~ opinions ~
While almost everything posted at Moving Poems Magazine is opinionated in some way, this is the place for more sustained questioning: essays, reviews, manifestos, provocations and shots across the bow. Thoughtful comments on our posts are of course always welcome, but if you have a fairly substantial response to something here, do consider submitting it instead. (Or post it on another site and leave a link in the comments.)
Exploring Contemplative Effects in Text-Based Video Poems
In 2005 I first began experimenting with rhythmic effects in relation to text-based, minimalist video poems as an extension of my work as a painter, filmmaker and writer. Influenced by a fusion of concrete poetry, feminist inquiry and structuralist and surrealist experimental film, I wanted to approach the essence of poetic structure in a reductive way, reconsidering the route to meaning through the traditional double pattern of verse – metre and rhythm – in moving, audiovisual terms.
Whilst contemplative effects exist across all forms of conventionally character and narrative-based poetry film, I wanted to strip down and magnify the prosody (rhythm) itself, and the letter became an ideal form, bringing less-suggested context to the inquiry. My aim was to focus on a series of minimal, visual text-based video poems as a way of exploring the remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) of aural or verbal prosody in page-based verse. I am terming these video poems rather than poetry films as they weren’t created from pre-existing poems, but more as artworks with the screen as canvas. Within this formal definition I was interested in creating a particular type of contemplative effect, where a letter or word slowly disappears and reappears, that I termed de/rematerialising prosody. (Apologies for the weighty terminology!) The combined sequential, linear word with the cyclical form for me represented the two essential formal components of the verse form, but revised in a dynamical way through motion.
My initial experimentation with moving visual verse became a research project entitled Re: Turning – From Graphic Verse to Digital Poetics: historical rhythms and digital transitional effects in Graphic Poetry Films. I went on to deliver papers or organise exhibitions/talks around the subject at: Chelsea College of Art and Design, including the work of artist Liliane Lijn; VideoBardo ‘For The Earth’ conference in Buenos Aires 2012; MIX conference in Bath (2012 and 2013); the e-poetry conference, Kingston, 2013; The Southbank Centre Poetry International Festival of Love in 2014; and TARP audiovisual festival, Vilnius National Gallery of Art, 2015. A more in-depth account of contemplative effects and prosody will be included in the forthcoming publication The Poetics of Poetry Film, co-authored with Zata Banks, including essays from many of the top practitioners in the field.
My work has always looked over its shoulder to historical forms that expanded on the dual verbal/visual letter (or verbicovisual as the Brazilian concrete poetry Noigandres group have stated, following James Joyce’s neologism in Finnegan’s Wake). As is commonly known, in the mediaeval period illuminated manuscripts such as ‘Books of Hours’ (commissioned books of religious/spiritual contemplation) featured large initial letters of opening paragraphs that were also pictures depicting the scene being verbally described. In a similar way, several hundred years B.C. prayer wheels containing short, linear texts were turned or spun by Buddhist monks as a means of attaining enlightenment, effectively turning texts according to the natural rhythm of the wheel of life, dissolving the linear word in the cyclical elements beyond human control.
As such the dual word as image and the deconstructed linear word, subject to turning, has historic precedents, and these deconstructions of the word align with the need to access spiritual concerns. It is hard to ignore that the very foundations of verse, metre and rhythm are also said to have a spiritual base. As the English critic and poet T.E. Hulme (1883–1917) has noted in his Lecture on Modern Poetry (1908):
The older art (double pattern of traditional form) was originally a religious incantation … The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief and ecstasy are easily and powerfully effective …
The binary, dual aspect of a letter as both visual and verbal, and also linear but also turned in poetic verse form, sat at the centre of my research. However, I was deterred by my supervisors from mentioning anything to do with spiritually related matters. And I should point out that I am not inferring in an absolutist way that a moving poetry film can create spiritually uplifting effects. What I have aimed to do is to appropriate and translate, in a form of broad metanarrative, historical structures and conventions as approaches to weaving a thoughtful and contemplative surface in its own right, as opposed to creating a poetic dramatic narrative containing effects. As can be imagined, many types of poetry film can be argued to utilise contemplative effects (knowingly or not) and I will discuss this further in the upcoming publication.
In 2005 I made a work that referenced the ‘carmina figurate’ in Renaissance texts, where typically a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on during the process of reading. The resulting film, Blanks in Discourse 3 — which became known as Mistaken Identity — was a commentary on consumer depictions of female identity. Found black text copy from women’s magazines became a foil against which the words I and Home were added in red, but juxtaposed with a computer error beep.
The resulting beep made a sonic pattern that, when shown in a gallery in Lithuania, created a delicate, random, plaintive ‘tune’ or irregular sequence. In some ways the pattern of notes, without direction or timing, evoked a sense of disconnection, but also pathos; of subjectivity and soul trying to play out within an out-of-control social environment.
Mistaken Identity, colour, sound, Sarah Tremlett, 2005.
As poetry is a temporal art, I sought to integrate metronomic time or interval measure with the durational or flowing rhythmic elements. This applied to both the aural and also the visual patterns before our eyes. In the early films I did not include voice, as I considered that an extra decipherable element in meaning creation, so that text, sound and image became the sole fusion of forms. I also examined ways of thinking about audiovisual structure as pure structure: repetition, blank space, cut-ups alongside minimal soundscapes. It is also important to note that my films and all the films in this essay have no definite beginning or end, which is why they cannot be defined by length; there is no narrative trajectory, simply a continuous play of audiovisual pattern that can be endlessly looped, and gradually interpreted.
There is some correlation between non-dramatic poetry films (more or less without a plotted narrative) and a more consciously affective reliance upon metronomic and rhythmic patterning. A still, framed space that changes and alters durationally, but not in tune with a sequential narrative, can have an effect on us that may be hard to put into words. One aspect of such a space can be its non-referential function. It does not talk of another space or time, but only its own being; which is why this sort of film is more accurately described as a video poem and most purely when the audio as well as the visual is newly composed, and relates back to the space, rather than associated with any other situation.
AMAM/AMMA, contemplative, minimal, graphic video poem; colour, sound, Sarah Tremlett, 2010.
As a minimal, contemplative form of graphic video poem, my work AMAM/AMMA in its letter formation comprises two paradoxical parts concerning the binary nature of the relationship between self and mother or mother and daughter. This work takes the words AM and MA, which not only palindromically, phonetically and visually but semantically create a parallelism of prosodic form with content. It asks the viewer to consider how the paratactical relationship between the two groups of letters which seem interchangeable function alongside the sound of a heartbeat. In minimal video poems we are not only examining a gestalt dialectical play between the parts and the whole or the text and the rest of the image, but also the dynamic motional play within the text itself. This work uses an irregular, fluttering, pulsing motion to explore a different understanding of beat or metre, and how blurring can have a conceptual relation to content, the tremulous nature of new life, as well as blurring boundaries of identity. Meaning is saturated throughout audiovisual form and content, supporting but testing Roman Jakobson’s theories of equivalence (1960) based on purely verbal poetic forms. On a wider scale, the dual pattern of constant beat (the heart) that underpins the rhythms of life in the womb and ‘outside’ also happens to be the core double essence of traditional verse-based poetry. The parallel between the way of human ‘being’ and the prosody of poetry might have a correlation that could explain the effects of poetry far deeper than we can imagine.
Thought Acts, B&W, Steve Fossey, Liberated Words II, 2013.
Another film concerned with de/rematerialisation of text and included in Liberated Words II at The Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2013, is British artist Steve Fossey’s Thought Acts. Here the sway of text and light with a moody soundtrack shifts between legibility and pattern: a fluctuating de/rematerialisation of text operates, as in AMAM/AMMA. The filmmaker is concerned with the visual effects of light and pattern and their inclusive relation to meaning. The disappearance and reappearance of visual text in itself encapsulates a form of gradual change through motion, a transitional effect that could be utilised to produce either slow cyclical repetitive rhythms, sometimes in relation to metronomic aural beats, or metronomic visual effects.
Les Lieux de Memoire by British artist Tamsin Taylor, which I included in Liberated Words poetry film screening at MIX 2012, is a slowed-down filming of a verse poem that has been scattered with water (seemingly tears), reconstituting itself through film reversal. Slowly we see the poem reappear, transcending conventional temporality, accompanied by the occasional blip, blip sound of what must have been the flicking of water onto the page. This echoes my film Mistaken Identity, in the heightened attunement to the smallness of random, repeated, identical sounds. This sublime video poem, which also engages with the liminal aspect between materiality and language and what I would term ‘elemental sound’ is an example of a de/rematerialisation process in a very profound and direct way. Les Lieux de Memoire asks us to engage with its very process of creation, its fundamental becoming or dynamic of change.
Les Lieux de Memoire, B&W, sound, Tamsin Taylor, Liberated Words I, 2012.
In Unrest by Italian artist Marco de Mutiis (included in Liberated Words I, 2012), the beginnings of a de/rematerialisation process have come into play, bringing forward the blank into a type of temporal form. Here words are diffused before blurring or disappearing alongside an eerie, repetitive, muffled ‘bleep’ sound, creating a metronomic sense of isolation — a non-narrative within a semi-narrative of scenes that seem played out rather than lived.
Unrest, colour, sound, Marco de Mutiis, Liberated Words I, 2011.
The metronomic interplays with the abstracted rhythms, and it is as if we are the systems that control us; we are discourse, but a discourse that is pre-written and out of our control; we don’t make it, we align with it. In fact, at a far bleaker and catastrophic level we are written or we are erased. To me this film contains signs of traditional prosody but in a new, conceptual way; and these rhythms appear to be embedded in the very fabric of our accelerated, overly-constructed human condition.
In my video poem She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature I aimed to blur the conceptual divisions between culture and nature, combining de/rematerialising prosodic texts from women’s magazines accompanied by metronomic star sounds and a pulsing coloured sphere that changes from cool to hot colours. She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature generates a cyclical return in four chromatic movements or phases which begin with ‘winter’ (in terms of colour) and return to it again and again on an endless loop. As the blurred effect increases, so the figure/ground (Arnheim, 1974) distinction lessens. Letters lose symbolic meaning as they become diffused into pattern. This cycle of chromatic prosodic change occurs as the text and the image slowly emerges and disappears. In some senses then, we can view the text and image as we might view the simple shapes of nature around us: trees and flowers which are subject to alteration due to the passage of seasons and time. American poet Stephanie Strickland’s notion of text decay (Kac, 2007) springs to mind but in this film the whole screen changes at once.
She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature, Sarah Tremlett, 2010/11.
In all the films mentioned, text has remained in its traditional, linear form yet also operates as visual, turned text. Meaning shifts between and as a fusion of text-based verbal language and audiovisual rhythms and effects, with almost non-existent narrative and a screen behaving as a contemplative canvas. Examining prosodic elemental forms is an attempt to naturalise how poetry works: how it weaves sounds and felt moments to create what we call ‘poetry’, or measured words through time. But whether an absolute comparison can be made between the verbal notational structures of verse prosody and those created via the moving audiovisual image is another question completely — one we will continue to debate for years to come.
REFERENCES
Arnheim, R., Art and Visual Perception – A Psychology of the Creative Eye. London, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.
Bolter, D.J, & Grusin, R., Remediation – Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2000.
Hulme, T, E., Lecture on Modern Poetry, 1908.
Jakobson, R., ‘Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics’. In: Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Style In Language. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, 357.
Kac, E., Media Poetry – An International Anthology. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 2007.
Lucy English on poetry-film collaboration
The British poet and poetry-film scholar Lucy English has a very interesting essay in Sabotage recounting the genesis of her Book of Hours project and how she’s adapted her poetic style to the exigencies of collaborative poetry-film creation.
When I tell people I am working on a poetry film project they make the assumption that I am creating films of myself reading or performing poetry. This is a natural response as I am a spoken word poet and, typically, my work is delivered live to an audience. My desire to create poetry films has made me re-evaluate the type of poetry I write, what word choices to use and what form it takes. As I developed The Book of Hours I have experimented with the placement of spoken poetry in a poetry film and formulated definitions of how a ‘poetry film’ differs from other filmic interpretations of poetry such as films of poets reading their work or ‘film poems’; short poetic films. The poetry I have written for this project is leaner, and more focused. There is more ‘space’ within the words for the moving images to interact and more silence. In The Book of Hours I have attempted to bring the delicate poetry film form, which is a growing but niche area of poetry, into the populist and digitally distributed arena of spoken word.
Why don’t more literary websites feature poetry videos?
From a high point of semi-trendiness six or seven years ago, I’ve watched poetry videos slowly disappear from U.S.-based online literary magazines, where one would think they belong. Internationally, videopoetry and poetry film are in robust health, with more festivals, screenings, and critical attention than ever. I think it’s useful to consider possible reasons for this puzzling decline of interest if we’re going to have any chance of reversing the trend.
For one thing, it parallels a decline in the popularity of blogging, eclipsed by Facebook and other social media platforms. Independent bloggers really helped spread the word about videopoetry and electronic literature generally, though I always felt that the more serious writers were rather backward about getting online. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, there are probably more writers on the web than ever before… but I’m not sure they really understand that they’re on the web (as opposed to on their phone, hanging out with their friends). There’s much less of a push to find (or make) new material to share than there was back when people were concerned with producing quality content for their blogs; most social media shares are from other users on the same site. And the Facebook algorithm seems to suppress views of videos not uploaded to its own platform.
Another thing that’s changed in the past decade: Flash, once the darling of e-lit creators, has been virtually killed off by Apple’s decision to stop supporting it on iPhones and iPads in favor of HTML5. YouTube, Vimeo and the other big video hosting platforms made the switch in less than a year, but websites that had put all their eggs into the Flash animation basket—including Synesthesia and the great Born—were screwed.
So journal editors have a right to be frustrated by regular changes in technology. Online journals that had featured poetry videos pre-YouTube generally used embedded Quicktime players, for example. A few linger online, with blank holes where their videos once were.
Generally speaking, I think literary magazine editors are a fairly conservative lot (and one could easily build a case for this being an asset rather than a liability for the culture at large). Poetry videos were rarely a part of regular content; magazines such as Atticus Review, Gnarled Oak and TriQuarterly are the exceptions that prove the rule. Most editors, I suspect, viewed poetry videos as curiosities, supplements to the real content, to be posted on associated blogs only as long as they were the shiny new thing.
For some literary magazine editors, videopoetry and poetry film may never have crossed their radar in the first place, and many remain firmly wedded to the idea of poetry as text. The editor of one of the most widely circulated print and online poetry journals once told me that he simply had no interest in poetry apart from the (literal or digital) page. For many others, poetry videos are at best illustrations of texts rather than a new medium for poetry — an impression many poetry animations do little to dispel. Videopoetry or cinepoetry, by contrast, may seem too avant-garde for mainstream editors.
A lot of online literary magazines, or print magazines with online components, appear to be edited by folks who aren’t terribly tech-savvy, to put it kindly. Flummoxed by the challenges of presenting poetry in HTML with widely varied viewing environments, an increasing number of journal editors are opting to go PDF-only, which precludes any moving images. Others may simply not be aware of how easy it is to share videos these days, especially if they’re using WordPress (or other CMSs deploying the oEmbed API) with a responsive theme: just drop the YouTube or Vimeo URL into a line by itself, and let it re-size automatically to fit the space available.
I think there’s also a bit of a culture-clash between journal editors and the kind of poets and filmmakers who make poetry videos to be shared on the web. The overwhelming majority of U.S. poetry journals still require that all submitted or solicited content be previously unpublished, and once they publish it, they prefer that people visit their website to view it. Hosting video on one’s own website is complicated and expensive, but if you host it elsewhere, doesn’t that mean that people can share it anywhere? (No, but I’d wager most editors don’t realize that.) If you let the video producers upload it to their own YouTube or Vimeo accounts and embed that, can your journal really be said to have published it? But if you want to put your branding on videos and upload them to your own account, that may require creating a new editorial position, and in all likelihood you’re running a shoestring operation. Then, too, there’s the copyright permissions situation with remixed material: complicated, to put it mildly, and possibly not worth the risk.
And speaking of risk, many U.S. literary magazines are intensely competitive and therefore wary about anything that might damage their prestige. So are videopoetry or poetry film in general really a safe bet? If you don’t have anyone on staff with a background in film, why risk choosing videos that experts in the field may sneer at? Publishing authors whose books will go on to garner critical acclaim and awards is the overwhelming focus, and anything that gets in the way of that will not be looked on kindly.
So far I’ve speculated about possible factors influencing the demand side, but I think it’s also the case that the supply of poetry films/videos is still too small. It’s easy to follow Moving Poems and think wow, look how many poets are getting into videopoetry! But I’m afraid they’re a drop in the bucket. And in the U.S., at least, I’d suggest that this is due in part to the capture of poets by the academy. (Something I don’t decry in general, by the way: I’m happy for any system that employs poets, and MFA programs are turning out great numbers of highly skilled writers.)
As with everything else in this blog post, my “evidence” for this contention is anecdotal, based on personal experience and hearsay. Most academic poets I know do seem excited by the possibility of having their work translated into film/video, but they don’t have any idea how to make it happen. Why not? Well, for one thing, just like the editors I mentioned above, their first allegiance must be to print publication. Getting your work made into a film, even one that wins awards and gets screened around the world, doesn’t count for promotion or tenure at most (any?) universities. Given how much of their time is already taken up by teaching, why would they want to sacrifice valuable writing time just to learn how to make videos? Collaborations are a better bet, but American universities are pretty Balkanized, so there isn’t likely to be much communication between English and Film departments.
And finally, we come back to the inherent conservatism of poets. Writing students at most MFA programs of which I’m aware aren’t taught any other aspects of poetry unconnected with text composition, such as coding, audio production, or live performance techniques, so of course videopoetry and poetry film aren’t on the curriculum, either.
I have a number of suggestions about how to reverse this situation, at least from the demand side, but I’ll save that for a future post. In the meantime, I’d like to hear other people’s impressions and suggestions.
New essay on poetry videos and the evolution of language at Ploughshares
Ploughshares, one of the most prestigious American print literary magazines, has a new essay about poetry videos up on their blog, authored by one of their regular bloggers, Ruben Quesada, himself a competent maker of poetry videos. But for this piece, he chose to look at the work of other video-making poets — David Campos, Vickie Vértiz, and Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. I’ve seen various survey articles about poetry film/video appear in journals over the years, but “American Poetry: Video and the Evolution of Language” is more historically grounded and philosophically reflective than most. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The moving image is the antithesis to a static image and therefore closer to poetry than painting. For millennia, poetry has been the sister art to painting, but poetry is not composed of “static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes” (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination). Poetry is dynamic and to understand the varied human experiences one must examine the stories it tells. It is moving images, film, video that brings us closer to the life that is lived than painting. Video complements and translates the written word.
(Should we hold out hope that the Ploughshares blog or website will begin to feature poetry videos? Probably not. I keep hoping that other prestigious journals will follow TriQuarterly‘s lead, but instead the number of literary magazines carrying videos and other multimedia seems to be shrinking, I’m not sure why.)
Lucy English interviewed about filmpoetry on Carpool Poetry
The latest episode of a new YouTube series from Burning Eye Books features a lovely interview with UK poet and poetry-film expert Lucy English.
Clive Birnie talks to Lucy English about her filmpoem project Book of Hours (http://thebookofhours.org), Liberated Words (http://liberatedwords.com) and Rebecca Tantony’s one-to-one poetry show All the Journeys I Never Took (http://rebecca-tantony.com/projects) which Lucy produced.
Burning Eye Books are “a small independent publisher in the South West predominately specialising in promoting spoken word artists.”
Incidentally, Lucy English wasn’t the first poet to draw a connection between Medieval illuminated manuscripts and poetry films; I suppose it’s a natural association to make. The Chicago-based poet Gerard Wozek, who has been making poetry videos with artist Mary Russell since 2000, has a good essay about poetry video on his website which was invaluable to me when I was starting Moving Poems back in 2009. I still quote his succinct definition on MP’s About page:
A poetry video is an illuminated electronic manuscript that records the voice, the spirit, and vision of the poet, and frames this technological intersection between visual art and literature.
ZEBRA festival sparks new insights into what makes a successful poetry film
Poet and filmmaker Annelyse Gelman has a good essay up at Poetryfilm Magazine called “Making Space,” in which she describes what it’s like to attend the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. She says she felt
for the first time like I truly belonged to a community of creators – a rich, diverse group of artists with all kinds of backgrounds and aesthetic sensibilities. There were experimental animations, pristine digital renderings, shaky handheld films; films with fully fleshed-out characters or no human subject at all; French, English, Dutch, German, Lao, Afrikaans. The festival, in short, made space for poetry-films, and, in doing so, made space for me – both as an artist and as a member of the audience. These films made me fall in love, hold my breath, roll my eyes, clench my hands into fists, squirm with discomfort, laugh – exactly as it should be.
Gelman talks about some of the poetry-film conventions on evidence at the festival, such as the overwhelming preference for voiceover as the delivery vehicle for the text, or the frequent use of “a deep, droning score.” And she had some comments that I wish every aspiring poetry filmmaker would take to heart on the importance of maintaining “a delicate balance between satisfying and defying the audience’s expectations.”
A film can fail to satisfy if it’s too obvious, too predictable, but also if the connection between film and poem feels too tenuous and arbitrary. On the former end of the spectrum, a filmic adaptation of The Song of the Wandering Aengus left me cold. Though beautifully rendered in colorful, lively animation – I loved the POV shot from the inside of a trout, berrylike, glowing – the imagery overall tracked far too precisely to that in the poem, culminating in a literal illustration of the poem’s final lines: »And pluck till time and times are done, / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.«
The literal image of a tree with silver and gold apples not only failed to augment these lines for me – it actually seemed to rob them of their metaphorical power. Yeats’ metaphor works through suggestion, conveying an equivalence that seems to vibrate across the senses (»moon« and »sun« are highly visual, tied together by spatial location, temporality, and light, whereas »apples« evokes touch, taste, and smell). It brings together the heavy, fraught »poetic« with the ordinary, mundane fruit. Its repetition closes the gap between two vastly different scales (the cyclical movement of celestial bodies, and nature’s cycle of growth and decay), reminding me of my own human complicity in these cycles. Seeing this language depicted literally, though, hollows it. I neither need nor want to see the tree, the apples.
Similarly, Yeats’ lines »And when white moths were on the wing, / And moth-like stars were flickering out« summon a multimodal response from me as a reader: simultaneously, I’m struck by the ›i‹ and ›o‹ shapes, the softness of the w-sounds punctuated by the firelike crackle of »flickering,« the harmony between the visual instability of a wing (fanlike when opened, almost invisible when closed) and a star (flickering or, perhaps, only visible in one’s peripheral vision – we want to look at the moth, but we also want to look away, so that we might see it better). I think part of the work of these lines is directly dependent on their indefinite nature – they suggest and evoke possibilities for ways of hearing or reading or imagining, without making demands. In other words, they make space for me as a reader. But by visually rendering moths flying up into the sky, Aengus the poetry-film collapses these possibilities, this multimodal experience, into a single specific rendering, that drastically narrows the space I have to maneuver as a reader/viewer. It’s suddenly not moths, it’s these particular moths that you see before you on the screen.
Zebra Poetry Film Festival Münster 2016: a view from the jury
The international ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has a new home in Münster. In 2016, for the very first time, the Filmwerkstatt Münster, in cooperation with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie, hosted the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin. The festival was located at Schloßtheater, a beautiful 1950s Art Deco cinema in Münster.
The focus of this year’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin was the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium). Since I’m Flemish, maybe that was one of the reasons they asked me to be on the jury.
I did not get a chance to see other than the selected films this year, nor to visit any of the extras that ZEBRA’s program had to offer. Maybe that’s a shame, but maybe it also made me a more focused visitor than I was at my previous visits to Zebra.
Jury Duty
Eighty films. That’s how many we had to see in two days. Eighty films from which to pick four winners. Hmm… That’s a lot.
The other members of the jury were filmmaker and festival organizer Juliane Fuchs and poet Sabine Scho — two women with a clear view and a strong interest in videopoetry/poetry films. They were also a delight to work with.
A few things I’d like to say about our goals as jury: We congratulate all the filmmakers, artists and poets who were chosen by the selection committee. We saw some fantastic films and wonderful creations this year, and were proud to play a part in the international competitions. We as ‘the jury’ wanted to make a statement. We believe that more films should have been awarded a prize. Not because it was too difficult to pick just four winners, no — that was fairly easy. We believe that more artists deserve a prize, and would prefer the budget for prizes to be split up to go to more ‘winners.’
So as ‘the jury,’ we were happy that we managed to pick six winners (instead of just four) and give three special mentions this year. On top of that, we also presented a list of films that deserved to be noted as well — films we could not award with a prize, but were too good not to mention:
Kaspar Hauser Song (Director: Susanne Wiegner, Poem: Georg Trakl)
Tzayri Lee Tzeeyur | Paint Me A Painting (Director: Jasmine Kainy, Poem: Hedva Harechavi)
Viento | Wind (Director & Poem: David Argüelles)
The Headless Nun (Director: Nuno de Sá Pessoa Costa Sequeira, Poem: Kris Skovmand)
Long Rong Song (Director: Alexander Vojjov, Poem: Ottar Ormstad)
The Poster Reads: ACTIVE SHOOTER EVENT (Director: Cheryl Gross, Poem: Nicelle Davis)
I Could Eat A Horse (Director & Poem: Jake Hovell)
What about the law (Director: Charles Badenhurst, Poem: Adam Small)
Refugee Blues (Director: Stephan Bookas, Poem: W.H. Auden)
If it were up to me, I would have invited (and paid) all 80 filmmakers/poets and only given prizes as an honor instead. Because the quality of those 80 chosen poetry films was so high.
The jury also felt that the selection committee left a lot of more experimental films out that we would have appreciated seeing. That is, of course, their right. It’s all about taste, after all. This year’s selection, like selections of previous years, was stuffed with many films from art schools and production companies. And that’s OK — these films have a great (technical) quality.
But the jury missed the not-so-perfect films. We missed the loner with the camera and the crazy idea. We often missed a strong poetic involvement. Brilliant technique, fantastic visuals, strong sounds and music, moving performances and lovely creatures do not always make up for the lack of a poetic experience. We really think we should encourage everyone who wants to make a poetry film (and to submit it to ZEBRA) to do so. No matter whether she or he only has a cellular with a camera and an idea, just go for it. Art should not be about equipment and/or budgets.
If you see hundreds of really well-made films — films that they could broadcast on TV any night of the week — then we jury members were looking for the one film that no one will show on TV. We tried to look beyond the well-made surfaces. If, as an artist, you feel a pressure to say something, then: say it with pressure, and not only with the perfect surface a consumer-orientated society supplies you with.
Many of the films we saw, said: here we are, ready to be melted, we already fit in your slots. Maybe young filmmakers and artists shouldn’t cooperate so eagerly right from the start.
But that’s something else altogether. We were there to pick winners. And yes, there were films that blew me and the other jury members away. Films that raised questions but left out the answers (Off the Trail; Director: Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan – Poem: “Endless streams and mountains” by Gary Snyder). Films that had the perfect surface and a wonderful technique, but also connected with the poem and left plenty of room for the viewer (Steel and Air; Director: Chris & Nick Libbey – Poem: “Steel and Air“ by John Ashbery). And films that stopped being ‘perfect combinations of different artforms’ and simply were stunning because they ‘simply were,’ in their own right, a work of art, pure and elegant (Goldfish; Director: Rain Kencana – Poem: “Goldfish“, by Shuntaro Tanikawa).
Some of the films showcased a strong sense of humor combined with a political impulse (Calling All; by Manuel Vilarinho – poem: “Chamada Geral” by Mário Henrique Leiria). Others just made you smile all the way through (Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk; Director: Ye Mimi – Poem: “Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk”) or cry (Process:Breath; Director: Line Klungseth Johansen – Poem: “Process:Breath“ by Line Klungseth Johansen).
I’m not going to describe all of the films we picked. (See the complete list on the ZEBRA website.) I hope that they will be all online in due time (and on Moving Poems from that day on).
But for now: Google them. Search them. Take your time looking for those that already are online. Listen and watch. See them again and again. And dive into the marvel that they are.
The UN, Beyoncé, Volvo, and Dareen Tatour: What’s at stake in the mainstreaming of poetry videos
As poetry films and videos enter the cultural mainstream, they are being put to a variety of political and commercial uses. But this growing relevance brings into sharper relief questions that have always dogged them, given how difficult and expensive it can be to produce them: Who gets to make videopoems and poetry films? Whose stories get told? Whose creative license is at stake?
Exhibit A: a recent, widely circulated poetry video about the plight of refugees featuring no actual refugee poets or speakers.
Most coverage led with variations on this headline from The Guardian: “Cate Blanchett leads celebrities in UN video poem for refugees.” Here’s how they reported it:
A host of celebrities are seeking to highlight the plight of refugees in a video in which they read a poem listing items people have grabbed as they fled their homes.
Oscar winner Cate Blanchett leads a cast including Keira Knightley, Stanley Tucci, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jesse Eisenberg and Kit Harington in performing the poem “What They Took With Them” in the film, which UN refugee agency UNHCR said was released on Facebook on Monday to support its WithRefugees petition.
Written by Jenifer Toksvig, the poem was inspired by the stories and testimonies of people fleeing their homes and the items they took with them.
Among those listed by the actors in the film are a wallet, an army service record, a high school certificate, a mobile phone, house keys and a national flag.
“The rhythm and words of the poem echo the frenzy and chaos and terror of suddenly being forced to leave your home, grabbing what little you can carry with you, and fleeing for safety,” Blanchett, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, said in a statement.
UNHCR said the petition is asking governments to ensure refugees have access to safe places to live, education and work.
Whatever one might think about the decision to have other people speak for refugees in an effort to make their plight seem more relatable, it is certainly impressive that a poetry video incorporating filmpoem-style sequences would be the major tool in a high-profile campaign to influence refugee policy at the UN General Assembly. Poetry film has arrived, people! And using celebrities certainly seems have been a successful strategy to draw attention. I saw the video being shared on Facebook, Twitter, and even the venerable Women’s Poetry listserv. It was a story on Reuters, NPR, Time, People, Access Hollywood, Hindustan Times, Mashable, International Business Times… well, you get the point. It would probably be easier to compile a list of places it didn’t appear. And I’m guessing that it was the first poetry video ever to be featured in a few of these magazines and newspapers. As Poets House in New York discovered with its popular YouTube video of Bill Murray reading poetry to construction workers, people will watch anything if celebrities are in it — even a poetry film.
But you don’t have to be an expert trend-spotter to see that 2016 was the year that poetry film hit the mainstream. It’s all Beyoncé’s fault. When the greatest superstar in American pop music releases a video album that includes imaginatively filmed interpretations of poems by Warsan Shire, a hell of a lot of people who didn’t pay any attention to poetry film before are going to take notice, including the New York Times.
When the credits roll on Beyoncé’s new visual album, “Lemonade,” which had its premiere on Saturday on HBO, one of the first names to flash on screen doesn’t belong to a director, producer or songwriter. It belongs to a poet: Warsan Shire, a rising 27-year-old writer who was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London.
Ms. Shire’s verse forms the backbone of Beyoncé’s album and its exploration of family, infidelity and the black female body.
That was in April. Most of the videos are still behind a paywall, but “Hold Up” was released to YouTube two weeks ago. I like both the poetry portion itself and how seamlessly the film transitions from poetry film to music video:
Another video chapter from Lemonade, “Sorry,” is also on YouTube, and you can read the entire script at Genius.com.
Poetry film is already a hybrid genre, so further hybridization with music video is a logical extension, in my view. And while many poetry films are made with little input from the writer, this particular collaboration between poet and singer-producer seems to have been a true partnership, with Shire apparently modifying her texts (which preexisted the album) in close consultation with Beyoncé, and receiving full credit for her contributions. This makes sense, since Black and female agency seem very much at the heart of Lemonade‘s message. And both partners stand to benefit from the collaboration: Shire gets to reach a vastly expanded audience, and Beyoncé gets to burnish her image as a serious artist engaged with the urgent issues of our time.
Barring seances, dead poets get no such opportunity for input in film adaptations. If their work is out of copyright, they may not even be credited at all, as in this new television ad for the Volvo S90, directed by Niclas Larsson, which incorporates an excerpt from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road“:
A post in Ad Age claims that “Volvo’s Beautiful Ad Imagines a Modern-Day Walt Whitman,” but I’m not sure that’s what is going on here. For one thing, the real Whitman was not exactly interested in picking up women. As I see it, the film depicts a pick-up artist passing off the poem as his own, or at least fantasizing about doing so (the film is nicely oblique on that point). Whitman is credited after a fashion: we get a brief glimpse of his name on a book cover at the top of a stack at the writer’s elbow. This may not be the first ad to use Walt Whitman’s poetry — I believe the honor goes to Levi’s for that — but as far as I know it is the first poetry film about a plagiarist. And given that plagiarism is a growing problem in the academic poetry world in the US and UK, it’s certainly a timely topic. I’m not exactly sure what’s in this for Volvo, but I salute the filmmaker for an inventive remix of poetry-film and advertising cliches in a story about authorship, power and fantasy that appears to acknowledge the sleaziness inherent in the commercial exploitation of poetry.
Since advertisers are always eager to make their brands and products appear authentic, it’s a given that they will continue to deploy poets, who are generally seen as incorruptible in part because, ironically, they tend to write for little or no expectation of remuneration. In Anglo-American culture, at least, poetry remains a peripheral art. But it’s worth remembering that in some parts of the world, poets are superstars, and can be jailed, flogged, and even executed for their poems. At this point, the question of who gets to tell their own story becomes very urgent indeed.
The case of Dareen Tatour has gotten quite a lot of attention this year, because it marks the first time that Israel has jailed one of its own citizens for expressing the wrong thoughts in a poem, leading critics of the Israeli government to draw uncomfortable parallels with Saudi Arabia and Iran. One of at least 400 Palestinians arrested for social media posts over the past year, Tatour is “charged with incitement to violence based on a poem posted to Youtube.” I can’t embed the video because YouTube restricts it to logged-in adult viewers, but as Al Jazeera‘s description indicates, it’s a pretty standard videopoetry remix of news footage:
The poem, whose title translates roughly as “Resist my people, resist,” is read aloud against background images of Palestinians clashing with Israeli security forces.
To me, Tatour is a great example of a modern poet at home with all the technological tools of the digital age: blogging, photography, social media, and video remix. At the same time, she shares that stubborn love of language and truth-telling that has set poets apart for millennia:
“I cannot live without poetry,” Tatour told Haaretz. “They want me to stop writing. For me to be a poet without a pen and without feelings.”
Tatour remains under house arrest; the prosecution wrapped up its case earlier this month. Here’s a video interview with her from AJ+:
A poem she wrote in prison has been translated into English by Tariq al Haydar. It concludes:
The charge has worn my body,
from my toes to the top of my head,
for I am a poet in prison,
a poet in the land of art.
I am accused of words,
my pen the instrument.
Ink— blood of the heart— bears witness
and reads the charges.
Listen, my destiny, my life,
to what the judge said:
A poem stands accused,
my poem morphs into a crime.
In the land of freedom,
the artist’s fate is prison.
But thanks to digital editing tools and the internet, the artist’s words and images may have an altogether different fate.
Note: While this article isn’t entirely a bait-and-switch, if you’ve read this far, there’s a pretty good chance you have some strong opinions of your own about videopoetry and poetry film. Why not share them with Moving Poems’ readers? We’re always looking for new contributions of essays, reviews, interviews, and curated lists. If you’re interested, please get in touch.
Poetry Film Magazine debuts in PDF and print
The inaugural issue of Poetry Film Magazine, titled “Faszination Poetryfilm?” is available for download. (Disclaimer: it includes an essay of mine.) There’s also a print version from Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen, though I’m told supplies are limited. The content has all appeared on the Poetryfilmkanal website over the course of 2015 (which makes it easy for us Anglophones to copy and paste the German-language portions into Google Translate), but the magazine is beautifully designed and easy to read, so I’m finding myself revisiting the essays and reviews with real pleasure. Here’s the flip-book version from Issuu.
In their email to authors, Poetry Film Magazine editors Aline Helmcke and Guido Naschert included two further announcements:
We have more good news: We herewith announce the first Weimar Poetry Film Prize! Our application for funding was successful and the prize will be awarded at the backup_festival (May 18-22) this year. The call for entries will open during the next days and will run until March 15th.
Regarding our blog: the next call for essays „Sound and Voice-Over in Poetry film“ will open around the end of March/beginning of April. We are very eager to get to know your thoughts and receive your new submissions.
I’ll share more details as they become available.
Stefanie Orphal on the aural dimension of poetry film
German literary scholar Stefanie Orphal, author of Poesiefilm: Lyrik im audiovisuellen Medium [Poetry Film: Poetry in the Audiovisual Medium], has an essay up at Poetryfilmkanal on “The fascination of hearing poetry films.” Here’s an excerpt:
In recent years there has been an increasing awareness of matters of sound and acoustics, in film studies as well as in other areas. Our understanding of poetry film can benefit a lot from this development. The principal point that we can take from this research is this: Not just on the level of signs, in terms of text-image-relations, but on the level of perception itself sound and image are fused into something completely new, into a third thing that is more than the addition of both elements. While experimental film maker Maya Deren meditated on this effect as early as 1953 on a podium on poetry and the film, contemporary scholars like film theorist Michel Chion have systematically laid out how what we hear, shapes what we believe only to see in the audiovisual experience.
One of Chion’s central terms is ›synchresis‹, by which he describes the psychophysiological phenomenon that lets us attribute discrete events that we see and hear simultaneously to the same source, e. g. the dubbed voice to the actor on screen. Such an effect – also called cross-modal association – is subtly operative in the perception of all audio-film, but it is crucial to the experience of poems in an audiovisual context, because voice over poems are often clearly not part of a diegetic world and what we hear is set apart from what we see creating counterpoint and contrast. But even in the most modernist and experimental efforts of counterpoint or of contrasting sound-image-relations, in our perception both sound and image are always drawn together, contaminating each other as Michel Chion puts it. The effect of this play of forces can be intriguing. What is fascinating about poetry film, to me, is the stunning effect when such a complex combination of elements brings about something new, the impression that something is revealed in the image or in the poem.
New essays on poetry film by Nissmah Roshdy and Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel
The German website Poetryfilmkanal has been sticking to its schedule of monthly featured poetry films and weekly short essays. Much of the content is in German, of course, including a recent essay by ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival organizer Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, “Poesiefilme, Festivals und soziale Netzwerke,” but Google Translate gives the gist of it.
Fortunately for us monolingual types, the latest essay, by Egyptian filmmaker Nissmah Roshdy—”Poetry Films: A Genre Alien To A Poetry Nation“—is in English. Roshdy brings a unique perspective on a uniquely poetry-drenched culture:
For some reason, Arabic Poetry, which is only the most significant form of art produced by the Arab world and considered one of the most visually rich and sophisticated breeds of poetry, had never officially taken part in the conversation of poetry films worldwide in a noteworthy manner. It sounded crazy to me, but I figured that it’s not surprising if you actually consider how many Arabs today appreciate or even understand their own poetry. But regardless of that, the main problem I saw was because of how poets and visual artists in the Arab world have no interest in collaborating with one another. The issue, as I see it, is from the literary experts side. For many writers, the argument usually made is that the beauty of poetry must be in the words only and how they manifest themselves visually in the imagination of each reader. However, this notion should not be threatened by the discourse of poetry films, because a poetry film is essentially a manifestation of the imagination exercise we go through while reading a poem. The defining line here is in accepting a Poetry film as an example of a visual representation of a poem as seen by one person.
