~ 2014 ~
Grandmother is a Crab by Rosemary Norman
The collaborative partnership between London-based experimental filmmaker Stuart Pound and poet Rosemary Norman dates back to 1995, and nearly twenty years later, they’re still going strong. I saw “Grandmother is a Crab” at ZEBRA. The description on Vimeo reads:
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Simple yet ingenious. It’s not just the kids who excel at digital remix these days.
Interni / Interiors by Azzurra D’Agostino
I had the pleasure of seeing this film, from Italian director Gianmaria Sortino, on the big screen at ZEBRA. Like Sina Seiler’s Elephant, it prompts us to consider the interior spaces of women’s lives from a new perspective.
Sortino describes it at Vimeo as
Video poetry based on a piece by a young talented poet, Azzurra D’Agostino.
A special thank to Marina Spada, who inspired this work.
Azzurra D’Agostino’s own reading is in the soundtrack. Jeff Abshear is the translator. (There’s also a version without the subtitles.) I see that Abshear has translated a collection of D’Agostino’s poetry, Canti di un luogo abbandonato/Songs of an Abandoned Place, for a small, letterpress edition from the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.
Martina Pfeiler on poetry film
Martina Pfeiler is a German scholar of literature and American studies specializing in, among other things, the history of poetry and technology. She’s the author of the book Poetry Goes Intermedia: US-amerikanische Lyrik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts aus kultur- und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. We spoke in the garden of the Pfefferbett Hostel in Berlin on October 19, 2014, during the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.
Reference is made to the following films:
- Manhatta by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler (1920)
- Do serca Twego / To Thy Heart by Ewa Borysewicz (2013) (the “Polish poetry film” Dr. Pfeiler discussed starting at 7:27)
- Ballad of the Skeletons by Gus Van Sant and Allen Ginsberg (1997)
- The Death of William Burroughs by Antonello Faretta with John Giorno (2005)
The conversation was wide-ranging (and I’ve edited out more than half of it—please excuse all the jump cuts), covering such topics as how poetry film fits into the larger context of poets’ use of technology, how poetry films may be used in the classroom to introduce students to poetry as a whole, and how the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has changed (or not changed) over the years. My favorite thing that Dr. Pfeiler said was this:
I could see myself going to something like an international poetry museum, where you have different rooms where you can explore a poetry film, or poetry films, either theme-based or throughout the last century, and interact with it again—just me and the film. So that experience: like an installation, where you take time, you sit in your little installation box, it’s all black, maybe some other, four or five people are sitting on the floor but you don’t necessarily know where they sit.
Yes! I love watching videos in art museums. Someone needs to do this. Surely there’s a billionaire out there looking to put his or her name on a new, unique museum?
Erica Goss on ZEBRA 2014
Poet Erica Goss’s Third Form column in Connotation Press this month is devoted to her impressions of the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and includes a short interview with ZEBRA’s artistic director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel as well as a list of “ten video poems from the festival that deserve attention.” The majority of these have yet to appear on Moving Poems, so do check it out.
Joining the Lotus Eaters by Laura M Kaminski
https://vimeo.com/108625030
Today again I’d like to present two very different videopoems made with the same text—and even the same reading. This time the poem comes from The Poetry Storehouse, and is the work of the Missouri-based poet and editor Laura M Kaminski. The voiceover in both is by Nic S., who is also the maker of the first video remix (her preferred term). Nic sourced her music from David Mackey on SoundCloud.
Australian artist Marie Craven puts the “kinesis” back in “kinestatic” here. I didn’t even notice that the film was made entirely of still images the first time I watched it; the uptempo music by anunusualleopard probably had something to do with that. Click through to Vimeo for the full list of credits and links.
Read the just-published interview with Laura M Kaminski at Moving Poems Magazine to learn why Nic’s film brought her to tears, and how a friend who doesn’t usually read poetry reacted to Marie’s film.
“Even people who do not read poetry become entranced”: an interview with Laura M Kaminski
This is the 19th 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 poet Laura M Kaminski.
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.
LMK: I’m not sure I think of “my work” as mine. Most of the poetry I write is responsive—ekphrasis, conversation poems, nature poetry—poems that try to pay tribute and call attention to whatever inspired them. And frankly, I didn’t recognize that until earlier this year when reading the blurb Jose Angel Araguz wrote for the back of my collection last penny the sun. It would be fair to say I didn’t know what I was doing until another poet put words to it.
But I wouldn’t know that there’s such an amazing thing on this planet as a cuttlefish if Temple Cone hadn’t put one in a poem. And if Ayla Yeargain hadn’t written about the scent of honeysuckle at sundown, I wouldn’t have, literally, “stopped to smell the flowers.” How do I even begin to pay back the people who have brought such wonder into my life? I can’t. I can only try to pay it forward. I’m indebted to The Poetry Storehouse for creating a “scenic route” for poetry—it’s all about pointing and sharing the wonder here.
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 briefly describe the remixes that have resulted for your work at The Storehouse and your own reactions to them.
LMK: Nic S. and Marie Craven both remixed “Joining the Lotus Eaters,” and both films used Nic’s reading of it since I wasn’t able to provide a recording with my submission. Nic’s film is haunting to me; I’ve spent a good part of my life in isolated areas and high-desert scrubland, and Nic’s remix uses mostly black and white footage of a young woman hiking alone in high desert, interspersed with short, full-color close-ups of nature at its most lush. My reaction to it was tears — how could she possibly know what it was like for a desert-rat like me to smell honeysuckle for the first time? But there it is, on film: it was just like that.
Marie Craven’s remix uses stills, mostly flowers, that seem to vibrate and dilate in time to the percussion in the soundtrack. It’s all lush, mesmerizing, intoxicating—the heady enchantment of those fragrances, and you can’t stop breathing in. Someone I know who doesn’t usually read poetry watched it and said “I could watch stuff like this all day.”
Nic reached into the poem and somehow extracted and showed me myself, like Jose did in the book blurb. And Marie, she’s serving lotus-blossoms, yes? Even people who do not read poetry become entranced and cannot leave.
3. Would you do this again? What is your advice to other poets who might be considering submitting to The Poetry Storehouse?
LMK: I’ve already gained far more than I’ve given in my relationship with The Poetry Storehouse. I’d certainly encourage others to be a part of this adventure in any way they can.
4. Is there anything about the Storehouse process or approach that you feel might with benefit be done differently?
LMK: I think the number of participants that have been drawn to The Storehouse in its first year—poets, readers, film-makers—validates the approach. The collaborative atmosphere and opportunities are exciting. It’s working! It’s working!
5. Is there anything else you would like to say about your Poetry Storehouse or any related experience?
LMK: It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to “hate” a remix—I’m simply in awe of the courage it must take to remix a poem and show it to the poet for the first time. Any other poets who’ve borrowed from Homer want to go back with me and show him how we’ve remixed his work? I’m not sure I’m brave enough to go alone.
Editor’s note: Since this interview was conducted, two more filmmakers have released work made with Kaminski’s poetry. We’ll probably post them to Moving Poems eventually, but in the meantime you can watch them on Vimeo: “Facing the Wall” by Swoon and “Ghosts” by Jutta Pryor.
Die liebe in den Zeiten der EU / Love in the age of the EU by Björn Kuhligk (Part 1)
For the 2014 ZEBRA festival, filmmakers were challenged to make a film using a text by the young German poet Björn Kuhligk, with an English translation provided by Catherine Hales. According to the program, “23 film makers from ten countries followed the call. Thirteen of the films have been selected for the festival.”
UK filmmaker Maciej Piatek‘s take on the poem was judged one of three best films of the contest. (I’ll share the other two, by Ebele Okoye and Susanne Wiegner, in Part 2 next week.) It includes a voiceover by Lisa Luxx and music by Dominic Rattray. In the Vimeo description, Piatek writes:
We, Europeans have tendency to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world, the EU is almost like a green island in the ocean of poverty. Sometimes our prosperity makes us blind even though we’re going through financial crisis, economy is only a part of the problem. The biggest challenge for the EU is to face the crisis of values, the same values which founded EU such as: “..respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities … “. This short video poem’s trying to visualize the state of mind of an illegal immigrant on its way to “freedom” through fear and despair.
Belgian filmmaker Swoon (Marc Neys) included Kuhligk’s reading in the soundtrack. One simple, powerful visual concept carries the filmpoem. In addition to the ZEBRA screening, it was also screened at the 5th West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival.
One more film from the screening has been shared on Vimeo, but cannot be shown here due to embedding restrictions. Mexican director Alex Saavedra‘s film is a complex narrative with several twists and turns.
Videopoetry and feminism: an interview with Penny Florence and Sarah Tremlett
The first five minutes of the October 14 ScreenSister podcast features an interview with radical filmmaker Penny Florence and Sarah Tremlett of Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival, recorded during the festival.
I loved this bit from Florence:
[The screening Tremlett curated] was a revelation for me, actually, because I’d been plowing a lonely furrow on my own for quite a long time until I got involved in digital poetry. Digital poetry seems to me to be really important because, just by the possibility to work digitally, it changes what poetry is.
I find this very exciting in feminist terms, because feminism, importantly, has to find ways of saying things that have not been said before, of making silence speak.
The interviewer asks if digital poetry is a medium that suits women in particular. Florence responds:
Yes I do. And I think it’s much more interesting than some of the ways in which we used to understand working collectively. The individual voice got subordinated. And in art that won’t do.
I like the stress they put on the unique accessibility of videopoetry and other digital media to a wider field of contributors, including young people in workshops and other new filmmakers. This certainly jibes with my own experience and observations. While there will of course always be room for highly professional filmmakers, at this stage they don’t yet dominate the field — and may never, given the continual progress of media creation tools toward user-friendliness.
As Tremlett says, you can check out the Liberated Words account on Vimeo and the Liberated Words website for growing archives of films and videos screened at the Bristol-based festival.
Pipene / The Pipes by Øyvind Rimbereid
This was the winner of Goethe Institute Film Prize at the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, where the animator, Kristian Pedersen, also had an exhibition and gave a talk, which I attended. One thing I learned that really impressed me is that the producer of Pedersen’s wonderful series of abstract animations, Gasspedal, does not view them as trailers or promotional tools for its chapbooks but as important publications in their own right — hence the creation of a separate division, Gasspedal Animert. A very forward-thinking publisher!
The poet and reader is Øyvind Rimbereid, who was also in attendance at ZEBRA and gave a reading of this and several other poems from a cycle of poems about the organ, accompanied by the Babylon Theater’s old silent-movie organ. In the video, Nils Henrik Asheim plays on an old pump organ with live electronic effects.
Written for the opening of the Stavanger Concert hall and its custom built organ, The Pipes is an ode to industrial history – the former backbone of the city’s economic and social life.
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One of Norway’s most celebrated poets, Øyvind Rimbereid (b. 1966) made his debut in 1993 with the short story collection Det har begynt (It has begun). His poetry collections Herbarium (2008) and Jimmen (2011) both earned nominations for the Nordic Council prize for literature. Rimbereid is the only Norwegian poet to be awarded the Critics’ Prize twice, for Solaris korrigert (2004) and Orgelsjøen (2013).
