~ News and Views ~
William Stafford documentary airing on PBS
See the website for a list of airdates (PDF) around the U.S. this month and next. See also the review of Every War Has Two Losers by Jayne Lyn Stahl in the Huffington Post.
Every War Has Two Losers is a documentary based on the journals of midwestern poet William Stafford who declared himself a conscientious objector to World War II and, from 1942 through 1946, was interned at the Civilian Public Service Camps as a pacifist. The film has already aired on selected PBS stations, and features some of this country’s finest poets, W.S. Merwin, Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, reading from Stafford’s work.
Stafford, who was born in 1914, was the author of some 67 volumes of poetry, winner of the National Book Award in 1963, and a close friend of another legendary American poet, Robert Bly.
Sharon Doubiago reading from My Father’s Love
A great example of an author-reading video made riveting not only by gripping material and a good reading but also by judicious editing and the inclusion of still photos. This really makes me want to read the memoir.
Hat-tip: the Women’s Poetry (WOMPO) listserv
YouTube Play contest — an opportunity for videopoem makers?
The deadline is July 31. Here’s a New York Times article on the contest. For more, go to YouTube.com/play.
Congratulations to Alastair Cook for having two of his videopoems selected for the 5th ZEBRA Poetry film Festival in Berlin, which will be held October 14-17. Both films have been featured at Moving Poems: “Emily Melting” (a poem by Gerard Rudolf) and “Scene” (a poem by Morgan Downie).
Random strangers reading poems on camera
Check out How Pedestrian, the latest addition to the Moving Poems linkroll. As described in a recent article in the Toronto National Post, the site’s curator and videographer, Toronto poet Katherine Leyton, stops people at random and asks them to recite a poem on camera. Most of the time, they agree.
“Poetry has such a bad rap,” Leyton says. “People will tell me about how they had to analyze Robert Frost poems in high school, and how boring it was, but poetry doesn’t have to be like that.” She’s hoping her blog will change the public’s perceptions about poetry and make it more accessible to those who might otherwise shy away from it.
Most of the participants read the poem Leyton provides only moments before they recite it, and while in some videos this is obvious, in others, the readers recite with such feeling and conviction that it’s hard not to think it’s rehearsed. “Good poetry should always work first on a gut level — it should communicate with you intuitively,” Leyton explains. “I think that for most poets, that’s the aim.”
As a proof-of-concept, the site is brilliant, and with Leyton’s short but substantive blurbs about each featured poet, I should think How Pedestrian could really come in handy in the classroom.
Literalism run amok!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4WZW8bdmk8
The folks at Weirdo Productions demonstrate what happens when poems are taken too literally, using as an example the Carol Ann Duffy poem “A Child’s Sleep.” I love this, because overly literal videopoems are one of the banes of my existence as curator of Moving Poems.
Video-hosting news
YouTube has added a vuvuzela button to all its videos. As a fan of noise rock and dissonant avant-garde classical, I’m cheered by this decision to embrace the sonic chaos of the 2010 World Cup. Sadly, however, this option is not included on embeds, so Moving Poems visitors will have to click through to YouTube itself to hear Sylvia Plath or Linh Dinh accompanied by the drone of a cheap plastic horn.
In other video-blogging news from the Blog Herald, the folks at Blogger have dramatically improved their free video-hosting system, but they still don’t allow embedding. Given that Blogger also doesn’t have an export tool that allows people to take their files with them, people who upload videos to Blogger at this point are basically consigning their uploads to a Blogger lockbox.
SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse Call for Entries
Heather Haley sent along this press release:
SEE THE VOICE – Visible Verse 10th Anniversary Celebration & Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
Please send in your videopoem by Sept. 1, 2010.
- Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information, see below, or contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
In 1999 the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, the first of its kind in Canada, began as an effort of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre, a non-profit literary arts organization dedicated to expanding the reach of poetry through new media with programs such as Telepoetics Vancouver and the Edgewise Café electronic magazine. The VVF became critically regarded owing to its progressive regard for spoken word in cinema, presenting poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could explore the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in these two forms, stage and screen, sparking new dialogue as to the essential nature of poetry. The festival then built upon that foundation, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. They presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from their own country.
Pacific Cinémathèque has been the VVF’s partner since 2000 and throughout the dissolution of the Edgewise. Founder Heather Haley continues to provide a sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry as host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse. And owing to Vancouver’s strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both.
To celebrate entering their second decade of showcasing videopoetry, Haley and the Pacific Cinémathèque are presenting two screenings this year as well as poetry performances, a panel discussion and an awards gala, Friday Nov. 19 and Saturday Nov. 20.
January Gill O’Neil
January just posted her video poem to Facebook, and I thought everyone might like to see it here. It’s from Underlife, her first book of poetry.
Father’s Day videopoem by Chris Eyre and Dick Lourie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QutfN2wb1wc
I don’t tend to post things to the main site which were uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, but I don’t mind sharing this here. It’s making the rounds on Facebook today, and it’s been viewed 84,515 times, which makes it one of the most popular videopoems on YouTube. It’s a clip from the end of the movie Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre. Sherman Alexie wrote the novel and screenplay, but the poem voiced here is by Dick Lourie, according to the YouTube notes. A little web searching turned up the text of the poem, which is titled Forgiving our Fathers.
I just updated this site (along with the main Moving Poems site) to WordPress 3.0. As soon as I did so, a new update of this theme became available, so I updated to that as well. Let me know if you notice anything funny.
