~ August 2013 ~
Erica Goss looks at poetry filmmakers under forty and “12 Moons”
Erica Goss’s latest “Third Form” column at Connotation Press takes a look at “Three Video Poems from Artists Under Forty,” interviewing Jack Wake-Walker, Annie Ferguson and Jesse Russell Brooks about how they’ve approached their respective projects.
Goss is directly involved in another project still under development, a collaboration with Swoon (Marc Neys), Nic S. and Kathy McTavish called 12 Moons. Several things interest me about this: the sheer scope of it (twelve videos in twelve months), its collaborative nature, and the different media venues in which it will appear (web, DVD, print chapbook, festivals). It has real potential to break new ground for filmmaker-poets. Here’s how Erica describes the project.
Mortal Ghazal by Luisa A. Igloria
Filipina American poet Luisa A. Igloria took an active role in collaborating with Swoon (Marc Neys) on this film in support of her new collection, The Saints of Streets, as Marc describes in a blog post. Much of the footage comes from a film Luisa found on YouTube,
part of a collection of motion picture films that John Van Antwerp MacMurray shot during the time he served as American Minister to China (1925-1929).
The 16mm silent movie was shot during a trip to the Philippines in October 1926, where MacMurray and his wife spent a few days at Camp John Hay, Baguio.
In the same post, Luisa has this to say about the poem and Marc’s film:
The poem’s recurrent rhyme is the word “everlasting” — it had started out as a meditation of sorts on a flower indigenous to Baguio, the mountain city where I grew up in the Philippines. The locals refer to them as “everlasting” flowers, but they are strawflowers or Helichrysum bracteatum (family Asteraceae). Locals wind them into leis and sell them to tourists. One of my dearest friends from childhood recently returned from a trip to Baguio, and brought a lei back for me.
Around ten years ago, this friend lost her only son, who grew up with my daughters in Baguio; and she has never really recovered from that grief; she has also just had surgery, and thinking about her and about our lives in that small mountain city so long ago, before we became what we are now, led me to writing this poem which is also a meditation on time/temporality, passage, absence and presence.
When I write poems, I am often guided first by images and their interior “sound” or texture, even before I can bring them to bear upon each other in some totally explicable way… What draws me in the first place to poetry is the sense it offers of mystery, of how not everything in language can be completely grasped, so that we can continue to think of possibility.
Therefore I love so much how Marc has been able to intuit the poem’s themes of recurrence and memory and render them in such a way that both sound and imagery, artifact and dream, loop one into the other in the video poem.
Ungleiche Brüder / Unequal Brothers by Gerhard Rühm
This short piece by Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sielecki for a poem by Gerhard Rühm was cited by videopoetry pioneer and theorist Tom Konyves as an example of a good sound text videopoem, in a new, lengthy comment at the Moving Poems forum. (This was in response to a Russian translator of his “Brief summary of videopoetry” requesting examples of each of the five types he identifies in the piece.)
History of a future by Renee Reynolds
This was the grand prize winner of the 2012 Shanghai Tunnels Project International Video Festival. According to the festival page on the Unshod Quills website,
Renee Reynolds is a freelance writer from Chicago living and working in Shanghai since 2007. Olivier Wyart is a freelance designer from Paris living and working in Shanghai since 2009. The poem was compiled over the course of five years in China by an American expatriate scribbling in the subways of Shanghai. The video ventures to visually straddle the mishmash of East, West, history and future colliding in the text.
2013 Filmpoem Festival reviewed in The Huffington Post
Due to Moving Poems’, um, extended vacation this summer, I’ve neglected to share until now Robert Peake‘s review of the first Filmpoem Festival in his poetry column for the Huffington Post: “The Film-Poem Arrives in Britain.” Here’s a snippet:
Over two intensive days of screenings and discussions, poets and filmmakers from all over the world converged and convened in the Dunbar Town House on August third and fourth to experience some of the most innovative works in this emerging genre. Described as “slim, but international” by founder Alastair Cook, the group of sixty enthusiasts in attendance was dense with heavy-hitters in both poetry and film.
Scottish poet John Glenday appeared to discuss the experience of having one of his poems developed into film-poems by five different accomplished filmmakers. Above all, though, it was the quality of films that stand on their own in representing the unique and exciting possibilities of this new medium–for poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the UK.
Peake concludes with a selection of six of his favorite films from the festival, shared as embeds (rather than just links) for maximum viewership. Check it out.
Motionpoems featured in the Georgia Review Online
The latest online column from Georgia Review assistant editor David Ingle focuses on Motionpoems, with mentions of other poetry-film projects (including this one). It’s great to see major literary journals such as GR beginning to pay attention to the genre. I also happen to like Ingle’s selection of recommended videos, and agree with his conclusion that the variety of approaches taken by the different filmmakers at Motionpoems adds greatly to the site’s charm. Go read.
2013 Visible Verse Festival programme announced
The 2013 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL programme has been announced at the Cinematheque’s website:
Visible Verse, The Cinematheque’s annual festival of video poetry, is back! Vancouver poet, author, musician, and media artist Heather Haley curates and hosts our celebration of this hybrid creative form, which integrates verse with media-art visuals produced by a camera or a computer. The 2013 festival will be selected from more than 150 entries received from artists around the world. As well, we are happy to host Colorado poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins, who will give an artist’s talk on video poetry and filmmaking.
Video poetry and poetry film festivals and sites continue to pop up all over the world; The Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival is proud to maintain its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant video poetry. As founder of both the original Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, Heather Haley has provided a platform for the genre since 1999, and has also vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Ms. Haley was honoured for her work with a 2012 Pandora’s Literary Award.
Click through for the full listing of film notes and showtimes. In a post at her blog One Life, Haley goes into a bit more detail about the selection process and the special artist’s talk:
As with last year, we received a record number of entries, over 200. … We received stellar works from South Africa, Thailand, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, the U.S, Ireland and the UK. With only one night of screenings, I am unable to include a lot of video poems I like.
Fortunately the program does include Literary Movement, a discussion with R.W. Perkins on the process of creating videopoems and the integration of modern filmmaking techniques, Q&A to follow. We will be screening his videopems Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes and Small Talk & Little Else. R.W. Perkins is a poet and filmmaker from Fort Collins, Colorado. His work has been published in the Atticus Review, Moving Poems, The Denver Egotist, The Connotation Press, and The Huffington Post Denver. Perkins’s work has been featured at film festivals all over the world, including an 18-state U.S. tour with the New Belgium Brewery’s Clips of Faith Beer & Film Tour in 2012 and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. Perkins is also the creator and director of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival, Colorado’s first poetry film festival, which held its inaugural event in May of this year. For more information on Perkins and his work, visit www.rw-perkins.com. We’re thrilled to have him!
The festival is Sat, Oct. 12 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. My son has promised to edit a trailer for me, I’ll post it asap. *See* you there!
Landays: Pashtun women’s poetry from Afghanistan
Produced by the Poetry Foundation to accompany the June issue of Poetry magazine, which was entirely devoted to the two-line Afghani poems known as landays. Seamus Murphy‘s film includes lots of stunning shots, and displays familiarity with the filmpoem genre in its imaginative conjunctions of text and image. Murphy has been taking still photographs in Afghanistan since 1994, and some of them accompany his fellow journalist Eliza Griswold‘s essay on, and compilation of, landays for the magazine. One thing the film contributes to the issue is the sound of the Pashto originals, which aren’t otherwise included in the online feature.
A story from PBS NewsHour provides additional background about the project:
A Westray Prayer by John Glenday
A Westray Prayer by C.J. Hurst
http://vimeo.com/69640126
Filmpoem 32/A Westray Prayer by Alastair Cook
A Westray Prayer by Marc Neys (aka Swoon)
(See Marc’s blog for some process notes.)
One of the highlights of the Filmpoem Festival earlier this month in Dunbar, Scotland, was a screening of five films by five different filmmakers for this same poem, all of them employing the same reading by the author, which they were not allowed to cut up. This meant that each of the filmmakers had to decide how to fill the silence before and after the short text. John Glenday himself attended the screening, reading and introducing his poem, which, he pointed out, is partly about silence. “When we’re silent, we’re letting the world in,” he said, adding: “Silence gets all the best phrases.”
The other two filmmakers who contributed work for the screening, Ian Henderson and James Norton, don’t appear to have uploaded their films to the web, though Norton has shared his audio track at SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/james-w-norton/a-westray-prayer
