewriter Underground Second Fragment, introduces the poem’s text in a different fashion, a scrolling background to an elaborate, animated scene set outside a train station. While the film presents the entire text of the poem, its function as a stage-rear scrim, backing lively action in the foreground, and its introduction in scrolling sections does not preclude, but hardly encourages, its complete reading. We see the text here as both source of and context for the action, providing us with passing clues to what’s going on in the larger underground, without bearing the burden of the telling the whole story.
As filmmaking strategy Edelman’s move is brilliant, calling attention to the text as frame for the visual world he has established, while placing the film’s vital action outside the text. Edelman took my premise of text as catalyst to heart, rendering this meta-function in the film itself.
The other films from the Typewriter Underground are closely keyed to the underlying text in their visual design and progression, and one, Incomplete Sentences, superimposes a single line from the poem on the action, but none of these poems directly communicate the body of the text to the viewer either by voice or words on screen. This can be accounted for in part because the films were produced to be elements in a theatrical production with live readings of the source poems on stage, but the films function well as silent entities with no direct reference to the text. Accordingly, one might read these as coherent visual responses to the underlying poems, a procedural reversal of ekphrasis in which a poem describes a scene or a piece of art.
How did the collaborations come about? Was film part of your vision for the Typewriter Underground from the outset?
Film was definitely part of the vision for the Typewriter Underground. The project envisions an entirely subterranean culture, one that invites participation in its rendering and in its ongoing life. My aim was to stimulate art, music, theatre, dance, film and community.
These particular collaborations came about because Janice Blaze Rocke, the director of the Typewriter Underground’s first theatrical production, integrates film with live action in her literary performance art. (That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work with her.) Janice and I agreed that I would reach out to half a dozen filmmakers, and invite them to make films that would stand on their own, but could be fully incorporated into the larger production.
In fostering these collaborations, I was interested in variety. I wanted people of different ages, filmmaking styles and genders, hailing from different parts of the country, so I reached out to people whose work I respected and invited them to make films from my poems. I was fortunate that the folks who signed on delivered superb films that traveled stylistically from film noir to theater of the absurd.
What was the role of live performance in shaping both the poetry and films?
That’s a great question. Live performance was crucial to shaping the poems in three ways. First, I constantly voiced the poems as I built them. I tend to process language best when I can hear it, so voicing poems in in development is a natural element of my process. Second, part of my strategy in bringing the Typewriter Underground to life was to introduce the poems in live readings well before making the films, staging the show (and subsequent theatrical experiences), and publishing the book. I did this most consistently in readings at the San Francisco and Los Angeles Poetry Brothels, but also at poetry readings in more conventional settings like bookstores, cafes, and Venice Beach’s legendary literary venue Beyond Baroque.
Live performance was an element in some of the films, and an anticipatory component in all. The films were designed so that they could be incorporated into a live show with a full-sized cinema screen positioned above the stage on. To give you a sense of what this involved, here’s a single photograph from the show at Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Jenn Vee’s film Hypergraphic Dakini-Prolixity (top half of the frame) is playing in parallel with Carri Newhouse’s live interpretation of the same character directly below.
What can digital poets, including videopoets, learn from the physicality of typewriter production?
A critical lesson is that verse can drive and can inspire physical action. A second lesson is that verse admits to physical interpretation. As I mentioned earlier, such interpretation both animates and delimits an audience’s experience of the underlying material. That being the case, if you want to make poetry that inspires creative action, it’s worth considering with care whether the language you’re shaping invites physical interpretation, and what paths that interpretation might take. The aim in this is not to prescribe the one right way to bring the poem to life, but rather to provide structure and cues that generate fruitful interpretation and that defeat translations and visual renderings that would do it harm.
In The Danger Meditations, I was struck by the images of blindfolded people air-typing, which seemed so to resonate (and contrast) with the way legions of people interact with their screens in public now. Was this your idea, or the invention of the filmmakers?
That was the invention of the filmmakers. As part of her preparation for the film, Ellen Hemphill, who has decades of experience in dance, studied how people go about typing on manual machines, isolated their movements, and then amplified them in the air-typing sequences you see on screen, turning the characters, like the machines they fetishize, into a gathering of typists as the undead—typewriter zombies.
In both Manicotti and The Danger Meditations, transcendent creative geniuses exist somewhat apart from a transgressive underground scene. Is this mainly an exercise in nostalgia for past avant-garde movements dating back to the Romantic revolt, or do you see it as a pattern of continuing cultural relevance? I ask because a new generation of extremely ambitious, prosocial, digital-native poets seems to be challenging many of the guiding assumptions of the poetry establishment, while in practice continuing to compete as lone creators for the same narrow, conventional goals (prizes, print magazine publication, books, academic tenure). Are there serious lessons for poets (and filmmakers) in the Typewriter Underground?
I feel definite warmth toward the bohemian communities of yesteryear. The characters in the Typewriter Underground are clearly driven by a yearning for the freedom, community, and scruffy life represented by those subcultures. The outstanding figures of the movement share with the Romantic revivalists an indomitable drive toward uniquely individual creative accomplishment, while, as you note, the transgressive scenesters who permeate the Underground are not particularly original, and rather parasitic.
At the same time there are important differences between the Underground and the avant-garde. Avant-gardes were creative movements consciously seeking to reconstruct art and culture on novel terms. Their central motive was to be out ahead of the culture, and they advanced their agenda in dialectical fashion via manifesto. In this sense members of the avant-garde were part of an expressly modern system dynamic. By contrast, the larger world that members of the Typewriter Underground inhabit is post-modern, networked, digitally mediated, increasingly virtual, massively subject to hive mind, and characterized by exponentially accelerating technical innovation. In such a context, the notion that art’s meaning lies in subverting static social convention is absurd.
Consequently, members of the Underground seek meaning and validation by other means, in particular their rejection of the virtual in favor of the tangible. Typists in the Underground do not find solidarity in a quest to be ahead of the crowd, but in an urgent desire to return to the self, to intimate acquaintance, and to passionate pursuit of individual expression, although their aims with respect to the latter range widely. For some, individual expression is a vehicle for making sense of one’s experience (as Mechanical Rust strives to do in the Danger Meditations); for others, a means of arriving at and communicating one’s truths; for a few, like Prolixity and others that you’ll discover in the First Folio, it is a path to transcendence, and for others, simply a form of exquisite indulgence.
There’s a meta-question implicit in your query about continuing cultural relevance: “Why do I make these damaged, driven creative geniuses central figures in the life of the Typewriter Underground? What am I trying to accomplish by putting them there, giving them life, cataloguing their experiences, describing their accomplishments and the social effects of their actions?”
I put these people in the scene because I believe fervently that in a world shaken loose from its foundations, we urgently need strong poets in the way that the late philosopher and cultural critic, Richard Rorty (following Harold Bloom) talks about them. We need determined individuals who aim not to look ahead, but to be real, to be true, to be themselves—not in a dissipated consumerist sense, but in the sense of active cultivation, realization and full expression of their creative potential. And who possess the capacity to do so with the fiercely ironic awareness that everything they do (and everything they believe) might, in the end, be wrong. Such self-possession flies directly in the face of the careerism that you attribute to the ambitious new poets you’re observing in the digital realm. These folks, on your account, are driving radical shifts in form, poetic method, and standards of evaluation, but are procedurally guided by conventional pathways, incentives and rewards. I conceived the Typewriter Underground as a humorous partial answer to that concern, one which, despite its lightness of touch, I hope and believe, will have durable relevance.
How so?
First, by demonstrating the project’s underlying premise that verse can be a creative catalyst for others, rather than simply an exercise in efficient rendering of language; control of the tongue; language and form presented for critical consideration, or, by its tools, tricks and devices, a song to be enjoyed. Not that these are bad aims, but for me, they are not enough. As cognitive linguist George Lakoff has made plain, our reason is grounded in metaphor. Consequently, as poets, I feel that we ought to make our metaphors count, and that I can make them count best by offering them as the basis for new thinking, fresh imagining and novel action, and by actively inviting others, especially those who work in other media, to explore them with me.
Second, by illustrating in practice how a working poet can make verse catalytic. In the case of the Typewriter Underground, I aimed to do so by imagining a recent, but lost, subculture that is revealed by surfacing fragments of verse. The material that appears is decidedly incomplete, and in places obscure, self-contradictory, laden with references and allusions, not all of which are readily attributable to their original sources. By consciously leaving such gaps, I’m inviting creative minds to fill them, to flesh out the stories, to fully imagine the characters, to dig into the material as a treasure hunter might—exploring where the maps, artifacts and trails of crumbs might lead. I think that’s why these poems appeal to filmmakers and artists.
Underneath this particular procedure lies a deeper set of choices about poetry’s aesthetics and operations. Undertaking this project, for me, entailed a commitment to using verse as a stimulus for a free-form, open-ended communal play experience. In order to invite and secure participation—and for the verse fragments I had created to work their effects—this project had to be funny, but it also had to be fun. Funny is something that makes you laugh in the first instance, fun is something you arrive at through active participation. Given vastly limited resources, for the project to succeed in lowering defenses, provoking curious inquiry, and prompting active creative engagement, it required a rather cracked and deeply layered sense of humor. (In much the same way that the tiny budget for Monty Python’s Holy Grail drove the filmmakers to substitute coconuts for horses in one of the film’s funniest and most memorable gags.) You can find a lot in Felt’s First Folio if you do the spade work and really dig into the verse.
A central implication of my commitment to using verse as catalyst was that I had to step back from the conventional role of a poet and embrace a different set of challenges and anxieties. If I merely presented this material in book form, then I would be offering it as a book solely to be read, not as evidence of something larger to be engaged, discovered, and explored. If I bound myself to conventional standards of poetic accountability, I would have to make sure that the work was witty, concise and precise, free from stumbles, devoid of cheap puns and other crude devices, and that it pointedly put language first. I could make it playful, but as a “poet,” I would have to take it out of the realm of play.
While that would have been more familiar and far safer, doing so would have destroyed the project’s innovative potential and larger relevance. So I stepped back, and offered the collection as a set of verse fragments, varying in quality, method and style, penned, supposedly, by a group of largely anonymous authors. Rather than putting my name on the cover, and presenting the material as a collection of my verse, which, at the outset, would have demolished the project’s premise, I gathered some of the verse fragments into a First Folio putatively published by a dandy named Swizzle Felt, and his partners in crime Horace Nepenthe Jones and Edamame Phelps. By withdrawing from convention in these ways, the collection and the verse it contains force us to engage with difficult but promising questions: “What is this thing? And how do I make sense of it?” That’s where the fun begins.
Achieving that kind of fun, and enabling lots of people to join in, isn’t an easy task. Not everyone is going to know where to begin, how to unpack the mysteries or fill in the gaps. For the premise to work, additional operations and procedures are necessary—but what kind?
The obvious strategy would be to turn the Typewriter Underground into an old-fashioned, manifesto-driven movement, but that would take it out of the realm of play and place it squarely back in the realm of aesthetic dialectic. The next close-to-hand strategy would be to make the Underground into some kind of game, adding structure and rules that showed people how to play, in addition to giving them well-delineated points of access, clear boundaries, modes of collaboration and meaningful choices. Turning the Typewriter Underground into a game, though, would undercut its deepest purpose, which is to draw people into a world of strong poetry, and perhaps discover the strong poet in themselves.
“What if instead,” I said, “I see the verse as seeding a larger conversation—and a variety of activities that grew out of this conversation?” The success of the verse would be determined then not by its linguistic efficiency, its elegance of form, or the beauty of its music, although those might be necessary to its effectiveness, but rather by how it was taken up, and what was done as a result.
Who, then, in particular, might be willing to take up verse in this way? Who might want to join in the fun? The answer for me was people who wanted that kind of play experience, people who wanted to explore the bohemian side of life—hence reading to patrons of the Poetry Brothel—and artists, living that life, who might find in the verse and the premises that spawned it vital sources of inspiration.
The idea of using the verse to seed a larger conversation, meant, to my thinking, that I’d have to invite folks to come play in the Typewriter Underground and start contributing to its legend and lore before the book came out. That’s what led me to invite the filmmakers and other collaborators to get on board more than a year before the book was released.
The project, as it turned out, also needed a watering hole, a durable place where people could meet, participate and join in, so about a year ago I created a virtual watering hole in the form of a Typewriter Underground group on Facebook. Ironic? Definitely. It took me a while to take this step because it seemed so counter to the world I was describing, and that I had invited other artists to help me fashion, but I had grown up in the days of punk rock, and during the early years of modern skateboarding. Those experiences significantly influenced my decision to proceed.
A favorite film of mine is Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys, which documents the origins of the skateboard scene in Santa Monica during the 1970s. There’s a great line in the film delivered by Craig Stecyk, the photographer who covered the scene as it was unfolding. He describes the kids involved as appropriating the urban infrastructure and bending it to their purposes, much as Eric appropriated stanzas of my verse and turned it to his ends. So I said, let’s do the same thing and adapt this piece of social media infrastructure to our purposes, creating a widely accessible portal into the Typewriter Underground. At this point, the group numbers just under 800 people, not huge by social media standards, but man are they real, and man are they interesting. More importantly, the conversation in this group has led to tangible Typewriter Underground activity in real watering holes, most recently in the form of a vaudeville that incorporated several of our films at the Normal Bar in Athens, Georgia.
Returning with a full sense of irony to your point about ambitious digital poets competing to achieve conventional goals within the rather rigid validation structure of the poetry world, the Typewriter Underground is winding its way through those channels as well; it’s just not limited or controlled by them. That I think is a key lesson for poets and filmmakers. Meet this apparatus on your terms, and to the extent that you engage it do so for ends that you value.
Crafting a novel play experience, especially one that isn’t rule-bound, requires more than defining a premise, supplying content, inviting people to play, and giving them a place to hang out; it also demands active nurture. People must feel welcomed, artists well met and appreciated, and stories about shared experiences must be told. As a founding artist, you have to breathe life into your people and the project until it can breathe for itself.
At the end of the day though, the decision to build the Typewriter Underground around an aesthetics of play, rather than elevation of language, and the operational strategies I developed as a consequence would not have been effective if the world, the story and the characters I created did not connect. The people I work with have taken the Typewriter Underground to heart because I’ve introduced them to them strong characters—people with profound limitations, disabilities, and damaged souls; wounded outsiders, who nonetheless have it within them to travel deep underground and emerge from the rubble as strong poets. These are qualities that as people and a culture we will always need. So are these characters and the life they embrace relevant? Yes, now more than ever.
This has certainly been an amazing project, and I love that it’s taken on a life of its own and spawned maybe the first fully formed fan poetry (as opposed to fan fiction) community. It will be interesting to see what other creative projects emerge from that. But what’s next for you as a poet? I mean, where do you go after something like this? I think if it were me, I might just retreat to the proverbial garret and try my hand at a crown of sonnets.
Your idea of retreating to the garret and writing a crown of sonnets has great appeal to me. I did something similar after last summer’s theatrical activities were over, and the book was not yet out. I wrote a very spare chapbook called The Snow Dead. The method was bone-bare minimalism, extraordinarily careful word choice, and a very precise form. In contrast to the aesthetic of fun that animated the Typewriter Underground, The Snow Dead’s governing principles are purely poetic. It is innovative, though, within the tradition.
The collection can be read either as twenty-two very brief poems, each on its own page, or as an extended poem, each line, or cluster of lines, placed in a field of snow, its design visually echoing the chapbook’s subject matter and content. It would be interesting to see how a filmmaker translated this material to the screen. I could imagine a variety of approaches, one would be something very spare and elemental, natural in a Japanese style. I’m very open to ideas about that. Meanwhile, I’m presently in discussions with a fine publisher, and hope to have the collection in print before too long. I’m also interested in what will happen next in the world of the Typewriter Underground. I do have verse ready for a second folio, am having conversations with theatrical producers on the East Coast, and am eager for new collaborators who want to join in the fun.
REEL poetry/Houston TX 2019, Houston’s first international poetry film festival, produced by Public Poetry, was impressive in its inaugural year, and already promises to be back next year, and then either annually or biannually after that. The three-day event included live poetry performances, a panel discussion, and a workshop, in addition to featuring more than fifty films, ranging from documentaries and poetry films to videos extending poetry in all directions, from calligraphy and graphic design to dance and art performances, wordless narratives, concrete poetry, and abstract animation. Rather than trying to distinguish poetry films (films of poems) from film poetry (whose lineage derives from early 20th century experimental film and the “pure cinema” of dadaists and surrealists, such as Man Ray), REELpoetry advocates a big-tent approach, preferring an expansive canon rather than a narrow one.
REELpoetry’s eclectic curatorial vision produced a diverse and lively program of 36 films, some of which have already been featured on Moving Poems, or in other poetry film festivals, but also others that highlight new voices and disparate inspirations. Most of the films are available on the web, so what follows is a compendium with links, so that you can watch them in one place. When a particular film is unavailable, a link to the filmmaker/poet’s website or social media is provided instead.
The festival itself commissioned one film, which opened the cinepoetry screenings: 7 Seas, by Kyra Clegg, based on excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s poems about bodies of water.
The festival also gave out two awards with cash prizes, the judges award, which went to The Opened Field (Helmie Stills, filmmaker; Don Bury, poet), and an audience choice award, which went to I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet).
Houston is a diverse and eclectic city that is proud of its support for the arts, and both REELpoetry and Public Poetry benefit from that climate, enjoying strong community interest, institutional support, and grant funding. Media coverage for REELpoetry 2019 was impressive, including articles in the Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, and Arts and Culture Texas. The festival also provided lodging for poets/filmmakers who attended the event, and the schedule included times and places for mingling and sharing ideas. The inaugural festival set a high bar, and promises even better next year.
7 Seas, Kyra Clegg, UK, artist and cinepoet
I could not locate 7 Seas on the web, but there are some short videos on her Vimeo page.
Shiver, Mark Niehus, Australia, filmmaker, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
The Shadow, US, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
Echoes, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
America Is Hiding Under My Bed, David Mai, director; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Mrigtrishna (Mirage), India, Rantu Chetia, director and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, nor much information about the filmmaker/poet, but I did learn that the film has shown at non-poetry film festivals, and located this brief write-up:
“Mumbai has been the city of dreams for ages. Millions, from every nook and corner of India, come here every day to try their luck in the film world of Bollywood. Only a handful gets their dreams realised though. The rest are left to face the harsh realities of life and the dilemma of their existence. The primary question that constantly hounds them is the motive of their life in Mumbai. The poem tries to portray this very existential query of the protagonist, who is a struggling actor and has left behind the joyous and playful life of the village,” said the director about the film.
Semechki, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Iris Colomb, gestural drawings
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wishing Well, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Moments, UK, Brett Chapman, director and writer
Watch on Vimeo.
I Remember, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker
I could not locate I Remember on the web, but you can learn more about the filmmaker on her website.
As We Embrace, Taiwan, Amang Hung, filmmaker and poet
The runtime for the version shown at the festival is listed as 4:36; this longer version is available at Vimeo.
Turkey Teacher, US, David Mai, Director; Barbara West, performer and poet
Watch on YouTube.
14 Sentences, US, Carolyn Guinzio, filmmaker and poet
Watch on YouTube.
Scarce Shelter in the Red Storm, UA, Cindy St. Onge, multimedia artist
Watch on Vimeo.
Home, Ireland, David Knox, filmmaker; Erin Fornoff, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Body Language, US, Margo Stutts Toombs, filmmaker; Roslyn (Cookie) Wells, graphic artist; Lydia Hance, dancer and choreographer; Loueva Smith, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Ice Fog, US, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, filmmaker and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, but you can visit her Facebook page, check out her book, or hear her read a poem in Houston for National Poetry month.
I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, US, Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
A Lost Penny, France, Madeleine Clair, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Names of Trees, US, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Plasticnic, Canada, Fiona Tinwei Lam, producer, narrator, and writer; Tisha Deb Pillai, animator; Tinjun Niu, sound designer
Watch on Vimeo.
The Wanderers, US, Ted Fisher, filmmaker; Aoife Lysol, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Hanging, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Opened Field, UK, Helmie Stil, filmmaker; Dom Burt, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
America, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker; text by Gertrude Stein
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wind and Plaster, Germany, Burak Kum, filmmaker; Nazim Hikmet Ran, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Capricorn, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Andrey Novikov, original score; Nik Nightingale, calligraphy
I could not locate a film with this title, but you can watch three films on Dahlia’s Vimeo page.
Silicon Valley, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Instructions for Soldiers Back From War, US, Jed Bell, director; David Mai, cinematography and editing; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
New Note, US, Ally Christmas, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
Aral, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker and poet
This title could not be located on the web, but the filmmaker does have a Vimeo page.
Without Distortion, Australia, Mark Niehus, director, producer, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
My Cloverfield, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
Untitled, US, Lisa Maione
I was unable to find this film on the web, but there is a Vimeo page, a website, and an artist’s page where you can learn more about the filmmaker.
Leisure, UK, Derk Russell, cinematographer; Al Barclay, actor; A D Cooper, writer
Watch on Vimeo.
A Family Recipe That Cannot Be Followed or Written Down, US, Elaine Zhang, Director; Tiana Wang, poet
I was unable to locate the film itself on the web, but the project does have a Facebook page.
Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies
When I read that Swiss actor Bruno Ganz died on February 15 of this year, I immediately recalled the iconic photograph of him as the angel Damiel, the character Ganz played in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. Dressed in a black trench coat that hangs past his knees, Damiel stands on the edge of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, looking down on the city of Berlin. Huge white wings erupt from his back.
Wings of Desire is an extraordinary film on many levels – the cinematography, acting, and directing are all of the highest quality. The film’s success, however, is not the result of any of these. The film succeeds because it’s based on poetry.
Poetry determined the film from the beginning. In an article published in the Criterion Collection, Wenders states
I really don’t know what gave me the idea of angels. One day I wrote ‘angels’ in my notebook…Maybe it was because I was reading Rilke at the time—nothing to do with films—and realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.
Needing a screenplay, Wenders approached his old friend and frequent collaborator, Austrian writer and poet Peter Handke. Handke, worn out from having just completing a novel, told Wenders, “I’m completely drained. I don’t have any words left in me. Maybe if you come down here and tell me your story, then I can help you out with a few scenes. But no more; nothing structural, no screenplay.” Wenders and Handke “spent a week thinking up a dozen key situations in a possible plot, and Peter started writing on the basis of that.”
From that initial meeting, the screenplay evolved from weekly dispatches Handke sent to Wenders: “I would get an envelope full of dialogue, without any direction or description, like in a stage play. There was no contact between us; he wrote, and I prepared the film.” Their process sounds remarkably similar to the way in which many video poems arise: one person, usually the filmmaker, creates a film using an existing poem. There is generally little or no contact between the poet and the filmmaker until the film is completed.
Wings of Desire starts with Damiel writing and reciting the opening lines from Handke’s poem, “Song of Childhood:”
When the child was a child
it walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
Gradually, the plot emerges: Damiel (Ganz), weary of his existence as a supernatural being, longs for the messy, sweaty world of humanity. Sitting in a car with his friend, the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) Damiel imagines what life would be like as a human: “To come home after a long day and feed the cat like Philip Marlowe,” – “to have a fever” – “to get your fingers black from the newspaper” – “to lie – through the teeth!” None of these is enough to convince Damiel to make the plunge; that decision comes when he falls in love with the beautiful Marion, an angel-winged trapeze artist performing in a cheesy, one-ring circus.
As Damiel becomes infatuated with Marion, he begins to hover, unseen, around her, influencing her thoughts and moods (the angels in Wings of Desire possess the ability to read people’s minds). In a couple of unsettling scenes, he enters her circus trailer and watches her undress, once reaching to touch her bare shoulder. Since he’s an angel, we assume that he is completely harmless, but once he’s developed feelings for Marion, his presence in her private sphere seems at least somewhat improper. In abandoning his immortality for the love of Marion, Damiel demonstrates that he shares that view: he can’t keep hovering around, spying on her. He must take his chances in the real world.
Wings of Desire is not only a love story between angel and human, but also a film-poem of place: Berlin in the late 1980s. Angels move freely on either side of the Berlin Wall, a privilege not allowed the city’s human population until two years later. Considering its affect on both the film and the city, the Wall imposes limitations as if it were a poetic form, forcing the filmmakers to create within its boundaries. As Nick Bugeja writes in “Discord and new beginnings in Wings of Desire,” “the Wall towers over the lives of those living in Berlin and Germany, physically and metaphorically constraining them.”
Handke’s “envelope(s) full of dialogue, without any direction or description,” form the overheard thoughts of Berlin’s citizens, edited into poetic snippets. I.e., in one scene, a man with a baby in a backpack thinks, “The delight of lifting one’s head out here in the open” while in another, we hear the thoughts of a woman riding a bicycle: “At last mad, at last redeemed.” When Damiel and Cassiel communicate vocally, it’s in elevated, cryptic speech. To quote Bugeja again, “The effect of Wings of Desire is startling. Its poetry seeps from every frame, as feelings of loss, impotency, and later renewal and warmth spill out.”
Poetry gives Wings of Desire its intuitive leaps and eccentric charm. Poetry elevates Damiel’s decision to leave immortality for love beyond cliché and into the sublime.
When he says, “Now I know what no angel knows,” he means he has found his humanity. This is the value of poetry, and all the arts: they awaken the shared sense of what it means to be human. That seems a fitting way to end a film that began with the word angel scribbled in a notebook.
Poetry Film Live, the UK-based online journal edited by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, has just announced its first competition. It’s also on FilmFreeway:
The Film Poetry Competition is inviting submissions of film-poems. The film should contain all or part of a poem. The poem can be pre-existant, or created as part of the filmmaking process. The emphasis should be on a convincing poetic experience rather than simply technical excellence. We encourage poet-made films, or where the filmmaker has worked closely with the poet.
Film-poetry harmonises words, images and sound to create a new poetry experience … it’s more than spoken words, visual images and sound being in the same room together, it’s their ability to talk to one another that creates the magic in poetry film.
The Film Poetry Competition is in partnership with Poetry Film Live and Swindon Poetry Festival.
Awards & Prizes
Prizes will be awarded at Swindon Poetry Festival on 4th October, at a live screening of all shortlisted and winning films.
The following prizes will be awarded: £400 for the overall winner. Recognition will also be given in the following categories: Single author made film, Animation, Best Newcomer.
The deadline is July 12. You can submit either through the website or on FilmFreeway.
I let Chaucer and Helen talk me into being one of the judges for this, alongside Lucy English. And barring any problems with the UK Border Force or Brexit-related chaos, I plan to be in Swindon in October for the screening. So I hope to see some of you there! And I look forward to viewing your submissions.