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.