~ 2015 ~
Registrations open for videopoetry workshop with Swoon at Annikki Poetry Festival
From the Anniki Poetry Festival website:
A free video poetry workshop will be organized on Friday, June 5, 2015 from 9.30 AM to 4 PM. The workshop will be held by Swoon, a.k.a. Marc Neys from Belgium, who is one of the world’s most renowned video poets. Attendance is free of charge, but requires a binding advance registration. The workshop is part of the Annikki OFF program and is organized by the Annikki Poetry Festival and the Sampola library.
WorkshopThe workshop will be held in English. Attendees are asked to bring along a laptop and/or digital camera. Smart phone cameras are also allowed. While laptop computers are not obligatory, they will enable participants to engage in writing the texts for the video poems. This is a hands-on workshop that will teach participants through first-hand experiences. During the workshop day attendees will compose one finished video poem, which will be presented the next day during the international video poetry showcase at the Annikki Poetry Festival.
RegistrationPlease direct all queries and sign-ups to simo.ollila(a)gmail.com. The workshop group is limited to the first 16 participants.
*
Speaking of workshops, the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C. would be an ideal venue for a videopoetry workshop, I think. Check out their call for proposals (deadline: June 30).
Everything But the Sky: poems by David Tomaloff and Meg Tuite
If I post a lot of films by Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon (while still failing to quite keep up with his output), it’s because he’s continually trying new things and not falling into a groove. This is an especially good example of that, blending two poems by two different poets, Meg Tuite and David Tomaloff, into a new whole, and taking its title from an unpublished chapbook they’ve co-authored, Everything But the Sky. It appeared at Gnarled Oak on April 10, along with some explanatory text:
Poem “No Code” & voice by David Tomaloff
Poem “I am walking beside me” by Meg TuiteEssentially, EVERYTHING BUT THE SKY explores the way that dream logic and interpretation often work in context to ordinary events taking place within our daily lives. Think of it as reverse dream interpretation–each of David Tomaloff’s poems is a dream poem whose images might have been the manifestation of the thoughts, emotions, and events that each of Meg Tuite’s flash pieces describe before it. In this way, each pair of poems is a complete set, and, likely, one could begin to see a greater narrative as one begins joining these sets. –David Tomaloff
I created a soundtrack around David’s own narration of his poem and presented that scape with a (horizontal split screen) film composition with Meg’s poem appearing as text on screen. –Swoon
Having one text appear on-screen while another is delivered via voiceover is an interesting and I think effective way to translate a collaborative poetry project into film. There are some additional process notes on Swoon’s blog, as well as the text of both poems.
Los Nadies (The Nobodies) by Eduardo Galeano
Spanish director and designer Carlos Salgado made this film for the NGO Africa Directo, evidence of the nearly universal appeal of Eduardo Galeano‘s writing. (Judging at least from my Facebook feed, Galeano’s death on April 13 occasioned much more widespread mourning than the death the same day of the Nobel prizewinner Günter Grass.) “Los Nadies” appears in Galeano’s 1989 collection El libro de los abrazos, translated by Cedric Belfrage and Mark Schafer as The Book of Embraces and described by Library Journal as a “literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem, [which] defies clear-cut genre classification.”
Salgado notes, “The project came through the agency Sra Rushmore to USER T38, which was where we did the animation and post production.” The credits given in the Vimeo description include 2D Animation: Raúl Echegaray and Alberto Sánchez; Additional 2D Animators: Rubén Fernández and Raúl Monge; 3D Artist: Alex Baqué; Compositing: Ezequiel Bluvstein, Eloy Gazol and Roi Prada; Sound: Sonomedia; and Music: José Battaglio.
This take on the poem by German animator Laura Saenger was much more simply produced (“Animation in After Effects, Music editing in Logic Pro”) but is equally beautiful and imaginative, I think.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “When At A Certain Party In NYC”
When At A Certain Party In NYC
Poem by Erin Belieu
Animation by Amy Schmitt
View at Motionpoems
This has to be one of the most charming video poems I have seen so far.
For starters, the animation is delightful: well stylized and flawlessly (graphically) designed. I am not usually a huge fan of Adobe Illustrator (I believe that is the program Amy Schmitt used to create the artwork for the animation), but in this case the simplicity of her art complements the poem perfectly. The speed and timing with which the graphics are deployed is seamless. The imagery doesn’t overshadow the poem but brings out the poet’s sense of humor. I could go on and on about the execution of the art, but long story short, it’s great.
The dryness of the poetry and the innocence of the art combine for a perfect fit. Our main character will never be part of the New York scene. She leaves the city not necessarily defeated, but with an acquired knowledge and awareness. It’s the realization that it’s all a bunch of bullshit, so why bother?
The message is very specific in terms of coming from a place like the Midwest and going to NYC. In other words, it’s basically a reality check. Belieu points out the pretentiousness of the whole hipster-scene phenomenon, which has gotten completely out of control. As a matter of fact, as long as I can remember, every scene has gotten out of control whether it’s the hipster regime, area- or zipcode-envy. People dream of coming to a place like New York for countless reasons. Some seek stardom and others are just looking for a more accepting lifestyle, a place to fit in. When they arrive, they either feel right at home or on another planet. I myself, a native New Yorker, ironically can relate to the Midwesterner who decides not to stay. I like to take a step back sometimes and observe the people who have come to my home town, agree to pay the high rents and act out their fantasies—which may or may not include someone like me, for of a whole slew of reasons. It is this trite behavior that Belieu has exposed and pokes fun at. Her vision makes me to laugh, and I could not agree more.
The music is great and adds to the nostalgic, late 50s-early 60s, plastic backdrop. I love this video poem. It’s superbly done on every level.
Árbol de Diana (Diana’s Tree) by Alejandra Pizarnik: three poems
*
Piedras Verdes en la Casa de la Noche and Green Stones in the House of Night are Spanish and English versions of the same poetry film by Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe, which includes and responds to three poems from Alejandra Pizarnik‘s brief but epoch-making collection Árbol de Diana (Diana’s Tree). I’ve just been reading and re-reading the marvelous new translation by Yvette Siegert, which was longlisted for the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. I went back and watched this film with fresh appreciation, having read the verses Yagüe includes in their original context (where they are nos. 6, 8, and 20, with a line from no. 35 supplying the title). The translations by Luis Yagüe in Green Stones in the House of Night are serviceable enough, but if you’re not fluent in Spanish, do get Siegert’s translation to experience the whole collection in its full, luminous intensity.
No volverás / You won’t come back by Alfonsina Storni
*
Spanish filmmaker Hernán Talavera‘s interpretation of a text by the great 20th-century Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni. The description for the English version reads:
“You won’t come back” starts from a poem of Alfonsina Storni, of [her] book “Poems of love” written in 1926 immediately after an unhappy love affair. In the beginning of the book, the poet warns: “These poems are simple phrases of love states written in a few days, some time ago. This small work is neither a literary work nor claims it”. After “Poems of love”, Storni kept silence during nine years.
And here’s the same description in Spanish, from Talavera’s website:
No volverás parte del poema LXVII de Alfonsina Storni extraído de su libro Poemas de amor, escrito en 1926 a raíz de una decepción amorosa. Al inicio del libro, la poeta advierte: “Estos poemas son simples frases de estados de amor escritos en pocos días hace ya algún tiempo. No es pues tan pequeño volumen obra literaria ni lo pretende”. Después de Poemas de amor, Storni estaría nueve años en silencio.
Solar Therapy by Michele S. Cornelius
This nearly perfect video remix of a poem by Michele S. Cornelius comes to us from Marie Craven, who writes,
Just a few days ago I read a lovely poem called ‘Solar Therapy’ by Alaska-based artist and writer, Michele S. Cornelius and published in the multi-media literary journal, Gnarled Oak. As it happened, I already had images and music on hand, edited together and waiting for a poem that would mix well with them. I recognised the potential in Michele’s piece straight away and completed this video in the 24 hours following the poem’s first public appearance. The music is by Western Australian ensemble, Masonik, whose soundscapes I’ve appreciated over a number of years. This track is called ‘Bending Light For The Magi‘. I sourced it at the Pool group on Facebook, where it was posted on offer for remix. The images are from the royalty-free stock footage site, VideoBlocks. With a minimal piece like this the small details become magnified. I spent a surprising amount of time on minutiae in the editing, especially deciding how to present the phrases of the poem on the screen and where and when the text should best be placed. In the end, as is often the case, simple seemed best.
Click through to read Marie’s process notes on three of her other recent videopoems, as well.
Crowdfunding campaigns for Hidden Door Festival and the Poetry Circus
Hidden Door is “a not for profit arts festival that takes place in abandoned or hidden places in Edinburgh,” and this year “will be transforming another venue and providing a unique mix of visual art, music, theatre, dance and cinema,” including a programme of poetry films from Filmpoem, from Friday May 22nd through Saturday May 30th. If you’d like to help support them, they’re looking for sponsors, and they’re also trying to raise £8500 through a crowdfunding campaign.
What we are trying to do is incredibly ambitious – 60 visual arts installations, 20 theatre productions, a cinema programme and live music programme every night. It’s a chance for emerging and established artists to do something completely new, to push their creativity to the limits and welcome new audiences in the thousands to be inspired by the extraordinary world that we will create for these 9 days.
We need to raise around £80k in total purely from ticket & bar sales to the festival and our own fundraising efforts. This all goes towards regenerating the site (an incredible but currently derelict secret courtyard location in the Grassmarket!) and covering the essential costs of putting on the festival – such as generators and electricity, materials for the installations, equipment for music & theatre performances, projectors, toilets, licenses and everything else involved in putting a festival on in a new and disused venue like this.
Expanded Poetry Circus could include film
California poet Nicelle Davis is on a mission to make poetry events more vital and more carnivalesque. Regular Moving Poems readers will recognize her as a collaborator on videopoems with Cheryl Gross and Anita Clearfield and an advocate for the genre generally. But her passion for finding fun and innovative ways to spread her love of poetry extends well beyond film. For several years now, she’s been doing community poetry-promotion events under the umbrella of the Living Poetry Project, and with the publication of her latest book, In the Circus of You, she felt inspired to launch her most ambitious project yet: a real, live poetry circus on February 28th at the People’s Park in Los Angeles, featuring a poetry merry-go-round, circus acts, kid crafts, and magic shows. It was, by all accounts, a huge success.
Now Nicelle’s looking ahead: “To fund a Summer of Circus!” Depending on the response to her crowd-funding campaign, the Poetry Circus could come to Colorado, Utah, Minneapolis, and San Diego — as well as making a return visit to Los Angeles in September. And “between these larger events I would like to host ‘sideshows’ which I call the GWHO Poetry Parties; the GWHO Poetry Parties are geeky burlesque-like shows that feature poetry focused on the freaky aspects of being human.” It all sounds pretty amazing, but what about poetry film? Nicelle responded in an email:
SURE! We can show films at the Poetry Circus… in fact I know just the Circus Theater for a poetry film festival. I love the idea of layering film with performance. Something like this or this explained like this.
The basic philosophy behind the Poetry Circus is very attractive indeed:
The Poetry Circus is part workshop, community outreach, performance, ride, dance, and creations. This community focused and driven event blurs the line between performer and audience to allow everyone the chance to run away and join the circus.
By presenting poetry in an alternative venue, the egalitarian characteristics of poetry are amplified. Poetry IS for everyone, regardless of where we come from or how we got there; we all process and understand the world through metaphor.
Read more (and consider making a donation).
Sigrun Höllrigl: Ten Atypical Poetry Films
The idea of my film collection was to leave behind the common definitions of what a poetry film means and offer in addition to other curators an atypical poetry film collection. In the Anglo-American definitions, a poetry film is based on a poem. As director of the Poetry Film Festival Vienna, I personally support a broader definition: A poetry film in my view is based either on a poetic experience or on a literary text. These texts can be experimental or spoken word or include letters and be in a abstract way close to fine arts (“Schriftfilm”). In some cases, text can be
missing altogether when the film circles around poetry.
Another aim was to present films which have been successful in established art contexts such as museums, exhibitions, or renowned short film festivals. I also included some examples of famous film makers who did films close to a text film, and I focused on the idea of changing the perception of the audience through the art work. Enjoy!
Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Sonnet 66
Robert Wilson with music by Rufus Wrainwright (2009)
Robert Wilson’s Shakespeare sonnets for Berliner Schaubühne became very famous. It’s a high level of visualizing a poem. Impressive threshold for every poetry film maker!
Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Lady Lazarus (poems by Sylvia Plath)
Sandra Lahire, 1991
http://vimeo.com/59413160
Sandra Lahire was a leading feminist and lesbian film maker in Britain. Her film about Sylvia Plath can be described as a mixture between a poetry film and a documentary. The film shows a deep understanding and visualization of Plath’s dangerous views to face reality. Sandra Lahire suffered from anorexia and died in 2001.
Un Chien Andalou
Luis Buñuel, 1928
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCl_8522FF0
The film Un Chien Andalou from 1928 is a famous historical film – a manifest of Surrealism. Picture and story follow a dream logic. Even though the highest valued expression in Surrealism was writing, Buñuel and many surrealists did not want to use words in their films. Buñuel created his poetic experience in Un Chien Andalou without any dialogue. The poetic spirit is part of the visual expression. This understanding became the dominating credo of the film world: Let’s be poetic without using words.
Inga Fler Ord
Tomas Stark and Jerker Beckman, 2012
This film is also nearly without words, but also deeply poetic. The subject of the film is a female writer writing poetry. She fights against writer’s block and finds her inspiration in a dog’s barking. The film starts with a credo of Antonin Artaud: “I have told you: No works, no language, no words, no spirit, nothing. Nothing except for the scale where the nerves are weighted.”
coração (heart)
Marcello Sahea, 2013
During two months, some friends and other interested people were invited to participate by sending short clips of their naked bodies, filmed by themselves with any types of cameras. The video poem shows the fragility of the human body. Even though there’s some poetry included, the film works basically with picture and sound.
Brazil
Giga Chkheidze, 2000
Watch at cultureunplugged.com.
Brazil presents a superficial view of a fictitious protagonist as a kind of satire. It exposes the emphasis on reasonable behavior and the irrationality lurking beneath. The film is part of the MOMA collection NY. The real meaning of the words is unsaid — it comes up in between all the elements: language, picture and music.
The Alphabet
David Lynch, 1968
Schriftfilm — David Lynch offers in his perfect animation a way to experience the alphabet between a children’s view and a nightmare.
Windows
Peter Greenaway, 1974
Welcome to humor! Peter Greenaway shows a great reinterpretation of how we could tell a story. The film is about falling out from the window. Greenaway combines text and picture opening up a weird logic. Rational behavior is pretended, but the opposite — irrationalism — comes through. Outstanding, very funny, a great film and a pleasure to watch!
Blue (Part 1)
Derek Jarman, 1993
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVaC3XKSi5M
The director Derek Jarman was partially blind while he made this film, suffering complications from AIDS. The film is highly biographical and this seems to be a particularly strong aspect behind the lack of visuals, which offers us a radical and minimalistic approach to how to make poetry film. Watch the full film version (75 minutes).
Confessions 7
Ignas Krunglevičius, 2011
Krunglevičius’s films are minimalistic and radical too. This film belongs to
A collection of eight confessions, hand written and court transcripts, of convicted criminals. It is then reduced to only those sentences where the criminal is talking about his or her own emotions. The perpetrator’s personal landscape of guilt is revealed with no descriptions about the actual criminal act. The most extreme act of violence contains something that we can all recognize in ourselves; the inner psychological patterns of reasoning and justification, remorse and/or the lack of it.
Karawane by Hugo Ball (2)
When is a sound poem a found poem? When it’s Marie Osmond Explains Dadaism with Auto-Subtitles, one of the latest uploads by UK videopoet Ross Sutherland as past of his 30 Videos/30 Poems project for the Poetry School. He’s been doing some really interesting stuff with remix, swapping in his own voice-overs for existing videos, but in this case all he’s done is share the results of turning on the auto-subtitling function for a YouTube video of Marie Osmund explaining Dada and reciting Hugo Ball‘s “Karawane.” The software’s “misreadings” are at times wonderfully apropos. And then there’s Marie, in her yellow bathrobe and 80s hair… I don’t think I’ve gotten this much joy from a web video since Cat Wearing A Shark Costume Cleans The Kitchen On A Roomba.
Now, you may be saying to yourself, why in the heck was Marie Osmond holding forth on Dada and and sound poetry? It turns out she was a regular host of the TV show Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in its 2nd series, which ran from 1982-86 on the American ABC Network. The TV show derived from a long-running syndicated feature in American newspapers—kind of the original “news of the weird.” According to the Wikipedia article,
Character actor Jack Palance hosted the popular series throughout its run, while three different co-hosts appeared from season to season, including Palance’s daughter, Holly Palance, actress Catherine Shirriff, and singer Marie Osmond. The 1980s series reran on the Sci-fi Channel (UK) and Sci-fi Channel (US) during the 1990s.
Six of the segments hosted by Osmond have been uploaded to YouTube, including another one about a poet, Renée Vivien. I’m not sure who the director was for this particular show (which apparently aired on 29 September 1985), but it didn’t go unnoticed. According to a post at Dangerous Minds,
In 1993, Rough Trade records put out Lipstick Traces, a “soundtrack” to the book by Greil Marcus. It’s one of my favorite CDs of all time, with tracks by The Slits, Essential Logic, The Raincoats, The Mekons, Buzzcocks, The Gang of Four, Jonathan Richmond and the Modern Lovers, Situationist philosopher Guy Debord and others. It’s an amazing collection, but one track in particular stands out from the rest, a recitation by none other than Marie Osmond, of Dada poet Hugo Ball’s nonsensical gibberish piece from 1916, “Karawane.”
The post goes on to quote the liner notes from Lipstick Traces:
As host of a special (Ripley’s Believe It or Not) show on sound poetry, Osmond was asked by the producer to recite only the first line of Ball’s work; incensed at being thought too dumb for art, she memorized the lot and delivered it whole in a rare “glimpse of freedom.”
In a YouTube comment on a different upload of the segment, art-video maker Ethan Bates does throw a bit of cold water on Marie’s performance:
Great upload and interesting video, but Ripley didn’t appear to get their dada facts quite right…
‘Karawane’ was performed and written by Hugo Ball, and was also performed in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as the video says. But his costume for that show was a kind of ‘Cubist’ tube-esque costume made from different coloured sheets. It can be easily found in images online.
The ’13’ costume discussed in the video was worn by Theo Van Doesburg, not Hugo Ball, in 1922 when he performed ‘Does At Mid-Lent’ at the Bauhaus.This info is from the book ‘Dada’ edited by Rudolf Kuenzli. As a product of its time, though, this clip is fascinating.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that this is not quite the strangest video of “Karawane” on the web. That honor belongs to Lucas Battich’s binary code translation. Still, kudos to Ross Sutherland for recognizing the re-Dadaifying potential of YouTube auto-subtitling.
Sonnet on Time by John Poch
A poem from John Poch‘s new book Fix Quiet, winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize, turned into a film by Alex Henery. The Vimeo description notes that it was “Shot in Lubbock Texas over the Thanksgiving weekend.”
This is the second Poch-Henery videopoem I’ve posted (Shrike was the the first). I reached out to Poch by email for more information about their working relationship. He told me that Henery is his nephew, and that he makes rock videos for Run for Cover Records, as well as playing in the UK-based melodic hardcore band Basement. (The guitar music in the soundtrack is his work, played on the $30 toy guitar shown in the video.) I asked to what extent they collaborated on the video, and Poch replied,
We definitely worked together a lot on this, and I made a lot of suggestions for changes toward this final project. I took him around in my red truck to a lot of the scenic sites in Lubbock, and he just shot the footage. And some around our house of my girls. Nevertheless, but for the poem, it’s all his work.
It’s kind of cool that even though the poet is not foregrounded in the way he might be in a spoken-word-style poetry video, he still appears in profile, unidentified, as the driver of the truck. Also, given the general influence of music videos on contemporary videopoetry, it’s fascinating to see what someone who makes rock videos for a living does with a poem. The relationship between the text and the accompanying shots is as elliptical and allusive as it gets, even as the shots themselves are sharply focused and charismatic. As with the work of such filmmakers as R.W. Perkins or Marie Craven, the populist/accessible and the experimental happily co-exist.
I see that in a tweet from 5 April, Poch mentions “a huge video project with TTU grads” in the works for next year, so it sounds as if we can expect much more from him. As he says in a follow-up tweet: “Video poems are probably a huge part of the future of poetry.”
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Hold Me, the Walls are Falling”
Hold Me, the Walls are Falling
Poetry by Robert Krut
Directed by Nick Paonessa
Embracing the decrepit Downtown Los Angeles imagery brings a nostalgic tone to Robert Krut’s poem, Hold Me, the Walls are Falling. Like so many other big cities, DTLA is falling into the Condo Cancer syndrome of gentrification. “Hold me, hold me because when we look up this will all be gone”, like so many other places whose charm was sculpted by preceding generations. The formula repeats itself: allowing an area to tumble into seediness, sometimes due to a failing economy. Then it’s rediscovered by artists, chop shops, ninety-nine cent stores, and vagrants. Cheap rents and larger spaces is the reason why these places are so attractive.
The street scene is typical. The “illegals” are the ones who are visible along with people who have time to spare and addictions to feed. They can still find low-wage work in sweatshops that will also fall victim to urban renewal.
It’s just a matter of time before this landscape disappears and is eaten up by large corporations, only to make way for more luxury housing or another Disneyland, where the “hipsters” will live six in a room, because it’s the next “cool” neighborhood to inhabit.
I feel the poem is very much in sync with the imagery. It’s telling us that we can’t stop the inevitable. But for this particular moment in time, the calm before the storm so to speak, we can dwell in its loneliness and enjoy the pause before it moves into its next phase.
