~ News and Views ~
“Even people who do not read poetry become entranced”: an interview with Laura M Kaminski
This is the 19th in a series of interviews with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse — a website which collects “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Anyone who submits to the Storehouse has to think through the question of creative control — how important is it to you, what do you gain or lose by holding on to or releasing control? This time we talk with poet Laura M Kaminski.
1. Submitting to The Poetry Storehouse means taking a step back from a focus on oneself as individual creator and opening up one’s work to a new set of creative possibilities. Talk about your relationship to your work and how you view this sort of control relinquishment.
LMK: I’m not sure I think of “my work” as mine. Most of the poetry I write is responsive—ekphrasis, conversation poems, nature poetry—poems that try to pay tribute and call attention to whatever inspired them. And frankly, I didn’t recognize that until earlier this year when reading the blurb Jose Angel Araguz wrote for the back of my collection last penny the sun. It would be fair to say I didn’t know what I was doing until another poet put words to it.
But I wouldn’t know that there’s such an amazing thing on this planet as a cuttlefish if Temple Cone hadn’t put one in a poem. And if Ayla Yeargain hadn’t written about the scent of honeysuckle at sundown, I wouldn’t have, literally, “stopped to smell the flowers.” How do I even begin to pay back the people who have brought such wonder into my life? I can’t. I can only try to pay it forward. I’m indebted to The Poetry Storehouse for creating a “scenic route” for poetry—it’s all about pointing and sharing the wonder here.
2. There is never any telling whether one will love or hate the remixes that result when a poet permits remixing of his or her work by others. Please briefly describe the remixes that have resulted for your work at The Storehouse and your own reactions to them.
LMK: Nic S. and Marie Craven both remixed “Joining the Lotus Eaters,” and both films used Nic’s reading of it since I wasn’t able to provide a recording with my submission. Nic’s film is haunting to me; I’ve spent a good part of my life in isolated areas and high-desert scrubland, and Nic’s remix uses mostly black and white footage of a young woman hiking alone in high desert, interspersed with short, full-color close-ups of nature at its most lush. My reaction to it was tears — how could she possibly know what it was like for a desert-rat like me to smell honeysuckle for the first time? But there it is, on film: it was just like that.
Marie Craven’s remix uses stills, mostly flowers, that seem to vibrate and dilate in time to the percussion in the soundtrack. It’s all lush, mesmerizing, intoxicating—the heady enchantment of those fragrances, and you can’t stop breathing in. Someone I know who doesn’t usually read poetry watched it and said “I could watch stuff like this all day.”
Nic reached into the poem and somehow extracted and showed me myself, like Jose did in the book blurb. And Marie, she’s serving lotus-blossoms, yes? Even people who do not read poetry become entranced and cannot leave.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
LMK: I’ve already gained far more than I’ve given in my relationship with The Poetry Storehouse. I’d certainly encourage others to be a part of this adventure in any way they can.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
LMK: I think the number of participants that have been drawn to The Storehouse in its first year—poets, readers, film-makers—validates the approach. The collaborative atmosphere and opportunities are exciting. It’s working! It’s working!
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse or any related experience?
LMK: It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to “hate” a remix—I’m simply in awe of the courage it must take to remix a poem and show it to the poet for the first time. Any other poets who’ve borrowed from Homer want to go back with me and show him how we’ve remixed his work? I’m not sure I’m brave enough to go alone.
Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted, two more filmmakers have released work made with Kaminski’s poetry. We’ll probably post them to Moving Poems eventually, but in the meantime you can watch them on Vimeo: “Facing the Wall” by Swoon and “Ghosts” by Jutta Pryor.
Videopoetry and feminism: an interview with Penny Florence and Sarah Tremlett
The first five minutes of the October 14 ScreenSister podcast features an interview with radical filmmaker Penny Florence and Sarah Tremlett of Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival, recorded during the festival.
I loved this bit from Florence:
[The screening Tremlett curated] was a revelation for me, actually, because I’d been plowing a lonely furrow on my own for quite a long time until I got involved in digital poetry. Digital poetry seems to me to be really important because, just by the possibility to work digitally, it changes what poetry is.
I find this very exciting in feminist terms, because feminism, importantly, has to find ways of saying things that have not been said before, of making silence speak.
The interviewer asks if digital poetry is a medium that suits women in particular. Florence responds:
Yes I do. And I think it’s much more interesting than some of the ways in which we used to understand working collectively. The individual voice got subordinated. And in art that won’t do.
I like the stress they put on the unique accessibility of videopoetry and other digital media to a wider field of contributors, including young people in workshops and other new filmmakers. This certainly jibes with my own experience and observations. While there will of course always be room for highly professional filmmakers, at this stage they don’t yet dominate the field — and may never, given the continual progress of media creation tools toward user-friendliness.
As Tremlett says, you can check out the Liberated Words account on Vimeo and the Liberated Words website for growing archives of films and videos screened at the Bristol-based festival.
Under remodeling
If you’re reading this on the website (as opposed to a feed reader or our weekly digest), you’ve probably noticed a few changes around here. Moving Poems Forum is now Moving Poems Magazine, with a greater focus on magazine-like content such as think-pieces and criticism, interviews, and craft essays, in addition to the usual news notes about festivals, contests, and other poetry-film-related things. This is a change that’s been brewing for some time, but got a huge boost from conversations I had with other poets and filmmakers at the ZEBRA festival last week. It’s a good bet that the look of the site will continue to change over the coming days as I work out the architecture, trying to anticipate both the needs of visitors and the likely range of contributions. I think this is what they call a soft launch.
If you’d like to contribute articles (including reprints), please email me with ideas: bontasaurus@yahoo.com. I regret that I cannot afford to pay anyone; this is not a money-making venture, to say the least.
Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel on ZEBRA and poetry films
Directly following the awards ceremony at the end of the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, I sat down with ZEBRA’s artistic director, Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, for a brief chat. I wanted to learn a bit more about how he and the other members of the program committee (Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck, Heinz Hermanns, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Heiko Strunk) chose the films to be screened, and how Literaturwerkstatt Berlin manages to plan and produce such a big festival. And snce Zandegiacomo is something of an expert on the history of poetry film, I wanted to ask what trends or fashions he’s seen in recent years, and where he sees the genre going in the future.
Mention is made of another Literaturwerkstatt production, lyrikline — an online archive of audiopoetry comparable to PennSound in the U.S., but many times larger and more international in its focus. They just added their 1000th poet on October 18.
As for my own impressions of ZEBRA as a first-time attendee: I found it very well-organized (albeit with a few technical glitches), intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, and a bit overwhelming. It was impossible to attend all the screenings, readings and other events even with a number of repeat screenings in the schedule — especially if one also took advantage of the opportunity to drink beer network and socialize each night. As I say in the video, I liked the way filmmakers were invited on-stage for brief interviews with the moderator after their films were aired, though I did hear other attendees complain that this interrupted the flow. As a web native, I suppose I have a pretty high tolerance for interruptions and distractions. But the folks at Literaturwerkstatt Berlin take the “werkstatt” (workshop) part of their name very seriously; craft talks are part of their core mission.
I was very impressed by the three-person jury (Cornelia Klauss, Alice Lyons and Michael Roes). Each of their four choices was a challenging, unconventional film-poem, in contrast to some of the more mainstream prizewinners from past ZEBRAs. I got the impression that 100% of the prize money goes to the filmmakers, but perhaps some of them will split it with the poets whose work they used, as I heard one animator in the awards ceremony audience vow to do if she won. I liked the themed screenings and was frustrated that I couldn’t attend more of them, but fortunately the paper edition of the festival program includes every film, so I can watch all the ones that have been uploaded to the web (probably at least half of them).
Vienna Poetry Film Festival announces competition films
still from a video by 4youreye
The Vienna Poetry Film Festival (A.K.A. Art Visuals & Poetry Festival) is coming up on November 5-6, as previously noted. Now they have released a list of the films they’ll be screening on November 6 from both competitions: Poetry films about the Festival poem “Kaspar Hauser Lied” by Georg Trakl, and Textfilm made in Austria. I recognize many filmmakers’ names, especially in the former category. Congratulations to all for having been selected.
The program for November 5, moderated by Sigrun Höllrigl and Hubert Sielecki, has also been released, including some teaser videos. It too looks very interesting. Best of luck to the organizers and participants for what is sure to be a successful and stimulating event.
“A real Arabic aesthetic”: Nissmah Roshdy on the making of “The Dice Player”
Egyptian animator and media designer Nissmah Roshdy talks about her film The Dice Player, an animation of a section of a Mahmoud Darwish poem of the same title. American poet Erica Goss, author of the Third Form column on video poetry at Connotation Press, interviewed Roshdy in a Berlin coffee shop the day after the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, where The Dice Player won top honors.
Our conversation continued for more than an hour after the interview, but 20 minutes is about the limit to what I can upload at my slow connection speed. (I apologize for the sound not being perfectly in sync; I’m still learning how to use new editing software.)
Ten-day hiatus
Moving Poems will be on hiatus all of next week and part of the following week as I travel to Berlin for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. (If you’re attending as well, do stop and say hi.) Some extra frolicking in Berlin is also part of the plan. Posting should resume on Thursday the 23rd, if not before.
Marc Neys in front of the camera: The Swoon interviews
I visited Marc Neys this past July mostly for a social visit. We’d really hit it off the year before at the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland. Also, I’m a big fan of strange beers and Medieval history, and Belgium has plenty of both. (See my photo essay at Via Negativa, “Embodied Belgium.”)
But I certainly didn’t want to let the week go by without filming the filmmaker and getting Marc to talk about how he makes his videopoems. After all, he’s one of the most productive poetry filmmakers in the world right now; his work as Swoon is inescapable at international poetry film festivals, not to mention at Moving Poems.
Fortunately, Marc was game. I originally thought I would make a single, twenty-minute video — I’d shoot a couple hours’ worth of footage, then edit and condense the hell out of it. The problem is that Marc really had a lot of interesting things to say, and what I’ve ended up with instead is a 42-minute documentary split into four, semi-independent sections. These can be watched in any order, I think. I’ve put them all into an album on Vimeo for easy linking and sharing.
I’ve also added closed captioning to each of the four videos, as I do with all Moving Poems productions these days, to make them as accessible as possible — but also to facilitate translating. If anyone would like to translate the videos into other languages, please get in touch. Vimeo will host and serve as many subtitle files as we want to upload.
Swoon on Sound
Marc explains how he creates the soundscapes he uses in his videopoems and other projects, despite not being a musician. He then takes us up into the bell tower of the cathedral in Mechelen, Belgium, famed for its massive carillon.
Swoon at Home
Where the handle Swoon comes from, and why Marc’s home and city double as a film set for many of his videopoems.
Swoon’s Secrets to Filming No-Budget Videopoems
If you only have time to watch one of these, watch this one. Marc lays out his basic DIY approach to making art, talking about the usefulness of water footage and other home-made filter effects, filming to music, cheap editing software, and more.
Swoon on finding a new angle in videopoetry composition
Marc talks about a new direction he’s recently taken: composing videopoems with the poem in text on the screen rather than in the soundtrack. Along the way, he talks about the influence of theater and classic film, and why he never follows scripts and works mostly by instinct.
