~ theory ~
Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views
I was happy to see a comprehensive, 17-page report [PDF] on the Feb 5 Send and Receive conference about “Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) from the poet John Davies, A.K.A. Shedman. His highly literate and personal take on the conference gives one a good sense of the sorts of issues under discussion and the often conflicting opinions of the participants. Davies also did his own research on poetry film to flesh out the article, which he titled “Send and Receive: misaligned model or magnificent mix?” It concludes with a brief description of each film shown. Check it out.
Davies includes his reactions to two presentations that are also online. Zata Kitowski has posted her talk [PDF] on the semiotics of poetry film at the PoetryFilm website. And while it doesn’t relate to poetry film per se, George Szirtes’ presentation on how he uses Twitter and Facebook to draft poems is nevertheless very interesting, and may be read on his blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).
Szirtes also shared some informal reactions to the conference, including the poetry films, in a post on Facebook that’s fully public (i.e., you don’t have to be a Facebook friend of a friend, or even a logged-in user, to read it). Although his assessment of the films was a bit less critical than Davies’, they agreed on which was the stand-out: Dream Poem by Danny Caswell Dann Casswell. “The Dream Poem won it for me, because the idea of the poem was the idea of the film—the one was the other,” Szirtes writes. And Davies called it “superb – witty, clever but thoughtful animation that played with the media. A true poetry film with the right mix and balance.” Unfortunately, I can’t find any trace of this film on the web. Hopefully that will change at some point. It’s available to view on the PoetryFilm site.
Videopoetry challenge: help me shape a new(ish) style of videohaiku
This collaboratively produced videopoem with text by James Brush represents a new approach to videohaiku for me: one in which the first part of the haiku is represented by film footage, which freezes and transitions to text roughly where a mid-poem kireji or cutting word would occur in a Japanese haiku.
[A mid-verse] kireji performs the paradoxical function of both cutting and joining; it not only cuts the ku into two parts, but also establishes a correspondence between the two images it separates, implying that the latter represents the poetic essence (本意 hon’i) of the former, creating two centres and often generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements.
It’s an approach for which I am partly indebted to Tom Konyves, who in his Videopoetry: A Manifesto cites Eric Cassar’s minimalist videohaiku as normative for the genre—”The videohaiku (approx. 30 seconds) uses a few words of text attached to the shortest duration of images”—and who responded to some recent thoughts of mine about different approaches to videohaiku (and there are many!) with a comment that took me a little while to digest. I had mentioned one approach in which a long shot (or series of related shots) is followed by the haiku as text-on-screen, so that the shot(s) function more or less like the painting in a traditional haiga as well as suggesting something about the poet’s observational process leading up to the composition of the haiku. This is a method both James and I have experimented with in the past. Quoting a description of the two-part structure of a typical haiku, Tom wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this “method” addresses a question about videopoetry’s strategies re: word-image relationships in the fact that the observation of the first segment – the division into two semantic elements of unequal length, usually corresponding to two different images or ideas, which for maximum effect should have some relationship but not too immediately obvious a one – is best achieved by the image, while the non-sequitur of the second segment is best expressed in words (the text in a videopoem).
It was with this on my mind last Monday that, rather on the spur of the moment, I challenged Facebook friends and members of the POOL group there to write something to go with a section of a randomly chosen old home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I gave them six hours, later extended to eight, and linked to my post from the Moving Poems Twitter account as well:
Ekphrastic haiku challenge: I need a haiku to feature in a haiga-style short film using footage from this old home movie—the section from 3:50 to 4:50 where the baby is brandishing a flower. Haiku should contain no more than 17 syllables but may contain fewer; kigo unnecessary; number of lines unimportant. It should work as a poem and should probably refer obliquely to the film imagery at best. You’ll be fully credited as author, and the resulting video may appear on Moving Poems if I’m satisfied with it. Email haiku (as many attempts as you like) to me: bontasaurus@yahoo.com by 10:00 PM tonight (Monday), New York time (3:00 AM GMT).
In short order I received 27 submissions from 13 people, most of them published poets along with a couple of inspired amateurs. I soon realized that my instructions had been inadequate if not down-right misleading. I shouldn’t have specified that a submission should work as a poem, because the lines that seemed to work best with the footage felt incomplete until I imagined them following the footage. James had started with a rather high-concept idea and pared it down in the course of three drafts. I suggested two further edits. What finally emerged was this:
…
how your hands burn
for the sun
with the ellipsis standing in for the footage of the baby in a meadow waving a daisy around. (One could even make it fit into a line: babe with a flower, say, or toddler in the yard.)
I’m excited by the result, and I’d like to propose a new challenge to help us further explore the possibilities of videohaiku. This time I’ll make the deadline midnight on Monday, New York time — i.e., 5:00 AM January 13 GMT. (That’s for people who get the weekly email digest and read it at work on Monday.) I tend to resist the idea that haiku need to be about nature all the time, so found a home movie, evidently from the 1930s, that features two men, naked but for jock straps, playing American handball in an indoor court. There are many minutes of that footage both at the beginning and end of the movie, but as before, I’ll select less than a minute of it, so feel free to suggest specific sections to use with your submission of haiku — or should I say, half-haiku. Because the idea this time is not to submit something that would necessarily stand on its own as a printed poem, but something that can be wedded with the footage as its other half, “generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements” as the Wikipedia entry on kireji puts it.
Again, please use email (bontasaurus @yahoo.com) to submit, and send along as many suggestions as you like. Also, feel free to consider the possibility that the footage might fall in the second part of the verse, with one or two lines of text at the beginning. Would that even work as a poetry film? Could the flinging of a handball operate even as an end-of-verse kireji?
If you’re unfamiliar with haiku, or wonder why a lot of us who write it in English no longer believe in “5-7-5,” I recommend the Wikipedia entry on haiku, Imaoka Keiko’s essay “Forms in English Haiku,” and an excellent brief for writing haiku based on art or literature, rather than exclusively on direct experience: “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths” by Haruo Shirane. And for a good overview of 20th-century and contemporary haiku, I strongly recommend the Spring 2009 issue of Cordite, “Haikunaut.” The issue index at that link isn’t actually complete, because the essays are as illuminating as the poetry, so start with David Lanoue’s introduction and use the “next post” links to page through. By the end of it, you should have a pretty comprehensive picture of the variety of modern traditional and experimental haiku… except for videohaiku, which they don’t mention. I guess it’s up to us to write that chapter.
Videopoesía: Un Manifiesto por Tom Konyves
La videopoesía es un género de poesía ilustrado en una pantalla, que se distingue por su yuxtaposición de imágenes, texto y sonido basada en un tiempo específico. La mezcla medida de los tres elementos, producen en el espectador la realización de la experiencia poética.
El famoso manifiesto por el pionero de videopoesía Tom Konyves acaba de ser traducido al español por Jorge A. Lucarini Sanz. Léalo en Issuu o descargue el PDF.
New book on poetry film by Stefanie Orphal
Academic publisher De Gruyter has just published a 310-page monograph titled Poesiefilm: Lyrik im audiovisuellen Medium [Poetry Film: Poetry in the Audiovisual Medium] by German literary scholar Stefanie Orphal. It’s probably a good thing I don’t know German, because if I did, I’d be feeling pretty frustrated by the astronomical price tag: US$126.00 for either the hardcover or the eBook — or $196.00 for both together! But perhaps one could talk one’s local university library into buying a copy. The publisher’s description is certainly enticing:
Unlike film presentations of narrative or dramatic literature, the audiovisual depiction of poetry has received little attention from researchers. This volume traces the history of the poetry film genre and subjects it to systematic examination. It thereby fills a gap in research on the relations between films and literature but also develops key categories for understanding ways of dealing with poetry in the audiovisual medium.
There’s a brief review (in German) at Fixpoetry. One can also get a sense of Orphal’s research interests from her page at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies:
Stefanie Orphal was born 1982 in Halle (Saale). From 2002 to 2008 she studied literature, media studies, and business studies at the University of Potsdam and Université Paris XII. She completed her Magister Artium (Master of Arts) in 2008 with a thesis on Stimme und Bild im Poetryfilm (Voice and Image in Poetryfilm) in which she analysed the connection and interference of voice and image in short films based on poems. Her research interests include the relation of literature and other media, literary adaptation, and 20th century poetry. From 2009 to 2012 she has been a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary studies, where she finished her dissertation “Poetry Film”: On the History, Poetics and Practice of an Intermedial Genre.
In her dissertation project on “poetry film’, she examines the emergence of poetry in film and the poetic dimension of film as an art form. The “tradition of the cinema as poetry”, as Susan Sontag calls it, appears particularly in the avant-garde films of the 1920s and in experimental cinema. At the same time, poetry itself has strived for connections with other media or for recognition as a performance art throughout the 20th century. Futurism, Dada, Beat Poetry, Spoken Word, and Konkrete Poesie feature prominent examples. Unlike literary adaptations, most poetryfilms do not present a ‘translation’ of literary text into filmic text, but keep the poetry present in vocal performance or writing. Her analysis of various poetryfilms therefore concentrates on rhythmic features of film and verse, the sound of voices and spoken language, iconic qualities of writing, and the interplay of poetic and filmic imagery.
Some Thoughts on Tom Konyves’ “Videopoetry – A Manifesto”
Of its definition.
Videopoetry1 is a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of images with text and sound. In the measured blending of these three elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic experience.
Presented as a multimedia object of a fixed duration, the principal function of a videopoem is to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words – visible and/or audible – whose meaning is blended with, but not illustrated by, the images and the soundtrack.
This definition is an interesting approach as Tom Konyves puts videopoems into the tradition of poetry, rather than film per se and therefore allows a media-specific transgression of the genre from the page to the stage to the screen. From a scholarly approach, this expansion provides a back-bone for analysis that one can rely on. The challenge that many teachers (especially from literature departments) face, but will hopefully embrace, is to stay open to new media developments and experimental art forms that have merged with poetry at specific points since the early 20th century and will continue to do so.
At this current juncture, I believe that it will be important to learn more about certain trajectories as well as about individuals, i.e. where videopoets see themselves aesthetically, ideologically, where they think they come from, who they felt was inspirational for their work and what it is that drives them into this complex relationship between words, images and sounds in a world that is already saturated with media. George Aguliar’s machinima Warriors of Aliveness is a vivid reflection of that current mode of existence. Poetry has always had the potential to express an alienation between the self and its environment for numerous reasons. In the course of a century, poetry has begun to adjust to and align itself with the visual arts and sound in order to continue to explore its own (up)rootedness and to branch out to new media art forms.
Consequently, it requires people in the arts and academia to see multiple strands of traditions and trajectories where the arts have crossed their creative paths. In my book Poetry Goes Intermedia (2010) I treat videopoems/Cin(E-) poems/poetry films as an intermedia art form, which requires an openness towards the sheer power of the intermedia arts that one can only hope will begin to flood universities. Some of the best works today – such as The Dice Player by Nissmah Roshdy – come out of media departments, so change is already happening. Where academia is still lagging behind is to introduce students (i.e. practitioners and non-practitioners alike) to a century-long practice of an art form that has so far largely been ignored. We need more experts who know about various styles of filmmaking as well as about new media art developments.
The vast collection of videopoems on Dave Bonta’s movingpoems site will help us to begin to see various forms of relations. By archiving and curating videopoems one may begin to be able to draw connections between them, such as, for example, “nature videopoems”, “feminist videopoems”, “anti-war videopoems” and many other thematic relations. The website will help us to investigate who creates these films and who collaborates with whom to be able to further explore where certain networks have emerged on a local and global scale.
The literary and oral legacy of written and recorded poetry provides artists globally with a range of poems that have not yet been put to screen. It is different with poems that are written for the screen. Opening oneself up to different media will put the verbal back into the picture (literally), which might be the one critical tool that keeps our responses to various forms of media in a productive distance and provides us with new perspectives on literary creations as well.
One unifying criteria that Tom Konyves proposes in order to define a videopoem is that it holds “a poetic experience.” It would be interesting to exchange ideas with people from various parts of the world as to see how they define a poetic experience, i.e. if it still retains its universal quality that it seems to have and whether this transcends the medium of verbal poetry. A poetic experience is something one can have in nature, in a city, by looking into the face of another person, as a response to injustice, to the news on television etc.– i.e. the source can be located anywhere (without ever even expressing it). It can also revolve around the construction of emotions, thoughts, images etc. that emerge from a digital remix that is driven by creative insights on previously mediated forms of poetic expressions. From the point of the viewer, in order to get in contact with this “poetic experience” on the screen, what may be the best place to experience a videopoem? A computer screen? A movie theater? A museum? A videopoet’s home studio? A handheld device?
If meaningful image-sounds-word relationships change and evolve, then so will our thoughts on these creative productions, and we will ultimately develop a critical language to analyze them together with our students, who will be more and more exposed to videopoems and new media art.
A question that comes up, and about which Tom Konyves goes into detail in his manifesto, is whether there are limitations with regard to the narrative mode and a poetic experience, and whether a visual impression can create this poetic experience despite or even because a documentary or narrative style accompanies it. How “poetic” do each of the media (verbal/sound/images) have to be? What makes this “balance”? What if the medial components blend perfectly, i.e. create a poetic experience, but are not necessarily juxtaposing each other as in one of my favorite short animated films, Ryan Larkin’s Walking, but as well in Billy Collins’ The Dead? In short, how does the art of blending come into play as opposed to the art of illustrating?
It seems to me that the poetic achievement of a verbal-visual-acoustic poetic experience on film can unfold in at least two interesting ways (and so many more and overlapping ones): one mode of poetic experience may come from the juxtaposed space between the medial components – i.e. something one learns from and appreciates in regard to the achieved discrepancy and disrupture. The second mode of poetic experience may thrive from connections between the media precisely because they are in sync with each other.
Yet, regardless of how analytically one may want to approach these questions, the power that videopoems hold is that they give us the chance to explore poetic experiences from many parts of the world, to collaborate and share them online, and to allow poetry to continue to shape us as human beings.
__________
lIn a German context the term videopoem may evoke a video tape and thus comes across as dated, but I am using the term here in my response as it points to Tom Konyves’ manifesto where it has many layers of meaning. (back)
Martina Pfeiler on poetry film
Martina Pfeiler is a German scholar of literature and American studies specializing in, among other things, the history of poetry and technology. She’s the author of the book Poetry Goes Intermedia: US-amerikanische Lyrik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts aus kultur- und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. We spoke in the garden of the Pfefferbett Hostel in Berlin on October 19, 2014, during the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.
Reference is made to the following films:
- Manhatta by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler (1920)
- Do serca Twego / To Thy Heart by Ewa Borysewicz (2013) (the “Polish poetry film” Dr. Pfeiler discussed starting at 7:27)
- Ballad of the Skeletons by Gus Van Sant and Allen Ginsberg (1997)
- The Death of William Burroughs by Antonello Faretta with John Giorno (2005)
The conversation was wide-ranging (and I’ve edited out more than half of it—please excuse all the jump cuts), covering such topics as how poetry film fits into the larger context of poets’ use of technology, how poetry films may be used in the classroom to introduce students to poetry as a whole, and how the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has changed (or not changed) over the years. My favorite thing that Dr. Pfeiler said was this:
I could see myself going to something like an international poetry museum, where you have different rooms where you can explore a poetry film, or poetry films, either theme-based or throughout the last century, and interact with it again—just me and the film. So that experience: like an installation, where you take time, you sit in your little installation box, it’s all black, maybe some other, four or five people are sitting on the floor but you don’t necessarily know where they sit.
Yes! I love watching videos in art museums. Someone needs to do this. Surely there’s a billionaire out there looking to put his or her name on a new, unique museum?
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.
Poetry videos on the web: some preliminary observations
In preparation for a panel discussion at ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2014, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on “poetry films in the digital world.”
1. When we talk about poetry videos on the web, we’re generally talking about videos shared on YouTube and Vimeo, and to some extent Dailymotion, Blip.tv and a few other places: huge sites that thrive on user-generated content, often monetized through advertising, and available to share and embed anywhere on the web unless the uploader specifies otherwise. Yes, it’s still possible to embed a Quicktime video, but why would anyone want to do that? I have yet to download Quicktime software on the computer I’m using now, and I’ve had it for more than two years. Flash is also rapidly becoming passé as more and more people access the web through devices that don’t use Flash to display audio and video players, but HTML5 — an open, non-proprietary format.
2. Poetry fans often focus on the potential of the web to bring poetry to larger audiences, which I agree is exciting. But just as exciting to me is the way in which the availability and popularity of free video-hosting sites, combined with the proliferation of digital film-making tools online and off, have made it possible for a vastly larger number of people to engage with poetry in a more creative way — to go from being passive consumers to active translators of poems. Because what is the making of a poetry video if not the translation of a poem into a new medium?
3. Not all poetry videos are highly creative, though, and I think it’s important to situate them within the larger context of online communities, cultures and behaviors. Who made this particular video, and for what purpose? What is their intended audience? It can be anyone from a bible study group to a film class to a potential buyer of a new poetry chapbook. So when I talk about online poetry videos, I mean everything — from expertly produced animated poems to experimental films, from masterpieces of video art to simple documentary videos of poetry readings, without ignoring the vast sea of very basic videos, many focused simply on sharing audio of favorite poems, with or without images thrown in to give the listener something to look at. I estimate that this last type accounts for 80-90 percent of the poetry videos on YouTube.
4. Lawrence Lessig distinguishes between a read-only culture of passive consumers and a read/write culture where the relationship between the producer of culture and its consumer is more reciprocal. Far from a new thing, read/write or remix culture is basically the normal way in which poems, songs and stories were created and passed along in pre-industrial societies, before professional poets, musicians and storytellers came to dominate so-called popular culture as well as elite culture, and before copyright laws were drafted to discourage creative remix.
So the web has enabled a remix revolution. But empowering the reader/viewer/listener really begins as soon as websites make it possible for people to leave comments, to share or even embed videos elsewhere, and — most critically of all, perhaps — to have complete control of when, where, and how often they can watch a film or video. Contrast this to the much more passive experience of visiting a cinema or taking in a video-art display in a museum. (Television is kind of a middle ground, with more and more viewers choosing to record programs for watching later, or to use streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix. If only there were a cable TV channel devoted to poetry! But poetry films do make their way onto television from time to time, especially in the UK.)
Watching poetry videos on the web is in some ways more akin to reading a book than to visiting the cinema, inasmuch as one can dip into the video at any point and return to it over and over. The experience is generally solitary… but can also be highly social, thanks especially to the way videos from YouTube and Vimeo can be watched and commented upon right in Facebook and Twitter, without leaving one’s feed. And just as one can take a felt pen or crayon to a book and create a new text through erasure (to say nothing of more drastic collages with scissors), any video on the web can be downloaded and made into something new. I can’t think of any other viewing environment where the raw material of a film is so vulnerable to immediate expropriation.
This vulnerability is inherent to any artifact published on the open web, and as a poet who has chosen to blog drafts of all my poems for more than a decade, it’s something I’ve learned not to fear but to embrace. We poets are vulnerable whenever we create something, and especially whenever we attempt to share it — which is why submitting work to a journal, contest or publisher can be such a debilitating experience. Self-publishing on the web, by contrast, can feel empowering. Sharing poetry is supposed to be a public act, not a private negotiation with omnipotent gatekeepers. And the read/write culture of the web does something else: by letting anyone become an author, it makes authorship less exalted… and also much easier to share the burden of through collaborative partnerships.
5. The poetry film world cannot ignore this culture; too many breath-taking films are emerging from online collaborations, often between poets, film-makers and composers who have never met in person. But the sheer proliferation of poetry videos on the web does present some interesting artistic challenges. Certain styles of poetry videos might become so dominant as to crowd out competing ones, for example. Influenced by music videos, performance poets tend to produce videos in which they are the star. Creators of animated poems often seem to treat the text as a straight-forward narrative screenplay. And countless poetry video-makers on YouTube seem enamored by the Ken Burns effect, ignoring the fact that it’s his masterful soundscapes that let viewers forget they’re watching still images. Serious videopoets should be conscious of the gravitational force such popular approaches can exert if they want to “make it new.”
6. In the larger world of viral videos pullulating with crazed cats and twerking pop singers, video remixing is often satirical and always subversive. What does it mean to use the same language of remix for videos created in response to poems at The Poetry Storehouse? Do poetry video remixers risk subverting the texts in some sense? I would argue they do, but that that’s actually a helpful way of looking at what happens any time a filmmaker decides to bring a poem to the screen. The worst sins are committed by filmmakers who are too respectful, unwilling to go beyond what the text explicitly describes. It’s no accident that some of the most inventive poetry videos are created by the authors of the poems. If they don’t feel reluctant to take the poem in a new direction when adapting it to film, neither should any other filmmaker.
7. Another thing that makes some poets and many publishers uneasy about online poetry videos is their very share-ability. It’s kind of frightening to realize that if you upload a video to YouTube or Vimeo and don’t change the default settings, anyone can post it anywhere. Poets wonder, what if it shows up on some hateful site where people will only mock it? And publishers of online journals wonder how they can claim to have published something themselves if anyone else can grab the embed code and do the same. If a journal can’t claim to have exclusive content, why would anyone visit their site?
This is a real issue, but I think publishers need to ask themselves whether their primary mission is to promote their own brand or to give good work as wide an audience as possible. If the latter, then they should certainly not restrict who can share it. But they can also insist on uploading copies of all videos they publish to their own (branded) account on Vimeo or YouTube. For one thing, that’s free advertising for their website everywhere the video is shared. But more importantly, it helps guarantee that the video will still be there in five or ten years… and suggests what the real value of online journals is now, when we are so overwhelmed by so much ephemera: not primarily to publish — anyone can do that — but to curate and to preserve.
8. The growing popularity of videopoem-making presents its own challenges. I had an interesting exchange on Twitter this morning with the Belgian poetry film-maker Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon). He had shared a recent video whose screenshot I recognized immediately. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: I almost used that same Phil Fried Ferris wheel footage in my latest. I thought it looked familiar…
Marc: We’re all fishing in the same pool.
Me: I’m wondering if the popularity of certain stock images poses a risk to online videopoetry, a creeping homogenization, a cliché effect. (I’m thinking not just about stock videos, but also iconic images from newscasts, for example.)
Marc: Let’s hope the really good combinations will survive…
Me: Yes, though survival may have a different meaning in the internet age. Repetition itself is key to keeping something in public consciousness. Whatever doesn’t go viral sinks out of site in the feed.
Marc: Yes indeed.
9. On balance, I think that the rewards of participating in online poetry video communities far out-weigh any potential pitfalls. For one thing, poets and artists get to learn from one another in an often quite intense manner, one that tends to stoke the creative fires of each. Poets in the U.S., accustomed to being ignored by society at large, are usually grateful for any attentive readers, and who reads (or hears) a poem more attentively than someone making a film or audio track out of it? We’re often told that the internet is a great distraction machine destroying our attention spans, but I think that’s true only if one takes a “read-only” approach to it. Read/write culture, remix culture, encourages just the opposite.
10. Another great thing that can happen with any poetry film, but is especially easy to do online, is to make a poem more accessible to audiences unfamiliar with its original language. Poetry film offers the unique possibility of hearing all the music of a poem in its original language while reading a translation in subtitles or closed captioning (easy to add on YouTube or Vimeo) — and with the film-maker’s images and soundtrack as additional bridges or vantage-points.
This might relate to another thing that I think can happen as a consequence of online sharing: reducing or eliminating what I call the socio-cultural intimidation factor. I’m talking about the tendency of many people to feel intimidated in social contexts that may be unfamiliar to them, such as poetry readings, art museums or art-house cinemas, preventing them from seeing or hearing with an open mind. I’m relying on anecdotal evidence based mainly on my own experiences with sharing poetry videos on Facebook, where I have a wide variety of contacts including many who wouldn’t be caught dead at any of the aforementioned types of venues. But it’s not uncommon to elicit positive reactions from such people to a supposedly high-brow videopoem. And I suspect that bilingual poetry videos, especially when artfully made with suggestive, allusive imagery, help us overcome a similar sort of intimidation that hearing an unknown language can otherwise provoke.
11. Poetry videos differ from other videos in the same way that poetry differs from other kinds of writing. It requires a different kind of attention and elicits a different, perhaps more thoughtful, kind of response. YouTube comments, generally speaking, are a cesspool, but for some reason poetry videos tend to be spared. I’ve been publishing poetry, my own and others’, online for a while now, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t attract the kind of bloviators who otherwise infest online comment sections and message boards. I helped publish the literary magazine qarrtsiluni for eight years, and despite a fairly large readership, we never had a problem with rude or inappropriate commenters. The same has been true at Moving Poems and my literary blog Via Negativa, which is mostly original writing with very little commentary. Somehow, online poetry seems virtually troll-proof.
12. Returning to the earlier question of how poets and publishers might come to terms with the reality that online videos have no single, canonical location, and can be easily subverted by remix artists, it’s worth remembering that poems in general have always been rather slippery as artifacts. They’re difficult to monetize because they are so easily reproduced, and reproduction in the imagination is what poems are uniquely engineered for. In an oral society, poems are the original ear-worms, the original viral content. Despite what copyright laws may say, once a poem is released into the wild it never comes back to its master. Its only owner is the one who can call it up at will. In the past, this could only mean committing it to memory, but now, with the web and good search engines at our fingertips, we can recall a poem almost as reliably in electronic form. I’m not saying it’s an equivalent experience; there’s no substitute for memorization, just as there’s no substitute for silent reading from a paper book. But I think audio and video allow us to hear, see, “read” and internalize poems in new ways — ways that can elicit a profoundly creative response.
Poet Nicelle Davis on motion graphics and videopoetry
In a wide-ranging interview with Nancy Chen Long for Poetry Matters, California-based poet Nicelle Davis waxes enthusiastic about the benefits of collaborating with artists, animators and filmmakers:
You’ve also done collaborations with Cheryl [Gross] and others on trailers/motion graphics for your books, including motion graphics for five poems in Becoming Judas, trailers for both Circe and your upcoming book The Circus of You, and a video poem “The First Hour of Being Buried Alive in the Walls of a Half-Built Cathedral.” The idea of video poetry and moving/motion poems is fascinating. What kind of responses have you been getting from those who “watch” your poetry? What has been the most surprising thing for you about making these?
ND: Motion Graphics are great! Great!
As the famous Shakespeare quote goes, The play’s the thing. I couldn’t agree more. The “play” of twenty-first century is the Motion Graphic; these films allow multiple artists to gather and return to their roots—to a place of performance. The Motion Graphics feel like pure art to me; they are so collaborative by nature that no one person is in control; in this way, such projects are as terrifying and exhilarating as live theatre. I feel so grateful to live in a time when artists from across the globe can virtually gather to create a very tangible performance of art, poetry, music, and dance.
The most surprising thing about making these films is how well people work together. Very serious artists are given a space to play, and they do play with diligence. This is a sort of work that adults rarely get to participate in—it approximates how, as children, we created imagined worlds together—it feels like falling in love, but without any of the complications.
I’m also surprise at how far the Motion Graphics travel: they have been shown in film festivals across the globe. My poems go places I’ve only dreamed of. I hope they are leading the way—teaching me how to be a resident of the world.
“Productively different interpretations of a poem”: an interview with Eric Burke
This is the 18th 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 Eric Burke.
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.
EB: When I finish writing a poem, I have a much narrower view of what the poem is (does, means) than I do much later, after many re-readings. What I am discovering with the creative remixes at The Poetry Storehouse is that there are often productive interpretations of the poem that I have missed altogether. This is a very rewarding experience. Of course, in addition to offering interpretations of the poem on which it is based, a video remix is itself a work of art that offers its own riches. The video remixes of my poems at The Poetry Storehouse have all been very accomplished and interesting in their own right. The group of video remixers working with The Poetry Storehouse are both sensitive readers of poems and talented film makers.
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.
EB: Nic S. created a video for my poem “The Convert” that uses suggestive and symbolic video images (waves of water, shattered glass, an hourglass, an alarm clock). The orchestration of these suggestive images works wonderfully with Nic’s reading of the poem to explore the inner state of the convert described in the poem. Marie Craven took a different approach to the same poem, using Prelinger Archive footage of a circus performer to explore the situation of the convert, adding the interesting perspective of the convert having to perform according to the expectations of various audiences. Both videos very effectively explore the poem in ways that add to what I had originally envisioned in the poem.
Othniel Smith skillfully used footage of the allegorical figure Hercules from the old movie “Hercules Unchained” to elucidate my poem “Aphorism”. Jutta Pryor used her own marvelous footage, filled with suggestive images (along with suggestive sounds and music by Masonik), to set the hermit in “Aphorism” alone in a hotel room in a strange country. Both videos suggest an interpretation of the mud in the poem that is productively different from the way I originally thought of it.
Paul Broderick made a cool video remix from my poem “Self-Portrait” that features dinosaurs rather than rotifers. Though it is self-described as whimsical, it nonetheless reflects a sensitive reading of the poem.
Marc Neys combined three of my poems, “December 22”, “Mineral Rights”, and “Calyx” to create a film titled “Fog”. Rather than using an audio recording of the poems, it displays the words on the screen in various fonts along with expressive video images and sounds. This is an amazing piece that takes three poems and creates a carefully structured work of art greater than the sum of its parts.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
EB: Yes. I would definitely do it again. This has been a very rewarding experience. My advice to other poets would be to submit.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
EB: No. This is a really exciting project and I love the way it currently works.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
EB: I really like both the concept of making work freely available for creative remix and the results coming out of The Poetry Storehouse. I am also excited about the growing collaboration and overlap between the Poetry Storehouse remixers and poets and the poets, artists and remixers in the POOL collaboration group that Jutta Pryor introduced me to. A lot of really interesting work is being made (and being made available for remix) by the talented folks associated with both groups.
“I like how pithy the video poem can be”: an interview with media maker Marie Craven
This is the 17th 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.” This time we talk with Marie Craven.
1. Would you briefly describe the remix work you have done based on poems from The Poetry Storehouse?
MC: I have a history with media-making but the video poem is a new form to me. I’ve put together four so far, based on wonderful poems by Janeen Rastall, Nic S., Michael A. Wells and Derek J.G. Williams.* Enticing readings by Nic S. feature. Images are from that marvelous source of historical film footage, the Prelinger Archives. Music is from talented online friends: SK123, 4our5ive6ix, Anguaji and Dementio13. Each of the videos has thus been a collaboration between artists on three continents: USA (poetry), UK (music) and Australia (video). The pieces I’ve put together are all less than one and a half minutes long. I like how pithy the form of the video poem can be.
2. How is The Poetry Storehouse different from or similar to other resources you have used for your remix work?
MC: I have previously spent time on poetry websites but none so attractive to creative remixing as the Storehouse. The two major advantages of the Storehouse to a remixer are: (a) everything is published on a remix-friendly Creative Commons licence; and (b) there are excellent voice recordings available for easy download on the site. On top of this I’ve found a warm and inclusive attitude to remixers. The Poetry Storehouse is great!
3. What specific elements do you look for when you browse offerings at The Storehouse (or, what is your advice to poets submitting to The Storehouse)?
MC: Selecting a poem for a video has been a combination of personal response to the writing and practical considerations relating to available media. There are so many poems at the Storehouse that would be interesting to remix but in some instances suitable images or music are elusive. These are uncontrollable aspects of the process. The main advice is simply to make a voice recording available for download. That’s number one for attracting remixers. Well-recorded audio with good levels is a plus.
4. Talk about how the remixing process comes together for you — for example, does your inspiration start with a poem, or with specific footage, for which you then seek a poem? How does sound play into the picture for you?
MC: In the videos I’ve made, the poem and the voice recording have come first in the process. After that I’ve searched for music and images that might work with these. The mood of the music is, of course, very important. Aside from this I look for music with a key and basic beat to fit with the pitch and general rhythm of the spoken words in the reading. I then like to cut and place the voice to fit with the music before cutting images. Working with archival film material means spending a lot of time searching and viewing films, looking for both literal and lateral connections between poem and images. Once selected, the images become a new rhythmic element in the mix and that involves further fine cutting and adaptation between the elements.
5. Most Storehouse remixers are video-makers who combine a poem with video footage and a soundtrack, but all in very different styles. What have you learned from seeing how other remixers work?
MC: I’ve seen some wonderful videos in my short time exploring the world of The Poetry Storehouse. The main thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of possible approaches to video poetry and that each remixer has a ‘voice’ of their own.
6. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience (or anything related)?
MC: I found my way to The Poetry Storehouse via Jutta Pryor and her Pool creative group on Facebook. Jutta, like me, lives in Australia and has recently generated quite a burst of creative exchange on Pool between Storehouse poets, video makers and musicians. This crossover between creative groups internationally has inspired me to participate too. I’m thankful to Jutta, Nic S. and all involved for the experience.
*She’s actually up to seven video poems now (the interview was conducted a week ago). View all of Craven’s videos on her Vimeo page.
