I’m a little late in sharing this announcement, but the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions:
For the seventh time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries to find the best poetry film. Entries may be short films made on the basis of poems. The total value of the prizes in the competition is € 13,000. From among the films submitted, a Programme Committee will nominate the films to be entered for the Competition and select the films for the various sections of the festival programme. The winners will be chose by an international jury.
The Festival is also inviting entries of films based on this year’s »Festival poem«, Love in the Age of the EU by Björn Kuhligk. The directors of the three best films will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with a sound recording and various translations here.
Closing date for entries for all the competitions is 25 April 2014
See the complete call for entries [PDF].
This is the first 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? Our first interview is with Peg Duthie, who shares a thoughtful and very interesting take on these issues.
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.
PD: When I was ten, The Hound of the Baskervilles showed up in my life as a graphic novel. The resulting obsession with Sherlock Holmes led to encounters with dozens of adaptations (some sublime, many banal) — including the original Broadway cast recording of Baker Street — and acres of analysis/speculation (some of it illuminating, much of it ludicrous).
So I learned early on that an author has little control over what a reader brings to a text or where they go with it. This lesson was reinforced when I won a state writing competition, and — I presume because I was still in grade school — a local newspaper summed up my work as being primarily about being a child. My winning entry was a multi-act play about a one-armed flute player, so I found the reporter’s mischaracterization both infuriating and instructive: some readers are gonna make your work be about what they’re looking for, even when it’s not, and it’s fruitless to fret about them.
On the other side of the coin, one of my favorite poems is Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” which I would have found wholly indigestible if I’d been introduced to it on paper. But my first collision with it was via a recording by a man whose voice closely resembled Ian Carmichael’s, the actor who’d portrayed Lord Peter Wimsey on BBC radio. So here’s a sprawling, emotionally extravagant poem reaching my ears as narrated by an urbane, Bach-playing detective — a man who cherishes order and precision. Twelve years later, I’m chanting “The Hound of Heaven” to myself while trying not fall off the back of a motorcycle zipping across Mississippi. You can’t dictate that kind of bone-deep connection — or any other type of connection, really — into existence. All you can do is to encourage multiple points of entry and then hope for the best.
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 describe the remixes that have resulted for your work at the Storehouse and your own reactions to them.
PD: At this writing, there have been three, all of “Playing Duets with Heisenberg’s Ghost”: an audio recording by Nic S., a video by Nic S., and a video by Othniel Smith. Both videos use Nic’s reading of the poem.
The camera in Nic’s video travels up and down a series of shallow, wide steps, in what looks like the middle of a forest. It’s a sunny day, but the vegetation is so thick and messy that many of the steps are almost entirely in shadow. In the background, a guitar softly plays Axel Rose’s “Shy Dreams.”
In Othniel’s mix, the camera alternates between two sets of black-and-white footage: scenes from a performance by African American musician Martha Davis (probably with her husband, Calvin Ponder, in the background — we glimpse hands plucking at a bass behind her), and scenes of an atomic bomb at several different stages of detonation.
What these remixes do for the poem is (a) accent some of its preoccupations and (b) bring new layers of potential resonance to the reader-viewer. Nic’s film highlights a juxtaposition of the man-made (the concrete steps) and the wilderness. The blurring of the already fuzzy boundaries between the path and its surroundings (look at those vines and branches and fronds encroaching on the trail) echoes the turn in the poem, where the narrator admits she’s not wholly down with how porous the divide between death and life seems to be.
Othniel’s film radiates energy: Martha Davis is brimming with it. She’s a big, beautiful woman in a ballgown, playing among the potted plants and sateen curtains of a mid-twentieth-century hotel or nightclub. Her eyes are bright and so’s her smile. You can’t hear what she’s playing and it doesn’t matter, because you can see how dialed in she is both to the music and its unseen listeners — sometime she’s leaning into the piano as if it’s just her and it and what her fingers are saying to it, and sometimes she’s giving the audience the “you and me, we’ve got a happy secret between us” look. She’s so alive.
So, juxtaposed against her effervescence, you have the bomb and its pouffy poison-clouds. A different kind of bigness and brightness, in what looks like the middle of nowhere. Out of context, it’s rather abstract and arguably beautiful — but you can’t escape from the real world for long, so Martha and her piano get the last word, so to speak (even though her audience may well have included scientists from UChicago or UCLA seeking a night’s break from their work).
Or do they? After I watched Othniel’s video, I looked up Martha Davis and found that she’d died of cancer at the age of 42. I’d figured that she might already be dead, given the period nature of the footage, but that nonetheless spooks me, watching someone who is at once so vibrantly alive and yet fundamentally isn’t. The landscape of Nic’s video reminds me of Heisenberg’s love of hiking, as well as the walk in the woods with Bohr that torpedoed what was left of their friendship (another narrative I first encountered as part of a graphic novel, incidentally). The reflection of Martha’s hands in the piano’s mirror strip has me wanting to sketch out new poems about fallboards and flirting and fumbling-for-words-for-what-fingers-do.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
PD: Absolutely. Truth be told, my first reaction each time I learned about the videopoems was an “Eeeeeeeeeeee!”-filled happy dance. There are so very many other things that people could be that it’s impossible not to feel honored when someone chooses to spend time with something I’ve written. And then when they choose to revisit that something, and to invest time in the recording and research and editing — that’s an amazing feeling.
There’s also that thing about providing multiple entry points: some of the people now telling me how much they like the poem are longtime friends who connected to it via Othniel’s video. I’m certain Martha Davis drew some of them in (“What in the world does she have to do with quantum mechanics?”); some of them really dig videos; some of them haven’t bought my book (which is fine! I don’t get around to buying or even reading/watching/hearing everything my friends make, either!); and some of them read my blog or tweets maybe once every four months, so whether they hear about a poem at all depends on schedules and stars aligning just so. So again, I’m acutely conscious of the attention as a gift.
Sort-of-advice-wise, I feel that different authors will have different thresholds for what they’re comfortable having other people play with, and with their ability to handle the interest (or a lack thereof) to what they offer — I say this not from my experience with the Storehouse, but from general observation — so I think things are more likely to be fruitful when writers are candid with themselves about their boundaries, their expectations, and how much self-promotion they’re willing to do on behalf of the republished work.
That said, I also think the selection-for-submission process can be a fun exercise whether one eventually hits “send” or not. Allowing myself to imagine where a remixer might go clarified some aspects of where I am now (e.g., “hmm, not ready for a stranger’s spin on that” or “Good lord, pretentious much?”), as well as suggesting some riffs I might want to pursue myself.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
PD: To my knowledge, everyone else involved with the Storehouse has way more experience in collaborating and remixing than I. I’m still taking in the possibilities.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
PD: I’ve enjoyed peeking at some of the other republications and remixes. Jennifer Swanton Brown’s collage on Erica Goss’s “Afternoon in the Shape of a Pear” is nifty, especially in how its links take the visitor to other remixes. Sarah Sloat’s “Dictionary Illustrations” is captivating. I’m looking forward to browsing around some more and offering remixes myself at some point — probably audio. Possibly calligraphy/collage. Possibly translation (probably in French). Quite possibly launching off a line or two into an entirely new poem. I wish I had the chops to produce comics: I can storyboard Kate Marshall Flaherty’s poems in my head, but actually drawing the panels isn’t in my skill set. Alas.
Also, I confess I get a kick out of the connections that led me to the Storehouse and have since been created by my being a part of it. I first heard about the Storehouse through Rachel Barenblat, who is another native of Texas, although at this point I think she’s spent over half of her life in Massachusetts, and I’ve spent 88 percent of mine east of the Mississippi. But we both grew up as minority women in the South (she’s Jewish, I’m Taiwanese) and sometimes I know she just gets my lover’s quarrel with my home region when there being love (or quarrel) at all has other people furrowing their brows. And then for a poem to be read by Nic, whose accent is primarily English (I think? I’m terrible at placing accents) but who has lived in Virginia longer than I’ve been in Tennessee, and then for that reading to inspire a playwright in Cardiff…
The latest installments from our two favorite monthly columnists don’t disappoint. In his “Swoon’s View” column at Awkword Paper Cut, Marc Neys considers “Two Cinematic Approaches to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”: “First Death in Nova Scotia” by John Scott, and “Where are the Dolls” by Cassandra Nicolaou.
The editing is thoughtful and draws the viewer inside the story (I love the jump cuts between the introvert close-ups of the woman and the loud and intimidating girls). Nicolaou did an amazing job in translating the poem to this day and age with respect and love for the original words, accenting the power of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. And when it’s over, I want to see it again.
And in her “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss mixes interview with analysis for an in-depth portrait of Heather Haley, organizer of the long-running Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver and a talented filmmaker in her own right.
Heather Haley’s videos take risks. They deal with domestic violence, eating disorders, prostitution, and other serious issues that affect society. “I don’t set out to deliver a message. I don’t like being preached at and I don’t want to preach. My work comes from my experience, but it’s also universal. I don’t theorize,” Heather told me. “There’s not enough time for that.”
I first heard about 12 Moons back in August. That’s the videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (writer), Nic S. (reader), Kathy McTavish (musician) and Swoon (filmmaker) slated to result in monthly films throughout 2014, appearing at Atticus Review. Now they’ve released a trailer:
https://vimeo.com/79471054
If this is any any indication, the series should be very watchable indeed. See also Swoon’s blog post introducing the trailer, which contains a thumbnail account of how the idea for this “videopoetry calendar” developed.
Motionpoems and public artist Todd Boss present “Arrivals & Departures at St Paul’s Union Depot,” a colossal 3D poetry film installation that will magically transform the facade of one of St Paul’s most impressive landmark buildings.
The plan is to:
- select a handful of original poems by Minnesotans (theme: “Arrivals & Departures”) from a statewide call for poems (see GUIDELINES below),
- commission Minnesota film teams to turn finalist poems into short films to fit digitally mapped 3D templates of the building,
- project the films onto the screen-filled facade of St Paul’s historic Union Depot at 5-minute intervals like trains, with accompanying audio from lawn-area speakers, during the St Paul Art Crawl, October 2-4, 2014.
The artistic vision for this project is to celebrate Union Depot’s renaissance as a rail hub with an act of locally sourced meaning-making that will reclaim the space in the hearts and minds of all who experience it.
They need a lot more backers, though, so please consider making a contribution to the Kickstarter campaign.
It’ll be huge. Five poems. Five films, departing every 5 minutes like trains, looping till late-night during the Saint Paul Art Crawl, when thousands of art-lovers already flock to Lowertown.
I’m a passionate evangelist for poetry, and I believe that our public spaces could be more “poetic.” This project is not about me or my poet friends. It’s about inviting everyone to write a poem, and sharing those poems (in film!) with the community.
I have an essay up at Voice Alpha, a group blog about reading poetry alive for an audience, on the unique challenges and rewards of doing a live reading accompanied by “karaoke” versions of videopoems — videopoems from which the poem has been stripped. I began by discussing a terrific example of this kind of performance which I’d been lucky enough to see this summer at the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland — the inspiration for my own first venture into videopoem karaoke this past Wednesday. Here’s part of what I concluded:
There was simply no question that I’d have to practice my ass off for a couple of days in advance, reading the poems over and over while the videos played in a VLC playlist on my laptop. With regular poetry readings, practice might seem optional (at least to poets who don’t read this site), but with audiovisual accompaniment, you have to come in on cue or the whole thing flops. I had assumed the screen would be behind me and prepared accordingly, but with it situated to my right, I didn’t have to glance exclusively at my laptop for visual cues.
Complete memorization of the poems would not have been a bad thing, much as I resist internalizing my own words to that degree. I wouldn’t have had to fumble with a book and set list, and possibly could’ve engaged more with the audience. However, with the audience focused on the screen, what really mattered was my vocal delivery, not eye contact. And with the accompanying music being generally melodic and at points down-right funky, it took off the pressure to give an absolutely flawless reading. So in a way, this approach offers a bit of a crutch to those of us (95% of poets?) who are not highly skilled performers.
There’s nothing like a live reading to improve one’s delivery, though. I had been afraid that the necessity to sync up my reading with prerecorded music and images might make for kind of a mechanical delivery, but I don’t think that happened. In fact, for some of the poems in the set, I found myself reading in a more intense, impassioned style than I used when I’d recorded myself alone in a quiet bedroom for the online versions of the videopoems. And since I had to pay close attention to the music for many of my cues, I think this approach actually improved my over-all sense of timing and rhythm.
I’d love to hear impressions from other poets who have given audio-visually enhanced readings. I know of quite a few.
The 3rd annual CYCLOP International Videopoetry Festival is coming up on November 16 and 17 in Kiev, Ukraine. For a description in English, see this very informative slideshow. They have a number of partners and media sponsors; it looks like a pretty major event. The focus is on contemporary Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian authors, and they hold a competition “to draw attention to Videopoetry as a phenomenon and a separate art form.” Last year they also showed selections from the Argentine videopoetry festival VideoBardo, the German ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and Brooklyn’s International Literary Film Festival.
Here’s the 1st Place and People’s Choice Award winner from 2012, “1 + 1 = 1,” directed by Kalinichenko Xenia using a text by Mary Teymurazyan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh1XU1bwKEk#t=122
Scroll down the CYCLOP webpage for many more videos.
The Body Electric has just announced through its Facebook page that the 2014 festival, on April 26 in Fort Collins, Colorado, is now open for submissions. The rules and submission process are exceptionally simple, and last year’s festival was evidently a resounding success, so there’s really no reason not to submit. The deadline is February 16.
Just a reminder to check out the new posts from Marc Neys and Erica Goss in their respective monthly videopoetry columns at Awkword Paper Cut and Connotation Press. Most of the films shared in the columns have yet to appear at Moving Poems, so that’s an additional bonus for me as well as for readers. In “Swoon’s View” this month, Marc looks at two cinematic-style videopoems from the Bokeh Yeah! collective in Manchester, made in association with Comma Press, by Adele Myers, Ra Page, and James Starkey. November’s installment of The Third Form with Erica Goss focuses on the poetry filmmaking of Michael Dickes, who is, among other things, the editor of Awkword Paper Cut.
Belgian filmmaker and musician Swoon (Marc Neys) gave a two-day videopoetry workshop as part of the TARP festival of audiovisual and experimental poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania earlier this month. His blog post about the experience should be of interest to videopoets and poetry teachers alike.
The participants get to experience the importance of timing, the power of coincidence, and, hopefully, the fun of playing with words and images. After that two groups were formed (making sure each group had someone familiar with film and/or video and someone willing to write) to work on a project of their own. Both groups took the results of the writing experiment as a starting point; One group used footage shot by one of the participants and combined two ‘poems’ of the experiment. In doing so creating two streams of thoughts played out against two streams of images. The other group wrote a new poem (using the same basic idea) and added self filmed footage and filmed some new material the day before the second part of the workshop.
The second evening we recorded the poems. Each group explained and showed their work in progress. Giving me a change to suggest, answer questions and help out where needed.
Just a few weeks old, The Poetry Storehouse, poetrystorehouse.com, is already beginning to live up to its slogan, “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Everything in the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and there are also links to off-site collections of work with remix-friendly CC licenses of one variety or another. The site’s editors, led by Nic S., are actively soliciting for submissions of poetry in English, and new material will be added on a weekly basis. The editors tag and categorize the poetry on the site fairly exhaustively in order to maximize its findability.
The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of freely-available high-quality contemporary page-poetry for those multimedia collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by copyright and other restrictions. Our main mission is to collect and showcase poem texts and, in some instances, audio recordings of those texts. It is our hope that those texts will serve as inspiration or raw material for other artistic creations in different media.
I’m one of the site’s advisors, along with Marc Neys. My primary agenda is probably pretty obvious: generate more videopoems/filmpoems to share on Moving Poems! But more than that, I strongly believe that poets should be more open to artistic collaboration, and stop viewing a printed book as the ultimate destination for their work. And I think any filmmaker looking for a great short subject should consider bringing a poem to the big or small screen.
I’ve added The Poetry Storehouse to our page of web resources for videopoetry makers in the “Free and Creative Commons-licensed texts and audiopoetry” section. (And while I was updating the page, I also added a new section with links to free online filmmaking tutorials, to make it even easier for poets who want to have a go at envideoing their own or others’ works. Thanks to beginning poetry filmmaker Graham Barnes for the suggestion.)
The Transatlantic Poetry Community on Google+ is doing something which, as far as I know, has never been done before on such a large scale (and with such major poets): delivering regular, live readings of poetry over the web. It uses “Hangouts on Air,” which are basically souped-up Google Hangouts saved instantly to YouTube, where past readings are archived. Each show so far has paired a poet from the U.S. with a poet from the U.K., each reading for 20 minutes to half an hour, followed by a joint Q&A in response to questions submitted on the Google page or on Facebook. Here are Michelle Bitting and Andrew Phillip; Jane Hirshfield and George Szirtes; and Marvin Bell and Esther Morgan.
The next reading is on Sunday, October 13, and features a half-dozen British poets: Katy Evans-Bush, Isabel Galleymore, Chris McCabe, Andrew Philip again, Paul Stephenson, and Claire Trévien. It’s part one of a two-part series in cooperation with Silk Road Review, which will conclude on Saturday, October 19.
I commend the organizer, Robert Peake, for what must be a tremendous amount of work, drawing on his expertise as a tech consultant as well as an American expatriate poet living outside of London. A page on his website is actually the best, most uncluttered place to bookmark for news and videos of the readings. It includes a stats counter for total views on the videos: 887 views in 43 countries as of October 4. His latest post on that page is a manifesto which outlines an ambitious program for expansion and partnering.
One does of course need a fairly good broadband connection to watch the readings live; I haven’t been able to watch it here in rural Pennsylvania, though I did enjoy the first two shows this summer when I was in London. Peake is a very good live host, and I’ve also been impressed by how politely but firmly he’s dealt with the narcissists on the Google community page who only want to post their own (inevitably terrible) poems. The show has had a few technical difficulties: an abrupt cut-off a few minutes from the end of the first show, and a muffled reading from Marvin Bell which required a make-up (non-live) reading video. Obviously for Hangouts on Air to work, care needs to be taken that participants have good cameras and microphones. But beyond the technical limitations are the inherent problems of reading poetry to an unseen, unheard audience. When I met Andrew Philip at the Filmpoem Festival in early August, I asked him how he’d handled that. He said something like, “It was strange at first, but I got used to it after a while.” I find I don’t enjoy the readings as much as I enjoy videos of readings before live audiences because I miss that feedback from the audience. Perhaps as the audience for Transatlantic Poetry builds, live reactions via Google, Facebook and Twitter can be given more prominence — integrated into a combined stream, perhaps, right beside or beneath the embedded video on Peake’s website? Barring that, I guess I’d prefer shorter readings and more time devoted to conversation between the poets and with the host. Another thing that seems slightly odd to me is the lack of any mention of Canada so far.
But enough of my obnoxious criticisms! Join the community and spread the word. I’ll conclude with a quote from the end of Peake’s manifesto:
What Transatlantic Poetry on Air ultimately represents is something greater than the sum of its parts. It is a manifestation of the growing trend of communication technology breaking down geographic barriers for poets and poetry-lovers to connect. Furthermore, the approach is economical, environmentally friendly, and accessible for those with restricted mobility.
In addition to the technological paradigm shift, enabling us to engage poets and their audiences in new ways, there is great interest overall for poets and poetry-lovers to connect globally. Poets on one side of the Atlantic recognise that they have much to gain from exposure to their counterparts across the sea. Transatlantic Poetry on Air therefore lies at the intersection between what poets and poetry-lovers increasingly want, and what is increasingly possible.
Transatlantic Poetry on Air aims to produce enjoyable, high-quality experiences throughout the lifecycle of each event for everyone involved. It aims also to be guided by its stated purpose and principles to evolve and expand over time, making it a fulcrum for the upliftment of global poetry in the twenty-first century.