~ News and Views ~
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.)
New York Shakespeare Exchange brings road show, 48-hour sonnet film contest to Texas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8H9JfgXHko
The New York Shakespeare Exchange is the nonprofit organization behind the nearly complete (123 of 154 films released) Sonnet Project… which is now going global. Their mission is to “provide fresh points of entry to the work by intersecting contemporary culture with the poetry of Shakespearean words and themes in unexpected ways,” and to that end, they announced this week a 48-hour Shakespeare Shorts film contest next weekend in Texas.
This March, NY Shakespeare Exchange is bringing our community immersion event, INTERSECTIONS to Bryan/College Station. In just one week, we will engage as much of your community as we can with the words of William Shakespeare. If you love cinema and want to flex your muscle with a little iambic pentameter, then this contest is for you! In just 48 hours you will pick a Shakespeare Sonnet and turn it into an indie-style short film which we will screen at a special Sonnet Project party. Shakespeare Shorts is a perfect way to show your sense of cinematic artistry.
Click through for the details. If you’d like to bring NYSX to your town or city, check out their INTERSECTIONS page.
Combining the spectacle of the stage, energy of our pub crawls, and the multimedia approach of The Sonnet Project, INTERSECTIONS, the latest offering from NYSX, is a community immersion initiative for the world beyond NYC.
Working with community leaders and local institutions, our troupe of actors, directors, and teachers will create a direct-from-NYC, tailor-made series of events special to your town.
Wait. Did they say “pub crawls”? Yes they did:
The true spirit of Elizabethan London lives on.
Doublebunny Press Opens Submissions for Fourth Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Submissions have opened for the fourth Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.
The Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is a competition meant to highlight poetry and visual art at the intersection of film. The festival, due to take place in Worcester, Massachusetts in October of 2017, focuses on short films that illustrate original poems, all of which are non-performance based (read: no footage of the poems being performed).
As well as a $200 prize for Best Overall Production, Rabbit Heart will be awarding $100 prizes in six other categories: Best Animated, Best Music/Sound, Best Smartphone Production, Best Under 1 Minute, Best Valentine, and the Shoots! youth prize. The matinee, and then the gala awards ceremony and viewing party will be at Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA on October 21st.
Doublebunny Press is a small independent press that serves the New England area through poetry design, layout, and production of fine books and posters. Doublebunny also supported Omnivore Magazine, a poetry and arts monthly which, during its three-year run, published poetry and articles by over 150 authors, and carried a national subscription base.
Doublebunny has a history of great spoken word events in Worcester. They combined forces with The Worcester Poets’ Asylum to present V Day to the city in 2002 and 2003, and the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2005. In 2014, Doublebunny brought the inaugural Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival to the city, and now for the fourth year’s festival, they plan an even more exciting show for Worcester, inviting the imagination of poets and filmmakers to once again take center stage.
About Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is one of very few outlets in the US for poetry on film, and the only festival that asks that the author of the poem participate in the making of the production. In 2014, 2015, and 2016 Rabbit Heart attracted international attention, including not only European submissions, but the honor of a showcase in the CYCLOP festival in Ukraine (2014) and showings in Barcelona, Spain at pro.l.e (2015, 2016).
This year, Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival has once again been recognized with a grant from the Worcester Arts Council, an agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Submissions are now open for the 2017 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, and will remain open through July 1st.
To learn more about this event, including guidelines and galleries of winning films from past years, please go to doublebunnypress.com and click on the menu links to Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.
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:
Disappear Here poetry film series to launch on March 16
Disappear Here has released the above trailer for its launch screening in Coventry on Thursday, March 16. Reserve your seats now.
18 Artists – 27 poetry films exploring the Modernist/Brutalist superstructure of Coventry ringroad!
Come and see the artist’s work produced over the last few months, find out more about their creative process in a Q&A session and hang out with other creative types!
The event is FREE – all are welcome – there will be a bar (with some money behind it for those who arrive on time)
Featuring:
Emily Wright X Martin Green
Alex Taylor X Leanne Bridgewater
Mab Jones X Emilia Moniszko
Jack Norris X Cathy Galvin
Sangam Sharma X Cormac Faulkner
Brian Harley X Zoe Palmer
Richard Houguez X Dora Mortimer
Ben Cook X Sarah James
John McCaughley X James GradyDoors open – 7pm
Screening kicks-off – 7.30pm (with intermission)
Q&A with the artists – 9pm
Event Ends – 10pm
Please RSVP via EventBrite so there are enough seats for everyone)
Disappear Here is grateful to acknowledge support from Coventry City Council, Arts Council England, Coventry 2021 Bid Team and Silhouette Press.
The organizer, Adam Steiner, tells me that they aim to go on tour with the films in the near future. To repeat what I said when I shared the initial film in the series, The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House by Steiner and poet Antony Owen, this sounds like a truly commendable use of film to bring the perspectives of poets and artists to bear on pressing local issues. And there are few issues more pressing than our fraught relationship with place. I’d love to see this project imitated elsewhere.
Poetry Film Live unveils first issue, opens submissions
Please join me in welcoming and spreading the word about a new online magazine, Poetry Film Live. Unveiled on Friday, its first monthly issue “features poetry films from international poets and filmmakers,” names that should be familiar to most Moving Poems readers: Robert Peake, Marc Neys, Marie Craven, and Judith Dekker. There’s also an interview with Martin Rieser, which adds historical perspective and contributes some insights about poetry film I haven’t seen elsewhere.
The editors are the energetic filmpoem-making team of Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, with assistant editor Lucia Sellars, a poet and environmental scientist who brings Spanish-language fluency to the table. Poetry Film Live is affiliated with The Interpreter’s House, a 32-year-old UK print literary journal. Here’s how they describe their mission:
Poetry Film Live is a collaboration with The Interpreter’s House poetry journal to show some of the best and most inspiring film and video poetry from the UK and around the world, by both new and established poets and poetry filmmakers.
Poetry film 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 editorial bias is toward poetry films with an emphasis 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. We also encourage work from poets who are new to poetry film.
Submissions are currently open through June 30th. After that, the plan is to have three submissions periods per year, though new issues will appear monthly.
There’s been a real need for this kind of publication. Until now, videopoets and poetryfilm makers who have wanted to submit their work to online publications have mostly had to look for regular literary magazines that make room for videos, and with a few notable exceptions such as Atticus Review and TriQuarterly, that tends to be an afterthought. And all too often literary magazine editors want exclusive publication rights, as if they still don’t fully understand how the internet or the filmmaking world work. By contrast, the Poetry Film Live editors state that “Previously screened and shown work is fine,” and require “A link to your film/video hosted on Vimeo or YouTube” as part of the submission.
They do stipulate that “The author asserts, under his/her own liability, the complete right of use on used materials (images, words, sounds, music) that compose the artwork; the author undertakes complete liability for any breach of copyright laws,” which will exclude some remixes, but should protect them from the situation I sometimes face on Moving Poems of videos disappearing from the site due to DMCA takedown requests to (usually) YouTube from original copyright holders of remixed materials. (Though fair use/fair dealing provisions in U.S. and U.K. copyright law may protect such remixes, YouTube typically errs on the side of caution and takes a “guilty till proven innocent” approach.)
The appearance of Poetry Film Live was a complete surprise, by coincidence on my birthday — which is one day after Moving Poems’ own birthday (she’s eight). So as you can imagine I was really happy to see such a promising new publication joining our not very crowded field, based in a country where — unlike the U.S. — poetry-film actually enjoys some recognition from the poetry establishment as well as in the very active spoken-word scene. Here’s hoping they become a vital and influential player in the poetry-film world.
Call for essays on typography and text as image in poetry film
The Weimar-based, multilingual Poetryfilm Magazine generated as part of the fantastic Poetryfilmkanal website this week issued a new call for submissions. For their third annual issue, they’re looking for essays on Typografie und das Wort im Bild — Typography and Text as Image.
We are looking for essays dealing with the following questions: Is a text in a poetry film purely functional and underlines or explains the meaning of sound and image? What is the difference between a font in a book and a font in the form of a moving image? What kind of different or additional meaning(s) does it create? What is the relation between a text and other elements that appear in a film – or together in a frame? To which extent does this relation turn the text into a protagonist of the film itself? Why does a filmmaker choose for a particular font? What is the relation between sound, voice-over and other visual elements? How is the balance between reading, watching and listening?
As in the past two editions we are interested in a direct connection to the process and practice of filmmaking. We encourage everyone interested to send us their contributions (up to 10.000 signs and without footnotes if possible) until the end of July 2017.
Call for videopoems: SINESTESIA 2017
For the third year in a row, SINESTESIA is mounting an international exhibition of videopoems during Barcelona’s Poetry Week in June. The call is in Spanish (here’s the Google Translate version), but submissions are welcome in English, Spanish or Catalan, or with subtitles in one of those languages. With all the emphasis on conventional filmmaking in so many poetry film festivals, it’s refreshing to see Tom Konyves’ manifesto quoted in a call for work.
Speaking of poetry film festivals generally, I’ve just attempted a long-overdue update of Moving Poems’ list of active festivals. I say “attempted,” because it often isn’t clear if a festival has simply taken a year off or has run its course. If they’ve gone two years or more with no update, I assume it’s time to start talking about them in the past tense. In cases where the website has disappeared, but it’s only been a year since the last festival, I’ll leave the listing up. At any rate, please let me know if there are other festivals or regular screening events I should include.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Streamschool (Patakiskola)”
Streamschool (Patakiskola)
poem: Zsolt Miklya
director: Péter Vácz
background: Kati Egely
narration: Piroska Molnár
music: Yvein Monq
English translation: Joseph Wallace
2012
The Vimeo description reads: “A little girl has an adventure with water as she travels from a small brook to the sea. A tale of growing up based on a Hungarian poem.” And Péter Vácz adds that “The film was made in (MOME) Moholy- Nagy University of Arts and Design in 2012 as my BA graduation in Animation.”
One thing I can say about my own animation students: they are dedicated and make great illustrators. That’s because they are pushed into honing their craft. Some of the best work I’ve seen comes out of film schools. It’s fresh, interesting, and ambitious. It’s always good to see a young artist present their thesis. In my opinion it usually turns out to be among their best work. Such is the case with Péter Vácz.
Streamschool (Patakiskola) is a beautifully rendered work of art. The combination of tactile materials such as plastic and cloth adds to the sweetness of the piece and depicts childhood as an exquisite journey. The music-box effect flows stunningly as well as the gravelly voice of the narrator, which reminds me of a loving grandparent. His use of stop motion (Dragon Stop Motion software) reminds me of the claymation that was very popular during my childhood, and continues to be so. Also, I like the fact that Péter posts the process of his work. Not every artist is this generous.
All in all, Péter Vácz is a serious technician and an amazing craftsperson. It’s good to see that one does not out-weigh the other. I checked out his other films, which are just as charming and a lot of fun. As a bonus, here is the making of Streamschool.
Lucy English interviewed about filmpoetry on Carpool Poetry
The latest episode of a new YouTube series from Burning Eye Books features a lovely interview with UK poet and poetry-film expert Lucy English.
Clive Birnie talks to Lucy English about her filmpoem project Book of Hours (http://thebookofhours.org), Liberated Words (http://liberatedwords.com) and Rebecca Tantony’s one-to-one poetry show All the Journeys I Never Took (http://rebecca-tantony.com/projects) which Lucy produced.
Burning Eye Books are “a small independent publisher in the South West predominately specialising in promoting spoken word artists.”
Incidentally, Lucy English wasn’t the first poet to draw a connection between Medieval illuminated manuscripts and poetry films; I suppose it’s a natural association to make. The Chicago-based poet Gerard Wozek, who has been making poetry videos with artist Mary Russell since 2000, has a good essay about poetry video on his website which was invaluable to me when I was starting Moving Poems back in 2009. I still quote his succinct definition on MP’s About page:
A poetry video is an illuminated electronic manuscript that records the voice, the spirit, and vision of the poet, and frames this technological intersection between visual art and literature.
Weimar Poetry Film Award’s new trailer raises the bar for poetry film festival trailers
Look, I like the typical jazzy, brief trailers that festivals like to turn out, but this short film, directed by Guido Naschert, really makes me want to drop everything and go to Weimar in May. More than that, it’s a great introduction to the genre as a whole, as well as to some of its leading thinkers and practitioners:
(In case you missed last week’s post, here are the details.)
