~ May 2015 ~

Lexiconography 1 by Heid E. Erdrich and Margaret Noodin

A fascinating experiment in translation. R. Vincent Moniz, Jr. is the producer and co-director with Jonathan Thunder (art direction and animation). Poet Heid E. Erdrich collaborated with translator Margaret Noodin of Ojibwe.net, as the YouTube description makes clear:

This short poem film, created by R. Vincent Moniz, Jr. and Jonathan Thunder, experiments with animation and sound in a bi-lingual tribute to the nearly extinct wooden clothespin. Created with English words from a bi-lingual dictionary entry for the word “cloud” the poem is brought to action in both English and Anishinaabemowin.

“Lexiconography 1″ is one of a series of poems Heid E. Erdrich has collaborated on with Margaret Noodin. Heid’s original text in English (written with an awareness of Ojibwe language) is translated into Anishinaabemowin and then back into English to reveal tensions between the language as Noodin sees them. The animated poem is not a strict translation of the English. “Lexiconography 1” is available as a FREE downloadable work of art by Meghan Keane at www.broadsidedpress.org

Here’s that artwork (PDF).

I’ve long maintained that videopoetry is a great medium for communicating the power of poetry across language barriers, and I think this is a good example of that.

Corkscrew Hill Photo by Roger Philip Dennis

A poetry-film about a photographer strikes me as a particularly difficult assignment, but director James William Norton of Filmpoem rose to the challenge, enlisting the aid of actress Kelcy Davenport. Artist and writer Roger Philip Dennis‘ poem “Corkscrew Hill Photo” took First Prize in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2014, and Norton uses his recitation in the soundtrack, along with soundscapes by Farah Mulla and music by Dissimilar.

Upcoming poetry-film screenings: Minneapolis, Edinburgh, Lublin and London

May 21 in Minneapolis
Motionpoems Season 6 World Premiere.

Two screenings: 6:00pm and 8:00pm with a half-hour panel discussion taking place after the 6 pm screening. Each screening will last less than 60 minutes and will be hosted by Motionpoems Artistic Director Todd Boss and MPR ‘movie maven’ Stephanie Curtis. Many featured poets and filmmakers will be on hand. It’ll be a night of great poetry brought to cinematic life!


May 24 in Edinburgh

Filmpoem Festival Fifteen at Hidden Door.

Filmpoem Festival 15 will be an open­-ended series of events and screenings. After our successful Antwerp festival in 2014, we are working this year with The Poetry Society and a series of universities and poetry festivals, presenting Filmpoem’s established mix of poetry­film, live film performance, poets, filmmakers, and discussions.


May 28 in Lublin, Poland

A screening of films from the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival as part of Festiwal Miasto Poezji (City of Poetry Festival).


June 13 in London

Mahu in Video at the Hardy Tree Gallery.

The emerging medium of poetry film or cinepoetry, crossing poetic principles with video art has often been overtaken by limited, dualistic collaborations. This evening aims to screen the more complex understandings of this new potentiality, another weapon in the pocket of the contemporary poet – the moving image. Co-curated by Dave Spittle & Gareth Evans
– Films from Joshua Alexander, David Kelly-Mancaux, Simon Barraclough, Caroline Alice Lopez, Robert Herbert McClean & more


June 21 in London

PoetryFilm Solstice at The Groucho Club.
Submissions are now being considered for this event, the post says. Here are the guidelines.


Please note that, contrary to what I had previously suggested here, the Laugharne Castle Poetry and Film Festival does NOT appear to be happening this year. (I had mis-read the website.)

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

“In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” a reincarnated Bard finds inspiration outside the Old Town Bar at Union Square, Manhattan. John Hayden directed this film for The Sonnet Project. Tom Degnan is the lead actor.

The background information on the sonnet’s page at the website includes this interesting tidbit:

The feeling of uselessness, outcasting, and disgrace in this poem is thought to be related to the 1592 closing of London playhouses as [a] result of an outbreak of the plague, causing Shakespeare and other actors to live with small wages, and be looked upon as filthy by town society.

Also, click the “actor” tab there for more information about Degnan than either IMdB or Wikipedia currently provide.

Needless to say, if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing screenplays for television, and probably penning rap lyrics in his spare time.

I Would Like to Go On A Bike Ride by Denise Newman

A minimalist, author-made videopoem:

Images and initial sound by Denise Newman
Singing by Dame Joan Sutherland “Rose Softly Blooming” from the opera Zemira and Azor

Newman, who also teaches college undergraduates, has somehow managed to get snails to collaborate on videopoems. I asked her how she did it, and she replied:

Aren’t those snails talented? No training and it only took one shot. I worked with other snails after that but had to become a “snail whisperer” to get them to cooperate.

555 by Ross Sutherland

https://vimeo.com/127593915

This is #29 in Ross Sutherland‘s “30 Videos/30 Poems” digital residency at The Poetry School. His description at Vimeo reads:

The relationship between screens and metaphor seemed like a good way to bring this residency towards a close.

How does TV like to portray itself? Short answer: usually as an oracle of some kind, or as a device to show a character’s inner thoughts. It’s right up there with “tortured protagonist looks in a cracked mirror.”

Although I know I’ve seen it a hundred times, these scenes are hard things to seek out on the web. If anyone can name any more, please comment below! I’d like to make a super-cut someday.

(Comment at Vimeo, not here, if you have suggestions for Ross.)

I wonder if anyone’s ever used footage of people watching videopoetry in a videopoem? Now that would be meta!

Y sonó la alarma / And the alarm rang by Lilián Pallares

*

Columbian poet Lilián Pallares is an actress with considerable charisma in this entertaining film-poem by New Zealand director Charles Olsen (Antena Blue). The use of silent-movie-style intertitles for Pallares’ text necessitates separate videos for the Spanish and English versions, but it’s worth it, I think, for the way it accentuates the manic, comic style. Spanish composer and pianist Pablo Rubén Maldonado contributed an original composition for the soundtrack.

One Story by Cristina Norcross

This Swoon (Marc Neys) film for a Poetry Storehouse poem by Cristina Norcross remixes footage from kenji kawasawa and Colby Moore. Swoon’s blog post about the film includes an interesting reaction from the poet:

Our lives are separate, yet we are bonded – part of an organic whole. Perhaps we are becoming more and more isolated. I would like to believe that there is hope for us to find common ground – to rediscover the beauty of our human connection.

When I first sat down to write the poem, “One Story,” I was actually in the middle of watching Charlie Kaufman’s film, Synecdoche, New York (2008), with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The dialogue and concept of the film struck a chord with me, and I was unable to wait until the end, to start writing down thoughts. I was transfixed by the notion of how our separateness and isolation is actually a dream.

We are all one. We are all part of the same story. From this seed, I fleshed out images of people I knew or people I had seen on the street. The actress learning her lines on a threadbare couch, sitting on hope, was (and still is) me and my fellow poet, artist, songwriter friends. We are all dreaming about having our ideas take shape – having them take flight.

When I found out that Marc Neys was developing a video remix for my poem, I was quite excited to see how he would interpret the words through the lens of film, images, and music. From the first glimpse, I was captivated by the balloons and mesmerized by the atmospheric sounds and voices underneath the recording of my poem. Each time I view the film, I see more details that have meaning for me. Marc truly captures the bustling, city feeling of many individuals sharing space. He also skillfully conveys how each person is unique. Each balloon finds its own direction, and yet at the end, the balloons form concentric circles. There is a never-ending string that connects us. We belong to one another. You are those feet drifting back and forth in the hammock. You are the father holding a toddler on your shoulders. These images are a glimpse and a gift. Even the very end of the film leaves an echo of how we connect: “What is your name? Mary? That is beautiful. That is a beautiful name.”

Tom Konyves at Poetryfilmkanal on “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen”

Poetryfilmkanal have just launched a new series of short, guest-contributed commentaries on “the fascination of poetry-film,” beginning with the Canadian videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves. I found his essay, “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen,” admirably clear and precise. He begins by discussing semantics, anticipating, I think the usual objection from British and German commentators that film is a better word than video.

Man Ray’s »cinépoème« and Maya Deren’s »filmpoem« sang the praises of film at a time when commercial/entertainment ventures first threatened the aesthetic potential of the new art form of film; it was not about exploring a new form for poetry. In the early ’80s, William C. Wees recognized that the use of poems had become prevalent in short films; he differentiated these »poetry-films« from »film poems«, i.e. poetic films, including films without words. Substituting »video« for »film« effectively deflected the »mystique« of celluloid from the conversation.

Konyves also suggests that terms in which poetry follow rather than precede film- or video- are preferable if you want to give primacy to the poetry rather than to the film. This is certainly true for English, where word-order plays a key role in semantics. Given how international and multilingual poetry-film and videopoetry have become, however, I think it’s incumbent on all of us who think critically about the genre(s) to try to understand how a poetry-first or film-first emphasis might best be expressed in each language.

In the second part of the essay, Konyves strikes a distinctly conciliatory, even ecumenical tone for someone best known in recent years for a manifesto:

Similarly, not all texts, including written-poems, can be expected to produce a desired new meaning when juxtaposed with images. If the written-poem was originally perfect, it would not need to be completed with images. Yet videos are made to promote these written-poems and are most worthwhile; otherwise these poems would not reach a wide public. Their »meaning« is not intended to change nor will it change in a visual context.

I’m not sure I agree that there’s such a thing as a perfect, finished poem, and therefore I like to imagine that it might be possible for a true videopoem to be made with any poetic text. But that’s kind of an absolutist position, I guess, and could easily be used to devalue films/videos that are simply made to promote poems, rather than recognizing them as equally worthwhile as Konyves does.

Brief as it is, I found the essay thought-provoking. Regular visitors to Moving Poems won’t be surprised to hear that I very much agree with Konyves’ over-all emphasis on videopoetry as poetry. My own, upcoming essay in this series will be much sloppier in its terminology, I’m afraid. In part, that’s because of my role as a blogger/curator rather than a theorist or critic: I tend to accept whatever terms poets and filmmakers themselves use for their creations. But I do fear that my use of “videopoetry” as the catch-all category at Moving Poems has muddied things a bit.

Fortunately, we have Tom Konyves to step forward periodically and clarify things as only he can. Go read.

“Seminario de Videopoesía” offered in Buenos Aires

Seminario de VideopoesíaJavier Robleda will be teaching a course on videopoetry from June 10 to July 1 at Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires. The course is called “Un lenguaje entre la palabra, el sonido y la imagen en movimiento”—”A language between word, sound and moving images”—and it’s open to the general public as well as to students and faculty. All the essential details may be found on the university’s website. There’s also a PDF document with the full program. The objective of the course:

Comprender el lenguaje videopoético, sus códigos y cómo interactúan entre sí: lenguaje verbal, lenguaje sonoro e imagen en movimiento, entendiendo por videopoema a aquellas obras audiovisuales en que el lenguaje verbal poético (palabra, escritura, letra, discurso, habla, signo, símbolo); es protagonista.

[To understand the language of videopoetry, its codes and how they interact with each other: verbal language and the language of sound and moving image. By videopoetry, we mean those audiovisual works in which a poetic, verbal language (word, writing, letter, discourse, speaking, sign, symbol) is the protagonist.]

Javier Robledo is of course the founder and director of the long-running VideoBardo festival, as well as an accomplished videopoet in his own right.

Sometimes the Water by Kallie Falandays

Marie Craven remixed some surreal footage by Simone Mogliè and Fernanda Veron, music by Adrian Carter, and Nic S.‘s reading of a poem by Kallie Falandays at the Poetry Storehouse. (Nic has also made her own video for the poem.) I’m especially impressed by the bold choice of music. It shocked me at first, but I eventually came to feel that it provides just the right contrast for the dream-like imagery, throwing it and the voiceover into high relief. I can’t tell you how many videos I’ve chosen not to share here just because the music struck me as too stale or predictable.

Noble Savage Learns To Tweet by LeAnne Howe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZxkKYyeveg

A videopoem by Choctaw novelist and poet LeAnne Howe and director R. Vincent Moniz, Jr., with artwork and animation by Jonathan Thunder. Though it may seem tailor-made for the film, like Heid Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” the poem originally appeared in text form at 99 Poems for the 99%, where the author included these notes:

1. Dutch settlers built the ‘Wall path’ sometime around 1692 to keep out the Indians. In other words it was built for white settlers to keep out undesirables to protect developing commerce. According to Hermes-Press.com, the Wall path “joined the banks of the East River with those of the Hudson River on the west.” Wall path later named Wall Street. Hence the poem’s narrator, Noblesavage, tweets irony.

2. “Indian agent” is a double entendre and can be read as Noblesavage’s agent, authorized to act on his behalf for acting roles in Hollywood westerns; or as an individual authorized to interact with American Indians authorized on behalf of the federal government.

3. “Ford and Cameron” refer to Hollywood film directors John Ford and James Cameron.

4. #AI.com is a site for “artificial intelligence.” Another irony, Noblesavage is not real, a creation of Hollywood imagemakers.