~ theory ~
“Remixes more fully realized the visions I had in these poems”: an interview with Jenene Ravesloot
This is the 16th 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 Jenene Ravesloot.
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.
JR: The experience with The Poetry Storehouse has been a thrilling one. The collaborative process has freed me from preconceptions of my poetry and allowed me to see my poetry, and myself as a writer, in a fresh way. In the past, I have worked closely with visual artists and musicians. This time around, I relinquished control of my work, allowing for surprising and fresh interpretations of the text by various remixers at The Poetry Storehouse.
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.
JR: Five of my poems were accepted by The Poetry Storehouse, three of them resulting in remixes. “Mostly About A Color” was remixed twice, once by Nic S. and once by Jutta Pryor. Nic’s seductive voice and use of kinetic text pulls the viewer down into the poem until the viewer almost feels like he or she is resigned to drowning. Jutta Pryor’s remix, with Nic S.’s voice, on the other hand, emphasizes and echoes the threatening energy of the sea. These remixes of my poem enabled me to rediscover the depth of my fear of the sea and its power. They evoked my childhood experience of almost drowning. Othniel Smith did an intimate and beautiful remix of “Alone,” using my voice and internet archives. Paul Broderick remixed my noir poem, “Crime Scene,” with my voice, the use of classic blues music, and strong noir archive images. Both of these remixes more fully realized the visions I had in these poems.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
JR: I would definitely do this again. It has been a wonderful experience to see my work remixed and to learn from the various interpretations of my poems. I would certainly encourage other poets to submit work to The Poetry Storehouse and have the opportunity to collaborate with an incredible roster of creative remixers, artists, and musicians. Prepare to be surprised!
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
JR: I have had an entirely positive experience with The Storehouse and cannot think of anything I would change. It has been a real joy and an honor to participate in this collaborative process.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
JR: I have, of course, been following The Poetry Storehouse on Facebook, and have enjoyed viewing the work of other poets via the remixing process as well as listening to audio files available through The Poetry Storehouse. Thanks to The Poetry Storehouse, my poems have found a wider home on the internet for which I am most grateful. The feedback has been enthusiastic.
The Poetry Storehouse featured in Connotation Press
As regular visitors to Moving Poems know, the Poetry Storehouse is an increasingly important, curated online meeting-place for poets and poetry-film makers. This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, videopoetry critic Erica Goss takes a look at five pairs of videopoems that each use and respond to the same text from the Storehouse.
Interview with poet-filmmaker Sara Anika Mithra at Voice Alpha
Voice Alpha, a blog focused on reading poetry aloud for an audience, has an interview with American poet Sara Anika Mithra about her use of audio- and videopoetry. I was especially struck by her description of how doing audio recordings helps her work through early drafts of poems, but she made some interesting points about video remix as well:
On Vimeo, with my found footage poem-videos, I’m engaging a distinct medium — video — that acts like a carrier oil for perfume. Poetry can be too rarefied to carry scent alone. Unlike recording my performances, the process for editing video out of archival footage is _not_ closely related to writing. Finding home movies from the 50s and splicing them into a three minute video is a subtractive process, like sculpture — paring away excess scraps of image to create a tone more than a narrative. It’s a decadent and aesthetic practice that gives each poem a visual soundtrack. I love editing video — it eats away hours of time and allows pleasure, plus gives me the chance to collaborate with musicians on the score. These massive projects take months, so I need to commit to a poem that bears scrutiny without boring me.
Embracing the “fuzzy” areas: an interview with poetry film critic Laura Theobald at Awkword Paper Cut
I was pleased to discover just now that my linking to Laura Theobold’s blog irreducible: a study on the concept and genre of poetry film has led to a short interview over at Awkword Paper Cut. Here’s a bit of it:
I think the genre as we know and understand it today is really new (which explains, in part, the lack of criticism). In the past it’s been really utilitarian, I think: a way for people to just hear and “see” the poetry they couldn’t in person (think of the million videos of poets simply reading their work aloud in front of a camera), but what it’s becoming is a lot more interesting. It’s becoming a new way for poets to create poetry, really, and to reach new audiences. But for everyone I think the goal is a little different: for some artist/poets it can be sort of like an extension of the selfie, a way to establish their brand; for others, it’s about creating a kind of harmony between word and image; some people just want to make something no one has ever made before—because the technology is there. For everyone who’s into it, I think it’s mostly about making something beautiful.
It’s funny, kind of: this project began with a desire to learn where boundaries lie, like “What IS a poetry film?” but I think during the process of bearing down on these distinctions, I realized that I think the future wants us to shed this kind of desire for delineation. I think a progressive future isn’t about making more categories for things we want to understand better, but about embracing the borderlands and “fuzzy” areas when they are doing something meaningful (and I think this applies in a lot of ways), and just like celebrate the fact that they exist.
The separate lives of poems: an interview with Sherry O’Keefe
This is the 15th 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 Sherry O’Keefe.
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.
SO: If a poem is a rock, and if that rock is in my hand, I look for its entry point. Rocks can be cracked open to reveal a network of both the beauty and the ugly inside, but where exactly is the best entry point? And how and when? Submitting to The Poetry Storehouse is submitting to the experience of watching another hand with that rock, turning it over and over, searching for an entry point. So many possibilities, it’s liberating to witness. There’s more than one way to gain entry, to crack that rock cleanly.
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.
SO: I tend to write from a state of confusion, seeking clarity. But if I focus too much on clarity what I write becomes a narrow experience. I like most when the seemingly disconnected connect with points coming from a wider field. Finding the balance between holding on and letting go has become easier because the remixes present views from that wider field.
Through The Poetry Storehouse, my poem about a pilot building the N a universe using the table setting at a café became a film featuring a wolf in the wilderness. The poem was a result of a dinner conversation; the remix expanded it, offering a new vista point from which one could experience wider implications of a universal law.
A second poem featuring a setting of an afternoon spent at a remote ranch became a film based on vintage news reels of beavers and men moving houses, a young girl watching from the window. On the surface my poem presented honey and bees, bells and dying goats, but beneath the surface was a respite from the solitary path we each face, this respite appearing in the random, circular ways we connect to one another.
Both remixes kept from bopping the poems on the nose and instead expanded into a wider view, allowing for so many more entry points.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
SO: I would love to do this again. It’s too easy to hold tight to what we intend the poem to be, but every time the poem is read by someone else, it takes on a life separate from its creator. I have learned something new each time my poetry has been featured in a remix. The experience of letting go is liberating.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
SO: I like the relaxed atmosphere at the Storehouse. It allows for organic response from the film makers. Each poem takes on new life when we hear someone else read it, or watch another’s video of the poem.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
SO: My first experience with video poetry was when Marc Neys approached me a few years ago seeking permission to turn my poem, “This Was Supposed to Be About Karl…” into a moving poem. I had no idea what he felt about the poem and was curious to see what he would do. It was a great experience. The poem had specific meaning to me, but through his film the poem allowed for many layers to be explored and experienced.
Film production is labor intensive and yet I hope more and more of us find the time to explore a poem through musical and visual portraits. If 12 videos were produced for one poem, we’d have 12 different experiences and this is what interests me. So: many thanks to the crew at TPS for making this possible. I appreciate what you are doing.
Sharing poetry film festivals and exhibitions on the web: “Poems, Places & Soundscapes” points the way
All the work exhibited at the Poems, Places & Soundscapes audiopoetry and videopoetry exhibition is now on their website, for the benefit of anyone who couldn’t make it to Leicester in April. It would be great if more poetry-film screening events followed their lead. They’re even promising to post feedback and appreciation from the comments book and audio recording from an informal panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition.
As an exhibition rather than a festival, though, this may be something of a special case. Off-hand I can only think of three poetry film festivals whose websites archive a significant percentage of the films they’ve screened: Liberated Words (Bristol, UK), Co-Kisser (Minneapolis, US) and The Body Electric (Fort Collins, US). A more common approach is to share a list of the winning films, sometimes accompanied by screenshots. A few festivals have let their websites lapse altogether… and of course some never had a website to begin with, which is puzzling, to say the least.
It’s interesting to think about the different mind-sets that people bring to the poetry film genre(s). My own background as an online magazine editor and a poet for the page leads me to prioritize viewing videopoems/filmpoems on the web, because in part it’s so strongly parallel to the reader’s experience: it’s generally solitary, and one can go back and re-watch (re-read) as often as one likes. By contrast, people with a background in film tend to think in terms of festivals, theater runs and TV broadcasts: one-time or serial events, in connection with which the creators’ rights must be scrupulously protected. It’s to be expected, therefore, that to festival organizers, sharing screened works online must seem like a decidedly secondary affair, and potentially a bit of a hassle. But I would suggest that:
- you can reach a larger and more diverse audience online, and at the same time generate interest in attending future events by encouraging social-media sharing of the best films;
- many filmmakers these days are already uploading their works to video-hosting platforms as a matter of course, and in some cases only delay in posting them because film festival organizers have asked them to;
- sharing videos online is as easy as signing up for a free WordPress.com site, posting a Vimeo or YouTube link on a line by itself (thanks to the magic of oEmbed), and enabling Twitter and Facebook sharing icons at the bottom of the post.
There is a third, major stream of influence on videopoetry, however: video art, which strikes me as uniquely well-adapted to the web since the emphasis has always been on multiple plays for a maximum number of visitors. The difference I think lies in the quality of attention we bring to exhibitions in a physical as opposed to an online gallery. But in any case, the appeal of this approach is reflected in its near ubiquity now. Video screens have spread out of the art galleries and into all kinds of other museums and exhibition spaces, even leading to hybrid festival/exhibitions where multiple screens display suites of films in continuous loops. There are of course trade-offs involved in every decision on how to present filmic work, but given that videopoetry/filmpoetry is itself a hybrid genre, doesn’t it make sense to think in terms of multiple approaches to presentation, with no single outlet—web, festival, TV broadcast, art gallery—becoming the standard?
***
Returning to the Poems, Places & Soundscapes exhibition, I was interested to hear that it may have succeeded in doing something that a lot of poets claim as motivation for making videos of their work: reaching a broader audience than the usual poetry scenesters and academics. In an email, co-organizer Mark Goodwin wrote:
Overall the exhibition was received very well. There is a very positive and attentive review here: http://siobhanlogan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/word-cubes-in-wild-place.html
The final exhibition gate-count was 1026. The Phoenix said that such a count was average to good for an exhibition in the Cube Gallery in April – they had estimated that the count would be around 700. So, considering this was essentially a poetry exhibition, I feel very pleased, and would suggest that for the presentation of poetry this is a long way above the average. […]
I saw quite a few folks who otherwise wouldn’t usually take time to engage with poetry, simply become poetically sucked into elsewhere via headphones! It really doesn’t get much better than that!
Escaping the writer’s closed loop: an interview with Rose Hunter
This is the 13th 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 Rose Hunter.
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.
RH: I love it any time someone interprets my writing. I’m interested in what they see, especially if it’s something I haven’t seen, or if I disagree with their ideas. And there is something extra going on when work gets interpreted in a different form I think. For example I’ve been really impressed with what people have come up with as covers for my books, and how different they are to what I would have thought of. As writers we are in that closed loop in a sense, creating in the same medium more or less, as we are criticizing in. (Not that criticism isn’t also a creation of course.) But there isn’t that marked transfer, for example, that there is in writing about visual art or music, say. So I think it’s really interesting to look at these videos as (also) a form of engaged criticism in the sense of being an interpretation that shines a light on the work, in a different form. They’re also kind of translations, of course.
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.
RH: Just the one so far, which you did, Nic! I love it, and I love how different it is to what I had imagined. Having not considered the scene (in “You As Tunnel”) beyond what I saw in my head while writing it, I thought automatically of grainy images, maybe black and white or desaturated, flickering perhaps, a gritty realism. Which is not very original (for this poem). I loved your fresh, non-literal take, and the visual symbols you created with the planets and the headphoned and sunglassed woman. You got to a really emotionally true part of that experience. Of my experience. So that is just so interesting to me.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
RH: Yes, for sure I would do it again! Well, re advice I’m not sure, so I’ll just share my experience of submitting. When I was getting together the poems to send, I thought well first of all your guidelines say short, so that ruled out a lot of my current stuff in particular. Then I thought I would take them all out of my You As Poetry book in case that serial idea is interesting to anyone. So I got together five short ones from that book. It’s strange, I had a feeling that the one that you made a video out of might be the one most suitable actually. I don’t know why exactly, but I remember it passing through my mind, that probably someone will make that one. Maybe because it has a clearer narrative than the others and is more serious. And/or because it is very scene specific, and therefore provides more of a jumping-off point for someone else, whereas some of the others I sent are already “jumped-off” so to speak. If that makes sense. Anyway, not advice per se, just something I thought of.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
RH: No, not offhand. I love what you’re doing.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
RH: Well, I blogged about some of my experiences (specifically the issue of reading my work out loud, and my insecurity/phobia). That’s here, and also you reblogged it at Voice Alpha. Thanks for the experience and the questions, and I look forward to keeping in touch and seeing what you do next!
Address to the Amsterdam ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium, April 4, 2014
Here’s the full transcript of Tom Konyves’ address; see the main site for the video shot by Alex Konyves. Tom gives a very personal introduction to the concept of videopoetry, using examples of his own work as a videopoet to illustrate some of the points he’s long been making as a critic and theorist. I have added just a few links. —Dave
Thank you Yan, Linda, Anne for the opportunity to address the ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium.
I was asked to introduce the genre of videopoetry with my own work.
I won’t be able to talk about the meaning of my videopoems, as it’s always subjective, always in the eye of the beholder. What I can talk about is their structural form and how I came to discover the process of assembling, the strategies I employed, specifically in my early works.
You may not be able to tell, but I wear two hats. The first is for the poet who can mix text, image and sound and design a new condition for the poetic experience. The other is for the observer-critic who reflects on what is being seen and can tell us about these works, how they relate to the world they are presenting as a new world. It is the critic who asks, What makes this work different from a really good printed poem? or Will you always associate the images on the screen with the words you heard or read? and Where is the poetry in this work?
“A more open kind of collaboration”: an interview with Steve Klepetar
This is the 12th 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? Steve Klepetar is our 12th interviewee; both video remixes made so far with texts of his from the Poetry Storehouse were featured on Moving Poems this week.
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.
SK: I find the entire concept of the Poetry Storehouse, with its invitation to multiple readings and remixes, thrilling. In the past, I have been fortunate to collaborate with the painter Bill Ellingson, my colleague at Saint Cloud State University, and with composer Richard Lavenda of Rice University, for whom I wrote a libretto and who set several of my poems to music. In those cases I worked closely with the other artists. The Poetry Storehouse allows a different kind of collaboration, one that is more open, and allows for surprises. There is something liberating about writing a poem, controlling all aspects of that process through final revisions, and then releasing it and relinquishing control while waiting to see what others might create with it.
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.
SK: So far two of my poems have been recorded by someone other than myself, and I love the results. That other voice is female and lightly carries an accent quite different from my own, still rather thick New York City sound, little changed from my many years in Minnesota. Those readings have stirred me with their clarity and loveliness. Two of my poems have been used in remixes, and I’ve enjoyed both a good deal. They are quite different, as are the poems they work with. One sets a short love poem about a woman working in a late fall garden against an image of Marilyn Monroe sashaying through a room, captivating male eyes as she goes. The juxtaposition strikes me as playfully erotic, funny and apt at the same time. The other works with a surreal poem about counting, settling up, paying existential debts, and the remix is wild. My favorite section involves a can of beans being opened, poured out onto a plate and eaten, a visual pun about bean counters perhaps?
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
SK: I would participate in this kind of experiment again in a heartbeat, with enthusiasm and pleasure. In fact, I submitted three poems, and did not wait very long before submitting three more. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to record my own readings, and to hear other readings and uses of my work — or work that has become mine and someone else’s. I would certainly advise other poets to participate, provided they could let go of individual ownership and would enjoy taking a risk.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
SK: My experience has been entirely positive, and I cannot think of anything I would change.
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse experience?
SK: I should add that I have been following the Poetry Storehouse on Facebook, and have enjoyed various readings and remixes of other poets’ work with different readers and video artists. I have also garnered some lovely comments from friends old and new. There is something so democratic about this process, which allows fresh views and voices to mingle with one another.
The soundtrack as an element of film-poem creation: an interview with Marc Neys
Belgian filmmaker Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, needs no introduction to fans of videopoetry. In an earlier interview in this series, he answered some general questions about his video remixing of poems from the Poetry Storehouse. Since Marc is also an electronic composer/musician and puts such a strong emphasis on the sound of the poetry he adapts to video, we wanted to question him in a bit more depth about the role of sound and music in his work.
Talk about how you view the soundtrack as an element of film-poem creation. Which comes first for you—the soundtrack or the images?
MN: I always consider my soundscapes the mortar of my videopoems. They pull the combination of the different building blocks together and hold them there. Very often they set the pace and lay down the main atmosphere of the whole video.
It doesn’t matter what came first (with me it’s sometimes the music, sometimes the images, sometimes the poem), but I do construct a soundtrack (with the reading) as a base before I start my editing, always—even if I had the images first. That provides me a timeline to work with.
Do you always build your own soundtrack or do you sometimes use tracks made by others? How do you decide whether to make your own or not?
MN: In 90 percent of my works I have built my own soundscapes, not that I consider myself a great composer—certainly not a musician in the strict sense of the word. But I just love making those.
I worked with others a few times. (Kathy McTavish is a great collaborator, but also Lunova Labs, Hanklebury and Sonologyst are a few of my SoundCloud friends I have worked with.)
Talk about the process of building a soundtrack. What comes first? How does the work process develop?
MN: That’s a hard one. I work organically. I love sounds, industrial as well as natural. I record sounds often—from crinkly paper and plastic to to coke cans, coffee and other household appliances, nature sounds, etc. I also use a collection of toy instruments to play with.
I collect my recordings just as I do with footage and images. I have a library of sounds and melodies that I use as building blocks. So it’s hard to say what comes first.
I start with a sound, add another, and another, shift, stretch, combine, add a fleeting melody or arrangement here and there… shift again… until, during that process, something happens. Some things suddenly ‘click’ and work together.
When dealing with a poem, I use the recording of the poem as one of the building blocks. Sometimes I build around the poem, sometimes I use (re-edited) existing tracks to lay the poem in.
What sort of hardware and software do you use to create your soundtracks? Have you always used these, or has there been a progression in the sophistication of your sound tools over the years?
MN: I use a combination of tools. I record my sounds analog (with an old tape recorder) as well a digitally (with a simple USB microphone, a Yeti) All my sounds are put into digital files using software by Magix (originally bought to transfer my old vinyl collection to MP3)
To create new arrangements and mix them with these soundfiles I also use Magix (Music Maker).
In MIDI I can ‘play’ any sequence of notes in any instrument, sound or style and combine it all in different tracks.
I would love to get my hands on some real (but old) instruments. I love the sound of anything ‘broken’. I would also love to get some better recording equipment (better mic’s, a new recorder…) but all those things cost money and take up space. (The space is there—one day my attic will be a full studio :-) —but the money isn’t.)
Give us an example of a soundtrack you created recently that you are very happy with – why did this one work out so well in your view? (If you can’t choose, how about that amazing soundtrack for ‘Sweet Tea’ by Eric Blanchard at the Storehouse..?)
MN: I wouldn’t use one If I didn’t believe it worked, but some work better than others I guess. It’s also in the ear of the viewer.
I kinda liked this one:
http://soundcloud.com/swoon_aka_marc_neys/bees-in-the-eaves-swoon-bill
Bees in the Eaves on SoundCloud
I loved the combination of that metallic-sounding percussion (for those who want to know: it’s the sound of an old wind-up music box, stretched and slowed down until it sounded like light metal plates) with the simple and light drone (a combination of MIDI sounds, wind—me blowing into the mic—and violins. Also slowed down). The harsh sounds (electronic) at the end come from this great online theremin I recently found, and I let them clash with some piano sounds I played on this online instrument and the metallic percussion of the intro.
But that’s the last time I let someone peek into the cooking pots! I myself, when hearing great soundscapes, don’t want to know where certain sounds come from or how and with what they were made.
What is your advice on soundtracks to film-makers who are just starting out?
MN: Listen, watch and learn. Experiment! Trial and error and keep the errors!
