~ News and Views ~
Erica Goss on how poets experience videopoems
This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss takes a look at how videopoems made by others are seen by the poets whose texts they use.
“Sometimes I feel like I have to watch the videos between my fingers,” says Howie Good. “I don’t feel like it’s my poem anymore.” Howie is a professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz, and the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dreaming in Red from Right Hand Pointing. “It’s flattering, and brings recognition for the poet, but the poem is a creation in itself. I want it to generate its own pictures in the reader’s mind.”
Howie told me that “the poet and the filmmaker have different goals. The video is a separate object. It’s good that a poem inspires the filmmaker, but then it’s not my poem. Now it’s out in the world, away from me.” Howie doesn’t feel that videos diminish poetry. “They don’t enhance poems either. They are simply different things.” The worst thing that might happen would be if the video “pre-empted the imagination. We need our consciousness liberated. Poetry does that.”
“Films based on youth writing” sought for the Poetry Projection Project
In line with Moving Poems’ focus on children’s poetry films this past week, here’s a call for entries for films based on poems by children and youth:
The Poetry Projection Project: A WritersCorps Film Event
Entry Deadline: March 1, 2013, 11 p.m. PST
Screening: April 2013 (date & location TBA)The Poetry Projection Project is an annual video contest held by WritersCorps, an award-winning creative writing program for youth. WritersCorps calls on filmmakers and video artists of all ages to create work based on youth writing. Videos will be screened at an event during National Poetry Month in April 2013 and online at WritersCorps.org.
WritersCorps will award three $250 cash prizes:
One prize to the best film made by an adult age 23 and over
One prize to the best film made by a young person age 17-22
One prize to the best film made by a young person age 16 and underEntries will be juried by special guest juror, filmmaker H.P. Mendoza.
In keeping with WritersCorps’ mission of helping youth through creative expression, the Poetry Projection Project engages filmmakers to explore the power of young people’s words and voices.
Click through for the guidelines.
(h/t: ZEBRA Poetry Film on Twitter)
Two-part interview with “ambassador of cinepoetry” George Aguilar in the Atticus Review
This is not to be missed: Matt Mullins interviews George Aguilar at Atticus Review: Part 1 and Part 2. From Part 1, here’s Aguilar’s take on what makes a compelling videopoem:
The core elements I find most compelling are works that are multi-layered both visually and poetically. They usually feel experimental yet are supported by an expert sense of editing, sound, timing and tone. These types of works draw me in deeply and often leave me wondering what I just saw but also wanting to see it again. Sometimes I don’t get the full meaning of the work until after I’ve watched it a few dozen times. Even then, I still might feel there is something else new to catch the next time I see it. Of course the viewing of it over and over again feels “joyous” even though it hasn’t changed. Isn’t that the essence of the poetic? I also enjoy works that exude a sense of passion and inspiration, whether it is dark or light-hearted.
The breadth and depth of Aguilar’s understanding of cinepoetry/videopoetry and its historical origins are impressive. I’ll be sure to share some of the films he recommends at Moving Poems in the coming weeks.
“We add meaning to culture by remixing it”: Rick Prelinger on the value of preexisting material
Rick Prelinger, creator of the invaluable Prelinger Archive of ephemeral films which so many videopoets have drawn upon, has issued a newly updated and expanded version of his evolving manifesto at Contents magazine: “On the Virtues of Preexisting Material.” (There’s also an interview with Rick and Megan Shaw Prelinger in the same issue.) There are so many good points in this essay, it’s hard to resist the temptation to quote it all. But here are a few passages that stood out for me:
I don’t at all mean to criticize experimentation, but I think we need to experiment harder. Let’s ask more of ourselves rather than asking more of our software. And, while this is really hard when working with appropriated media, I’d suggest that we stop trying so hard to criticize existing media forms, and let them die by themselves. Instead, what might future forms look like? In other words, redeem recycling from a reactive mode and move it into a formative mode. Can we think about recycling as a point of origin?
My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical, and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth.
Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists—the idea that we can touch and appropriate records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
We add meaning to culture by remixing it. Putting something in a new context helps you see it with new eyes; it’s like bringing your partner home to the parents for the first time, or letting a dog loose to run in the waves.
While not shrinking from remixing the present, let’s enjoy the freedom that comes with working with public domain material. The public domain is the coolest neighborhood on the frontier. Use it or lose it.
Read the whole thing. And if you’d like to get into remixing public-domain and Creative Commons-licensed material to create your own videopoetic works, see our compilation of web resources for videopoem makers.
Celebrate London Poetry Systems’ 5th birthday Feb. 16 with Alastair Cook and Swoon
London Poetry Systems “came into this world when a few friends decided to put on a kind of club night mixing poetry, music and live visuals. We wanted to see poetry in a new context, one that made sense to us, that spoke of our generation.” They’ve emerged as one of the most vital spaces for contemporary filmpoetry and videopoetry screening in the UK. On February 16, they’ll mark their 5th birthday with appearances by, and live mixes from, Scottish filmpoem maker Alastair Cook and Belgian videopoet Mark Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, as well as the composer Luca Nasciuti, whose work features in the soundtracks of a number of Cook’s filmpoems. Other poets and musicians will perform as well. The location is Edel Assanti, near Hyde Park. Get the complete details from their Facebook event page, or, in a somewhat more abbreviated form, from their website.
Call for submissions: 6th annual Trevigliopoesia Festival
The Trevigliopoesia Festival has been held in Treviglio – Bergamo (near Milan, Italy) every year since 2008, and includes a competition called La Parola Imaginata. From their website:
TRP – Trevigliopoesia is VIDEOPOETRY: Video-Art, Video Documentary and Poetry Film.
The word as language but also a symbol that becomes an element as the expression of thoughts, images, visions of the poets and their lives. Combining inspirations and influences from the field of philosophy, music, theatre and literature the result of the artistic creation meet the public showing the perfect union between POEM and VIDEO.Under the patronage of the Office of Culture of the town of Treviglio, the arts association Nuvole in viaggio advertises the sixth edition of the video poetry competition LA PAROLA IMMAGINATA.
March 1 is the deadline for submissions. Download a PDF of the rules from their website. (And don’t forget that Italy’s other international poetry film festival, DOCtorClip in Rome, is also still open for submissions.)
Upgrade to the Moving Poems directory page
Visitor stats show that the directory page, Moving Poems’ index of poets and filmmakers, is one of the most-visited pages on the site. But it’s long been difficult to read, especially since the switch to a new, wider template. So I finally decided it was time for an upgrade and found a WordPress plugin, Multi-column Tag Map, that appeared to do everything I wanted. (The previous page was entirely hand-coded.) It is still perhaps a little unwieldy on smaller screens and mobile devices, when it shrinks to fewer than the maximum five columns, but on a desktop monitor it should now be fairly browsable. Check it out.
“Another new kind of poem is made”: Michelle Bitting on the making of poem-films
In an interview at Connotation Press, American poet Michelle Bitting, author most recently of Notes to the Beloved, answers a couple of questions about her poem films:
Second, I see that you have created poem-films. Does the strong visual component of films influence your poetry? Is it the other way around (does the visual element of poetry influence your films)? Or is it both? Or that you’re (like me) a very visual person?
I made the poem-films in much the same way I believe I want to make poems. Going intuitively on what I want it to feel and look like and then seeing what actually falls in my path as I go along. So, the illusion of control and then surrender to what’s happening. That’s a truly fun tight-rope to walk. I try to be willing to fall, meaning fail, and I do, a lot. Sometimes the chemistry just ain’t happening and sometimes it’s an alchemical triumph. To me, the films are poems made out of images and sound. Then, informed by the text, another new kind of poem is made. When it’s working right, it’s all poetry.
On the subject of poem-films, how do you approach and understand them? Do you have expectations for them?
I’m pretty much called to create a visual text for a particular poem and then I just start to see it and keep following the thread that spins out of whatever I’ve begun. I let what naturally falls into my lap (or lens) enter into the conversation. For instance, in the film I did for my poem “In Praise of my Brother, the Painter”, at one point, I took photos and filmed bits of an exhibit on Houdini that was showing in my city (Los Angeles) at the time. Later I wanted a particular person to be in the film as a kind of muse-slash-nod to Houdini. Eventually, I realized I was supposed to wear the top hat and so the configuration of Brother, Houdini, Me and the final images led me to a new understanding of what the piece was trying to tell me, or I was trying to tell myself, in the first place. I could never arrive at that stage of revelation without just simply putting one creative step in front of another into the unknown.
Read the rest of the interview (and scroll down to read the poems). (h/t: R.W. Perkins)
Moving Poems adds a Twitter feed
You can now follow Moving Poems on Twitter: @moving_poems. Though I continue to favor RSS feed readers myself, I have to admit that the Twitter feed proved its utility this week when Vimeo went down for several hours at midday on Wednesday — exactly the sort of thing worth mentioning on Twitter, where savvier web users tend to look for updates about site performance.
Cliché and meaning in videopoetry
I don’t share videopoems of my own work on Moving Poems; that’s confined to my literary blog Via Negativa, where earlier this week I got a little carried away with introducing a new video. In fact, I’d been meaning to say something about common videopoetry images and strategies, and it occurred to me that the popularity of at least a couple of them — moving landscapes from a train or car window and P.O.V. shots of walking feet — may suggest that something deeper is going on:
Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem.
Date set for The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival
As just announced on their Facebook page,
The date is finally set. On Saturday May 4th 2013 at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins CO. The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival will come alive! So now you can tell everyone you know, to tell everyone they know about the what, where and when. Also, don’t forget we are still open for submissions.
