~ News and Views ~
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.
Found videopoem?
A reporter tries to get out a simple report in what I presume is Urdu. The result struck me as an inadvertent videopoem. (Many thanks to Arvind for locating this for me on YouTube, based on a version that had been uploaded to Facebook.)
Morgan Downie on videopoetry and surrendering to time vampires
Scottish poet Morgan Downie shared some of his thoughts about videopoetry and his collaboration with Alastair Cook (see their two videos) in “time vampires,” a blog post from April 28 which I only just discovered. He includes some kind words about Moving Poems, which I appreciated, but I particularly liked his conclusion:
in computerland you can pretty much do what you want, pick a sound, an image, a stream of words and run with it. when alastair did the scene video he just picked it up and ran with it. what a surprise, what a treasure! not only that by indulging yourself in these collaborative efforts you get to meet new people who do things differently to you, who come from different and interesting backgrounds, countries, cultures and, more or less, there’s no publisher, deadline, competition, brief etc etc other than what you want there to be. so all of that is rendered superfluous. and that can only be a good thing.
so, time vampires. yes, staring at a screen can be a bad thing, but as a means to some form of creative expression, some interaction, something new you hadn’t even thought of? that’s a monkey on my back i’ll welcome. i could write more but i’m off to practise some guitar noise i want to use. i have no idea how to record it, what to do with it when i have done, but that’s all part of the joy.
i recommend it.
Film quotes with possible relevance to videopoetry
“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
–Orson Welles
“Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.”
–Frank Capra
“A film is — or should be — more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”
–Stanley Kubrick
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
–Ingrid Bergman
“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
–Robert Bresson
“With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.”
–Akira Kurosawa
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.”
–Igor Stravinsky
“Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”
–Jean Cocteau
“The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. … The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.”
–Francois Truffaut
