~ News and Views ~
Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel: Ten Favorite Funny Poetry Films
“Always look on the bright side of life” (Eric Idle). So here are ten funny poetry films which have participated in past editions of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, a project of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin in cooperation with interfilm Berlin. Enjoy!
Oedipus (poem by Nathan Filer)
Rong, 2005
The Art of Drowning (poem by Billy Collins)
Diego Maclean, 2009
Missed Aches (poem by Taylor Mali)
Joanna Priestley, 2009
https://vimeo.com/13830005
Der Conny ihr Pony (poem by Gabriel Vetter)
Robert Pohle and Martin Hentze, 2008
Financially strapped (poem by Katrin Bowen)
Katrin Bowen, 2008
Höpöhöpö Böks (poem by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl)
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, 2008
Dialog über Österreich (poem by Gerhard Rühm)
Hubert Sielecki, 2012
Giraffe (poem by Annelyse Gelman)
by Annelyse Gelman and Auden Lincoln-Vogel, 2013
On Loop (poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold)
Christine Hooper, 2013
Carnivore Reflux (poem by Eddie White)
Eddie White, 2006
Further experiments with videohaiku
The footage I linked to for a videohaiku challenge last week elicited very few responses, though each of them was very interesting. Perhaps composing a credible haiku is challenging enough without the additional burden of such WTF imagery to work with. However, in a classic example of beginner’s mind out-pacing the professionals, my friend Rachel Rawlins, who doesn’t consider herself a poet at all, suggested some lines which I thought worked very well. After some rather intense back-and-forth via email and Skype, here’s what we came up with:
To recap, the challenge was to treat the footage as if it were one part of a typically two-part haiku, either preceding or following the cut-point (usually represented in English by an em dash or colon). I find that composing this kind of videohaiku is much easier if you mentally substitute words for footage. So for this one, one could start with something like “[nudist handball—]”, e.g.
[nudist handball—]
not even netting
comes between us
which was an earlier joint effort of mine and Rachel’s.
Haiku are untitled, but Tom Konyves argued in an email that a videohaiku should have a title nonetheless. This was in the context of a critique of my first effort in this vein. I talked about it with James Brush, the author of the text, and he agreed. So we decided to call that piece flower (videohaiku) — though we didn’t remake the video itself, just changed the title on Vimeo, which was perhaps a bit of a cop-out. But for the second one with Rachel, you’ll notice we did put the title right on the video, using a freeze-frame as background.
There’s a long tradition of occasionally using bizarre imagery in written haiku and senryu. I found some truly WTF footage in the IICADOM collection (the Belgian equivalent of the Prelinger Archives), in an undated home movie identified simply as “Rural Life.” My mental substitution for the footage was “Hitler in the garden.” (This was in part a response to Othniel Smith’s video in this week’s Cheryl Gross column.) Anyway, here’s what I came up with:
I decided both videos worked fine as silent films, but I don’t think that’s necessarily part of the videohaiku prescription. I thought the ambient insect noise in flower was a good addition, and could work just as well with visitor here.
I’m now beginning to consider the best way to string videohaiku into videorenga. In classic Japanese linked verse (renga or renku), each stanza apart from the opening and closing verses is part of two different two-stanza poems in succession, which creates a dilemma for filmmakers: repeat each verse or not? And how to represent the shorter stanzas (two lines in English-language renga; 14 “syllables” in Japanese)?
I’m not going to issue another formal videopoetry challenge for now, but I am interested in continuing to work with other writers, and possibly other video remixers as well, so if you’d like to be part of that, let me know (bontasaurus@yahoo.com). Renga is a quintessentially collaborative approach to composition, and it seems to me it might be a natural fit for the remix/mashup culture of the web. But first we need to generate a prototype, I think.
Free Östersjöar (“Baltic Sea”) rentals for Moving Poems readers
You may remember my post from late December about the 31-minute poetry film based on a long poem by the great Tomas Tranströmer that’s now available through Vimeo On Demand. Director James Wine emailed with this offer:
Thanks so much for spreading the word through Moving Poems. We are nudging the audience closer to the first 1000 mark, with viewers in 20 countries on 4 continents — so far! Here in Sweden we are working on a celebration around Tomas’ birthday in April with screenings across the country.
We know the price bites many, but the cost breakdown after the 25% Swedish VAT, the platform charges and plain old taxes, it’s just about 30% left! (At least there is healthcare and free university for all!) No grants or outside funding contributed to the production.
But as thanks to you, we have put a promotion together for your followers, if you like: free rentals starting today through the end of the month. Just hit Rent and enter the code.
The Rental Promotion Code is: movingpoems
Also have put up on Vimeo Part 1 for embedding freely.
https://vimeo.com/116962956
(Be sure to click the “CC” icon to get the English subtitling.)
Here’s the link to the full-length film.
Frankly, I’m poor as the proverbial church mouse, but USD $5.00 doesn’t strike me as too much for a 48-hour rental of a high-quality, feature-length film. That said, I’m always happy to save some beer money. Thanks to Mr. Wine for his generosity.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Despot’s Progress”
I’m still looking for collaborations to write about, so poetry filmmakers and videopoets: please send me links to your work! Today’s collaboration involved two different filmmakers’ responses to the same poem. First, propaganda cartoons (thank you Walt Disney) compiled by Othniel Smith make a stirring backdrop for Robert Peake‘s poem “Despot’s Progress.”
I would like to begin with a bit of history. Walt Disney was pro-American and produced a number of propaganda animations depicting Hitler and the Nazi party as buffoons. Unfortunately his patriotism irrationally carried over into the 1960s. This resulted in not allowing people to enter Disneyland if their hair was too long. (This was sparked by protests against the Vietnam War that I believe he felt were anti-American.) If memory serves me correctly, Disney enforced a rule limiting the length a man’s hair could to be in order to enter the theme park. Call it discrimination, but it’s an interesting example of what the times were like, and I believe makes the interplay of audio and visuals here even more poignant. Since Disney was calling the shots, does that mean he was right in inflicting this regulation on his clientele? If he had prejudice against hippies with long hair, I wonder who else he didn’t like?
I happen to love cartoons, especially old Disney and Warner Brothers. This blended with Peake’s poetry makes a brilliantly chilling observation of injustice and intolerance. The poem speaks sarcastically of totalitarianism as something we must adhere to. Images of Donald Duck saluting and trying to conform “comically” support this theory, but as you can see it is not funny. The cartoons just make it palatable and easy to swallow. This piece points us in the direction of taking an otherwise unrealistic depiction (the actual animation) to reveal the nightmare that eventually came to fruition. I think the question that should be asked is, when it comes to being prejudiced, what is the real difference between Disney and Hitler? I suppose we can say it was six million Jews, but what about the haircut? The atrocities committed by Hitler were undeniably more severe than Disney’s point of view and perhaps I should not compare the two, but let’s not dismiss the last section of the cartoon, when the baby duck bursts out of the egg saluting “Sieg Heil!” To me that’s where it actually begins.
No matter what kind of discipline you practice, art is a very powerful medium. This couldn’t be more relevant to what happened at Charlie Hebdo last week. Je Suis Charlie!
Music/concept/editing by Swoon; footage: coxyde 1951 AB (IICADOM 903 at the Internet Archive).
Then we have Mark Neys A.K.A. Swoon‘s interpretation, which is equally chilling. The use of vintage footage puts me on the edge of my seat. The music gets under my skin and I can’t help but feel this is the second before a disaster is about to occur. I find in Swoon’s piece the end is very different. There is no baby Hitler being born, just anticipation. What is next? And is there a next? Perhaps a bomb will drop or a tsunami will wash away the mother and child, leaving us with basically the same outcome. The world has changed and continues to change.
See also Robert Peake’s blog post, “Two Views of ‘Despot’s Progress’ (Film-Poems).”
News round-up: FACT symposium, Tang Dynasty poetry films and more
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), which describes itself as “the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool,” will be hosting a day-long symposium on February 5: Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century. I’m not sure why it’s scheduled for a weekday rather than the weekend, but it certainly sounds interesting. The topic is somewhat reminiscent of the colloquium discussion at the most recent ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Hopefully they will avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into there by defining their terms (such as “platform”) a bit more clearly.
FACT, in association with the University of Liverpool, PoetryFilm and The Poetry Society, is pleased to invite you to imagine the future of poetry at our symposium Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century. With presentations from artists, scientists and thought leaders, the day examines innovative platforms involved in contemporary poetic practices.
How has the digital age changed the way in which poetry is written, performed, communicated and received? Further exploring themes demonstrated in Torque Symposium: An act of Reading, the day will focus on the prevalent difficulties, dialogues and collaborative possibilities that new technological avenues have revealed in the world of poetry.
The symposium will include three distinct discussion areas, with audiences invited to join facilitated discussions after each segment. Confirmed speakers include George Szirtes (poet and translator), Deryn Rees Jones (poet and director of Centre for New and International Writing), Zata Kitowski (Director PoetryFilm), Marco Bertamini and Georg Meyer (Visual Perception Labs UoL), Suzie Hanna (animator) and Jason Nelson (hypermedia poet and artist, Australia).
More information TBA soon.
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A news story from October, recently posted to the ZEBRA Facebook group by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, also caught my attention this week, about a very ambitious plan by CCTV and the China Central Newreels Corporation to make 108 short films based on Tang Dynasty poems. I can’t embed the English-language newscast video here; click through for that, because it includes brief scenes from a couple of the films. Here’s a bit of the transcript:
“I think film communicates Chinese traditional culture in a very powerful and vivid way. I think it will really help young people appreciate the beauty of Chinese poetry,” said President of Beijing Film Academy Zhang Huijun.
The production team carefully selected 108 poems to be adapted into short films. It explores the works through story-telling and recreating the life of the time. Each film is about 15 minutes long and involves top Chinese actors and directors.
“We selected the best poems. We also selected them based on whether it is easy to make them into a story. That is vital for the short film,” said deputy director of China Central Television Gao Feng.
The initiative aims to promote China’s rich heritage in literature, especially among the younger generation. 70 of the total 108 short films have already been completed, with the rest scheduled to be finished before the end of this year.
The organizers have also invited 108 young singers to perform the theme songs for the films. They are also planning to produce picture-story books based on the poems. The goal is to eventually promote the entire collection of poems from the Tang dynasty.
By “the entire collection,” I suppose they are are referring to the famous and ubiquitous anthology of 300 Tang poems, though that would of course involve also making films out of short lyrical poems lacking in strong narrative elements.
I must say the emphasis on story-telling, popular appeal, and “recreating the life of the time” worries me. I don’t want to pass judgement before seeing any of the films, but experience with big-budget poetry films made elsewhere makes me fear that these films will add little or nothing to the poems and risk achieving the opposite of the project’s stated goal: rather than making poetry more appealing, they will communicate the message that it needs to be sexed up and turned into glossy period drama in order to hold anyone’s attention.
I hope I’m wrong, and that these films do challenge audiences and help translate ancient poems into a new idiom. Because Classical Chinese texts do in fact need to be translated in some way in order to be comprehensible to a speaker of a modern Chinese language such as Mandarin. It’s easy to see how film could assist in that regard, because the Chinese characters are a strong bridge to the ancient language. Calligraphy or type animations similar to what Nissmah Roshdy did with classical Arabic in The Dice Player could help bring the texts across without resorting to actual translation into Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Alternatively or in addition, subtitling into modern languages could be used with the original language in the voiceover. Traditional poetry recitation, a stylized and beautiful art, could be incorporated into the soundtracks.
As for the imagery, I do think it’s a mistake to leave out all contemporary references, which might well serve as further bridges, adding depth and nuance. One element of Classical Chinese poetry that’s in danger of being lost even to modern Chinese intellectuals is their wealth of allusions to older poems and other texts — the vast libraries that were committed to memory under the Confucian educational system. I wonder if it might not be possible to somehow work a few of those allusions in through film collage techniques? At the very least, filmmakers could strive for a roughly equivalent level of allusive depth by incorporating references to well-known movies, pop songs and the like. I’m simply worried that too conservative an approach risks dishonoring the spirit of the texts. It would be as if Tang Dynasty poets composed only gushi and never experimented with the then-daring jintishi. If they’d been that allergic to innovation, we wouldn’t still be reading their poems today.
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The January issue of Poetry brings news of a poetry film still in production, an English-language documentary tentatively titled Las Chavas focusing on girls on a Honduran orphanage who are learning to write poetry in English and Spanish, with the aid of an American Episcopal priest and the poet Richard Blanco. A brief essay is followed by a selection of the girls’ poems. Check it out. Honduras has always punched well above its weight where poetry is concerned, so I’ll be looking forward to the film.
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The Athens-based collective + the Institute [for Experimental Arts], sponsors of the annual International Film Poetry Festival, have launched a new website to replace their old Blogspot site. It’s certainly easier to navigate, not to mention better looking. The Festivals link in the header takes one to a gallery-style archive of posts about the poetry film festival.
Videopoetry challenge: help me shape a new(ish) style of videohaiku
This collaboratively produced videopoem with text by James Brush represents a new approach to videohaiku for me: one in which the first part of the haiku is represented by film footage, which freezes and transitions to text roughly where a mid-poem kireji or cutting word would occur in a Japanese haiku.
[A mid-verse] kireji performs the paradoxical function of both cutting and joining; it not only cuts the ku into two parts, but also establishes a correspondence between the two images it separates, implying that the latter represents the poetic essence (本意 hon’i) of the former, creating two centres and often generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements.
It’s an approach for which I am partly indebted to Tom Konyves, who in his Videopoetry: A Manifesto cites Eric Cassar’s minimalist videohaiku as normative for the genre—”The videohaiku (approx. 30 seconds) uses a few words of text attached to the shortest duration of images”—and who responded to some recent thoughts of mine about different approaches to videohaiku (and there are many!) with a comment that took me a little while to digest. I had mentioned one approach in which a long shot (or series of related shots) is followed by the haiku as text-on-screen, so that the shot(s) function more or less like the painting in a traditional haiga as well as suggesting something about the poet’s observational process leading up to the composition of the haiku. This is a method both James and I have experimented with in the past. Quoting a description of the two-part structure of a typical haiku, Tom wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this “method” addresses a question about videopoetry’s strategies re: word-image relationships in the fact that the observation of the first segment – the division into two semantic elements of unequal length, usually corresponding to two different images or ideas, which for maximum effect should have some relationship but not too immediately obvious a one – is best achieved by the image, while the non-sequitur of the second segment is best expressed in words (the text in a videopoem).
It was with this on my mind last Monday that, rather on the spur of the moment, I challenged Facebook friends and members of the POOL group there to write something to go with a section of a randomly chosen old home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I gave them six hours, later extended to eight, and linked to my post from the Moving Poems Twitter account as well:
Ekphrastic haiku challenge: I need a haiku to feature in a haiga-style short film using footage from this old home movie—the section from 3:50 to 4:50 where the baby is brandishing a flower. Haiku should contain no more than 17 syllables but may contain fewer; kigo unnecessary; number of lines unimportant. It should work as a poem and should probably refer obliquely to the film imagery at best. You’ll be fully credited as author, and the resulting video may appear on Moving Poems if I’m satisfied with it. Email haiku (as many attempts as you like) to me: bontasaurus@yahoo.com by 10:00 PM tonight (Monday), New York time (3:00 AM GMT).
In short order I received 27 submissions from 13 people, most of them published poets along with a couple of inspired amateurs. I soon realized that my instructions had been inadequate if not down-right misleading. I shouldn’t have specified that a submission should work as a poem, because the lines that seemed to work best with the footage felt incomplete until I imagined them following the footage. James had started with a rather high-concept idea and pared it down in the course of three drafts. I suggested two further edits. What finally emerged was this:
…
how your hands burn
for the sun
with the ellipsis standing in for the footage of the baby in a meadow waving a daisy around. (One could even make it fit into a line: babe with a flower, say, or toddler in the yard.)
I’m excited by the result, and I’d like to propose a new challenge to help us further explore the possibilities of videohaiku. This time I’ll make the deadline midnight on Monday, New York time — i.e., 5:00 AM January 13 GMT. (That’s for people who get the weekly email digest and read it at work on Monday.) I tend to resist the idea that haiku need to be about nature all the time, so found a home movie, evidently from the 1930s, that features two men, naked but for jock straps, playing American handball in an indoor court. There are many minutes of that footage both at the beginning and end of the movie, but as before, I’ll select less than a minute of it, so feel free to suggest specific sections to use with your submission of haiku — or should I say, half-haiku. Because the idea this time is not to submit something that would necessarily stand on its own as a printed poem, but something that can be wedded with the footage as its other half, “generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements” as the Wikipedia entry on kireji puts it.
Again, please use email (bontasaurus @yahoo.com) to submit, and send along as many suggestions as you like. Also, feel free to consider the possibility that the footage might fall in the second part of the verse, with one or two lines of text at the beginning. Would that even work as a poetry film? Could the flinging of a handball operate even as an end-of-verse kireji?
If you’re unfamiliar with haiku, or wonder why a lot of us who write it in English no longer believe in “5-7-5,” I recommend the Wikipedia entry on haiku, Imaoka Keiko’s essay “Forms in English Haiku,” and an excellent brief for writing haiku based on art or literature, rather than exclusively on direct experience: “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths” by Haruo Shirane. And for a good overview of 20th-century and contemporary haiku, I strongly recommend the Spring 2009 issue of Cordite, “Haikunaut.” The issue index at that link isn’t actually complete, because the essays are as illuminating as the poetry, so start with David Lanoue’s introduction and use the “next post” links to page through. By the end of it, you should have a pretty comprehensive picture of the variety of modern traditional and experimental haiku… except for videohaiku, which they don’t mention. I guess it’s up to us to write that chapter.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Ballad of The Skeletons”
This historic collaboration between Allen Ginsberg (1926-2007), Philip Glass and Paul McCartney was a low budget venture. Gus Van Sant who had ties to the Beat Generation directed it. I happen to love Van Sant’s work, which includes Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Milk. It aired on MTV making Ginsberg one of the oldest artists on the network at the time. This in and of itself is an accomplishment since MTV is primarily youth-oriented. It’s also a good way to acquaint an audience not necessarily familiar with a very important part of our culture.
Glass and McCartney carry the music and Ginsberg the poetry. The recording was produced by Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith group) along with an array of musicians.
The poem was first published in 1995, two years before Ginsberg’s death. The footage of Ginsberg reminds me of the time I saw him at the old Chelsea Hotel picking up his mail. We nodded to each other. I could see he was in pretty bad shape. To approach him would have been an intrusion. As far as I was concerned the acknowledgement was as good as an autograph. This was a special moment for me, and probably an everyday occurrence for him. Such is the price one has to pay for being a celebrity. I’ve also had the pleasure to see him read. Needless to say I’m a big fan.
I love and admire all three artists, but their collaboration created a bomb. To begin with, I adore the use of old footage but the interlooping of Ginsberg’s image in my opinion doesn’t work. I know it’s Ginsberg’s poem, I know, I know. So use Ginsberg as a weave. His image feels too disconnected. It’s as if Van Sant threw him in from time to time just to remind us this is Allen Ginsberg and how important he is. Even if it was low-budget, I think he could have done a better job. The vintage material Van Sant used is pretty powerful on its own. I would have liked to see it used as a backdrop with just Ginsberg’s voice. Another thing I would like to point out is the fact that in the so-called Vietnam Era we had the first war that was televised on a daily basis, thereby desensitizing us as a generation along with generations to come. Perhaps seeing this on a larger screen would have more of an effect, but for the small screen it’s almost dismissible.
The point of the poem as I understand it references the Mexican Day Of The Dead and refers to our figureheads and society as no more than skeletons that are posed, thus leading us to think they are doing something that will improve our lives. I would have liked to see more skeleton and Dead references used. It comes in only at the beginning and if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a stickler for continuity. This is a very significant piece. If it were revisited today, perhaps it would have more of an impact on me personally. It hits me intellectually but not emotionally. Again, I love Ginsberg with his fuck-you attitude. Although dated I would have liked to be punched in the gut, where it really hurts, making me puke, rather than leaving me feeling detached.
There are two versions. The second is Ginsberg reading and McCartney playing guitar, filmed by one of McCartney’s daughters (which one I don’t know). This poetry video is a performance. I think I like it better than Van Sant’s attempt, which seems to have everything thrown in including the kitchen sink. This to their credit is pure and unpretentious.
Special thanks to Open Culture.
The Continental Review relaunches and The Volta’s Medium returns from hiatus
A post at Queen Mob’s Teahouse tipped me off to the relaunch of The Continental Review, one of the oldest online videopoetry magazines, founded by Nicholas Manning in 2007 and still co-edited by Manning and Jordan Stempleman. It’s now hosted on Squarespace with a minimalist, responsive design that serves the content well. The archive is organized alphabetically by author’s last name and is very browseable indeed. And they have two new videos up for Winter 2015.
The Continental Review is included in the short list of recommended sites on the front page of Moving Poems. Another journal in that list, The Volta‘s video section Medium, had been on hiatus since April 2014, but as of January 1 they too have a new issue out, #85: a 20-minute videopoem by Brandi Katherine Herrera and Andrew Glei called Verso. It’s great to see Medium back, and I hope they’ll resume regular posting.
Both journals welcome unsolicited submissions, by the way — both through more or less the same process of uploading pieces to Vimeo and emailing their editors with the links.
HaikuLife: The Haiku Foundation video project
The Haiku Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of haiku in English, including but not limited to the 17-syllable form that has (regrettably, in my view) become the norm. They run contests, host extensive web archives, produce teaching materials and more. And for a number of years they’ve been sponsoring a National Haiku Poetry Day on April 17, which in 2015 will be turning into an International Haiku Poetry Day — thanks largely to web video technology.
[R]ather than create dozens of small gatherings, as we have done in the past, we will host a single event that all haiku poets can attend on line. We hope you and your organization will want to create a HaikuLife presentation to share with haiku lovers around the world.
They’ve produced a video to explain what they have in mind:
Read much more about it on their website.
Poetry filmmakers Sina Seiler and Eduardo Yagüe featured in The Third Form
This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, poetry-film critic Erica Goss profiles and interviews two filmmakers who should be familiar to regular readers of Moving Poems: German documentary filmmaker Sina Seiler and the Spanish freelance director and poet Eduardo Yagüe. I learned a lot about both directors. For example,
Sina served as an intern at the 2008 Zebra Poetry Film Festival, and was involved in the pre-screening process (no small feat, as Zebra receives close to one thousand submissions). She remembers how it felt to watch so many poetry films: “It was so great that something like this existed. I immediately had the idea to make my own poetry film.” “Elephant” is the result, based on a poem Sina wrote. She added, “I have been writing poems since I was young, but I didn’t publish them – they were just for me. Nothing commercial.”
And this about Yagüe:
Eduardo’s influences include the German choreographer Pina Bausch, the British performance group DV8 Physical Theatre, and the work of Samuel Beckett. Themes of emotional and sexual tension are evident in Eduardo’s work, which his many talented actor friends aptly express.
“I know a lot of actors,” he said. “I am lucky that they want to be in my films. I love actors and poetry, so that’s what I want to do: mix the things that I love. And most actors are comfortable with poetry. We study poetry; it helps us learn to speak properly. Much of the spoken part of theater is poetry: Shakespeare, for example.”
Do read the rest (and watch the films). What each filmmaker has to say about their process is especially interesting.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Affects of Gravity”
Poet Chris Tonelli sent me this article regarding his collaboration with Boston-based performance artist/activist Andi Sutton.
A brief explanation of the video poem: Tonelli and Sutton collaborated on a piece that involved replacing a voiceover on a ride in an amusement park. They substituted Chris’ poem for music that is ordinarily played over loudspeakers. The ride chosen was the Gravitron, which is based on centrifugal force. “The Sculpture In The Memory” is the name of the poem.
Chris recorded the voiceover, which substituted for the music normally used to attract customers and sell tickets. This was a three-day event.
Affects Of Gravity allows the masses to experience high art without the stigma or fear of appearing ignorant. The fact that music is usually played on rides in amusement parks is indeed part of the attraction to the ride, but when replaced by Chris’ poetry, a third aspect is created. This reaches a population that would ordinarily shy away from anything highbrow such as installation art, therefore allowing the average person to gain an elite cultural understanding at least for a brief moment. I’m sure if people were listening, they would realize that the poem is about the Gravitron experience. But for most people the original intent was to enjoy the actual ride. This is the reason why people frequent amusement parks. The sound continues to remain a backdrop.
Sutton’s video in my opinion is perfect. It captures the gritty atmosphere of a seedy amusement park. There is an air of sleaze and perversion that is amplified, which personally leads me to a place my parents warned me about. For me it is nostalgia at its creepiest. I suppose some people would equate this to a fear of clowns.
This is a wonderful performance piece and I love it when artists think outside of the box. By incorporating the two genres, poetry and installation, they have created a fresh experience and perhaps gained a new audience as well.
I emailed Chris and asked him to further explain the project. These are his words:
I was giving a reading at the Plough & Stars (I think) in Cambridge and Andi was in the audience. And she approached me after the reading wondering if I wanted to collaborate on something based on the poems that I had read…13 weird poems (a chapbook called FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE GRAVITY AND OTHER PEOPLE, Rope-A-Dope Press) told in the voice of Gravitron, the carnival ride. The bizarre thing about that is, the poems were based on an art installation I’d experienced at MASSMoCA, not an experience I had at a carnival.
Anyway, what we settled on was replacing the typical pop music that would be played inside the Gravitron with a recording of me reading the poems. This was at the Topsfield Fair…Massachusetts’ big state fair. So we asked the operators how much we’d need to pay them to do this (how much they thought it might cost them in ticket sales), we priced the cost of a bus to get people we knew out to the fair (in case NO ONE at the fair wanted to ride it), and applied for a grant from MIT for like 3K and got it! So I had the poems recorded, we went to the fair and made the switcheroo, and Andi filmed it…capturing the responses of the riders, etc. Her thing as an artist is confronting people with art, not in a typical art setting, but when they aren’t necessarily expecting it, out in public.
Here’s a review of the project. An excerpt:
[W]e were prepared to pay more attention to the poetry than the kids around us. And they were all kids, talking loudly, full of sugar and giddy with a day at the fair. They could not have cared less about the poetry and sound recordings, and Colin even noted how they seemed to be trying to drown out the sounds by stamping their feet.
Yet, when the ride started to spin and there was nothing but the whir of the motors, the sound of the recordings and the pull of gravity, something seemed to change. Tonelli’s voice, the voice of the Gravitron, spoke with authority. The machine demanded our attention, pulled at us and spoke to us at the same time. For that brief period, the length of one midway ride, our small group of artists and children understood the Gravitron in a way that I doubt any of us will understand any other carnival ride.
Zata Kitowski interviewed at A Younger Theatre and Write Out Loud
Two recent interviews with the founder and curator of the UK-based PoetryFilm project together serve as a good introduction to Zata Kitowski’s basic philosophy and priorities. In an interview with Frances Spurrier for Write Out Loud, “‘Separating and combining the senses’: the art of the poetry film,” she shows herself to have very broad tastes, while expressing a preference for what has become almost an orthodoxy in poetry-film, filmpoem and videopoetry circles:
How would you define the relation of the poem to the film and vice versa?
The question implies that there is a separation between the poem and the film. Some poetry films are created from the outset as a cohesive poetry film so in this way there is no separation. If the artwork did begin with a poem at the start of the creative process, or with a film, then there are various integration approaches. Duplicating the visual, verbal and aural content is a popular obvious interpretation; however, in my opinion, contrasting different elements is more powerful, playing with the presence and or absence of words, images and sounds. The poetry film art form is a fertile and creative area to explore, and the project celebrates many different approaches, both separating the senses and combining the senses.
A feature article by Heather Kincaid in A Younger Theatre takes the long view, “Celebrating Creativity – Twelve Years of PoetryFilm.” I was especially interested in what Kitowski had to say about the audience for PoetryFilm events:
“We have a really diverse audience,” said Kitowksi. “People come from poetic and literary spheres, as well as from film and artistic circles. I think this diversity is partly influenced by where we hold events – so we might exhibit work at a cinema or film festival, in an art gallery, or at a literary festival. The response from audiences has been very positive both in the UK and abroad.”
Judging by the fact that her latest event, PoetryFilm Solstice at the ICA in London, sold out a day in advance, I’d say the response is very positive indeed. Even though my own approach at Moving Poems is to pull in fans of film and poetry with the lure of free web videos, I recognize that seeing films in a theater or art gallery is a wholly different—and generally much more immersive—experience, and having a knowledgeable guide to interpret each film really adds value as well. And as a poet, I love the idea of getting people to pay real money to go hear and see poetry. So here’s wishing PoetryFilm many more years of success.
