~ Swoon ~
Videopoetry makers Swoon and David Tomaloff featured at CoronationPress.com
Check out this terrific interview with Belgian filmmaker Swoon and American poet David Tomaloff about their recent collaboration on a triptych of videopoems. I loved learning about their collaborative process and how they thought of each other’s work, and as an amateur maker of videopoems I was especially impressed by some of Swoon’s thoughts about his approach, such as:
I love working with found material. Trying to give images, shot for a whole other purpose by someone you don’t know in a place you’ve never been, a new life and, more important so, a new meaning, is very liberating. It gives you a weird sense of power. Even the material I shoot myself is often not shot directly for a specific film. I try to build a library of images, shot by me and found footage, where I can wander around in when making a new film. On the other hand, it’s also very nice if I can shoot images the way I want them to be for a specific idea and poem.
Read the rest (and watch the triptych).
Call for submissions or your poems are dying to be a videopoem triptych
Whale Sound, Cello Dreams and Swoon are looking for poems with which to create a videopoem triptych.
Do you have a group of three poems you’d like to have published as videopoems? They could be three of your own poems, a set of three separate-but-related poems by you and two other poets, or a set of three poems written collaboratively by two or more poets.
We are a trio of artists — Nic S., poet/reader; Kathy McTavish, musician; and Swoon, film-maker — who have come together to pioneer this novel method of poetry publication.
Flight, a videopoem based on a poem by Helen Vitoria, is an example of our collaboration.
To get a sense of how your videopoem triptych would look and sound after publication, visit Night Vision.
Send 3 to 5 poems in the body of an email to Nic at nic_sebastian at hotmail dot com or Swoon at swoonbildos at gmail dot com.
Interview with poetry-filmmaker Swoon
Montana-based poet Sherry O’Keefe has posted a great interview with the Belgian artist Swoon Bildos (Marc Neys) at her blog. Marc talks about his process, his background, and how he got into making videopoetry. It was gratifying to learn what a role Moving Poems has played in encouraging him. And Marc’s thoughts about what makes an effective videopoem are very much in line with my own:
I (most of the time) try not to use obvious images. For several of my videos I used ‘city-landscape and crowded places’ where the poem is more ‘rural’, It often surprised viewers, but they like it on a second note.
I catch myself thinking in the same way; for instance for ‘The Universe’ (my last video, Poem Neil Ellman) I thought about using Ice, Northern light,… I even tried it out…then said no and turned it around.
It’s that turning around that I’m not afraid of. Be prepared to turn your work around, inside out…but with a gut-feeling.
