Blood Constellations is a beautifully made example of a poetry dance film, a genre showcased many times over the years at Moving Poems.
Boldly directed by Jim Demuth, based in London and China, the film is part of a broader, multi-disciplinary arts collaboration called Singing My Mother’s Song, which explores family and lineage. The overall director of the project is Bristol-based Rebecca Tantony.
The poet is Durban-born Malika Ndlovu, whose rich and passionate voice rings out in word and song on the soundtrack. It is compellingly danced by Nyaniso Dzedze, also in South Africa.
I was lucky enough to see the film in Athens earlier in December, where it screened at the International Video Poetry Festival.
At long last, the documentary Versogramas or Verses&Frames by Galician director Belén Montero—a unique, multicultural look at contemporary videopoetry through the eyes of 14 filmmakers—is available to watch on the web:
We have great news to share with you: Verses&Frames is now available at Vimeo On Demand. Watch it here!
Now you can enjoy the documentary at home, at any time, for a really low price. Moreover, we have released all the different linguistic versions of Verses&Frames, so you can choose five screening possibilities: original version in Galician with Galician subtitles, Spanish version with Spanish subtitles, English version with English subtitles, reduced Spanish and reduced English versions.
This is how it works: For 3€ you can “rent” the screening of the version you choose. It will be available for 24 hours so you can watch the documentary as many times as you want. You can reproduce it on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast.
One of our main objectives when producing Verses&Frames has always been to contribute to the knowledge, research, enjoyment and diffusion of videopoetry. As well as the screenings conducted at festivals, museums and television, we believe that this is a good way to deliver the content of the documentary directly to the public, and to share with you all the emotions that videopoetry arises.
So, just a click away: Verses&Frames On Demand.
That rental price in US dollars is just $3.32. The Vimeo description doesn’t include links to the videopoets interviewed in the film, but you can find that on the project’s website (also available in three languages). I wrote a somewhat critical but generally positive review of Versogramas for Poetryfilm Magazine in 2018. I wrote, in part, that
The interviews are creatively shot and well edited, and the interviewees all come across as fascinating people with uniquely unconventional approaches to making poetry and art. There wasn’t one of them whom I didn’t want to immediately track down on the web and watch every one of their videos, and I was pleased by how many of them were new to me, either because their work had never been translated into English, or because they just hadn’t happened to have crossed my radar.
This is testimony to the sheer breadth of the international videopoetry community, I think. It’s impressive that the producers can focus on just one part of the world—Spain, especially the Galician region—add a handful of filmmakers and videopoets from outside that region, and still end up with a highly varied, complete-feeling snapshot of the state of videopoetry in the 21st century.
So go check it out! I know I for one will definitely be watching it again.
In mid-October, Ó Bhéal’s 7th International Poetry-Film Competition took place in Cork, Ireland, in association with the IndieCork music and film festival. The winner was Virginia Gave Me Roses, directed by Dublin-based Fiona Aryan and written by Lani O’Hanlon, from Waterford. 2019 is the first time an Irish film has won this international competition, which has become highly-regarded in the poetry film community worldwide. The winning film was screened at the Kino as part of IndieCork, along with the other finalist films.
The judges this year were poet/film-maker Colm Scully and poet Stanley Notte. Excerpts from their comments:
Being a practitioner myself I learned so much from reviewing the 200 plus entries… Virginia Gave me Roses immediately worked for me on first viewing , and only improved as I watched it again. The beauty of the poem was matched by the subtle imagining of the visual.
—Colm Scully
In the end the film that stayed in the mind as a fusion of words and images was Fiona Aryan’s depiction of Lani O’ Hanlon’s poem, Virginia Gave Me Roses.
This piece depicts a soft-focused, memory-like family interaction that supports, compliments and, at the same time, adds weight to an original text that is both moving and strongly visual.
This depiction transports the viewer into a dreamlike state where one is enveloped by the profound sense of love and safety which being in a close-knit family occasion provides.
—Stan Notte
A warm, nurturing film to see at this time of year.
This week Atticus Review, one of the best online magazines to regularly feature videopoems, poetry films, and other multimedia literary works, announced that their second annual videopoem contest is open for submissions. Marc Neys AKA Swoon is the judge.
Atticus Review is happy to announce our second annual Videopoem Contest judged by Swoon. You can submit up to 3 videopoems. The cost for entry is $10. You may submit video files or links to Vimeo or YouTube pages. Please no submissions from former students or close acquaintances of the Contest Judge. The videopoems can be previously published.
First Prize: $250 & Publication
Second Prize: $50 & Publication
Third Prize: Publication
Deadline: January 12th, 20120
Winner Announced: January 31st, 2020
SUBMIT HERE
ABOUT THE JUDGE:
Marc Neys / Swoon / No One
No One is a composer, Swoon a video-artist, and both personas reside in Marc Neys from Belgium.
As one of the leading and most prolific figures in modern videopoetry he made videopoems for and with writers from all over the globe. He inspired new creators through his workshops and showcases on videopoetry.
He creates works with a focus on the purely poetic quality of the moving image in relation to the spoken or written poem. A sophisticated interplay of constructed soundscapes and images with personal reflections. Through a visual language and references to his everyday life, he creates a framework in which the poems come to a different development.
He released 3 CDs over the last two years and his videos have been selected and featured at festivals all over the world.
Links:
https://musicfromnoone.bandcamp.com/
https://vimeo.com/swoon
Marc follows Moving Poems’ own Marie Craven, who judged the contest last year. (Here are the results.) Marc wrote about his philosophy on judging poetry film contests after his experience on the ZEBRA jury in 2016.
This 2016 film co-directed by Stephan Bookas and Tristan Dawes moved me to tears. That’s how effective, and affecting, I found this juxtaposition of W. H. Auden’s poem (text here) about Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany—read by a man identified only as Noah, a refugee and former child soldier from Uganda—with excellent documentary footage of contemporary refugees. Here’s the official synopsis from Bookas’ website:
Set to the verses of W.H. Auden’s 1939 poem, the multi-award winning “Refugee Blues” charts a day in ‘the jungle’, the refugee camp outside Calais. More intimate and unlike much of what has been seen in the mass media, this documentary poem counterpoints the camp’s harsh reality of frequent clashes with the French riot police with its inhabitants’ longing for a better future.
On Vimeo, Bookas includes a mini essay about the making of the film, which I found illuminating in its suggestion of how documentary poetry can differ from journalism. This was something I’d been thinking about because I recently attended a reading and slideshow from another documentary poetry project, which was a collaboration between a poet and a photojournalist: Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin’s Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields. Technically, Auden’s poem by itself would not be considered an example of documentary poetry, but as a filmpoem Refugee Blues certainly would qualify, in my opinion. Anyway, I hope Mr. Bookas won’t mind my quoting a sizable chunk of his post:
We didn’t set out to make a film at first – that idea came later – we just packed a car full of blankets, clothes, food and other items and went, not fully knowing what to expect. But of course, being filmmakers, we also brought along our cameras – to see if we might have the opportunity to document, to capture, to find the human story in all the chaos that was so ubiquitous in the media at the time.
Soon after our arrival, we found the people living at the refugee camp to be very warm and welcoming, as long as we assured them we weren’t news-gathering journalists.
We didn’t film anything to begin with and just walked around, introduced ourselves as documentary filmmakers and listened to people and their stories. Every single one of them was unique and heartbreaking.
Following these discussions, we asked if it would be alright to take out our cameras and start filming. For the most part the answer was a resounding yes.
We spent the following days exploring the camp and talking to people, discussing the situation and the political climate and spending time with them, being invited for coffee and food and allowed to film elements of their daily lives. This turned out to be the calm before the storm, as things culminated in a clash between the camp’s inhabitants and the French riot police on the road leading to the ferry terminal, symbolic for the plight of the refugees and their struggle against institutional powers they are unable to defend themselves against. […]
Of course, our film can’t possibly even begin to try and unravel all the lives and personal fates entangled within this crisis. But in some small way, and for us especially, it has given this tragedy a face that’s less abstract, more relatable, more human.
In last week’s round-up I gave the Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival too brief a mention since I hadn’t found much in English. But I just got a bilingual press release from organizer Sigrun Höllrigl, so I can rectify that. Here’s the English portion of her email. Note that the link at the end also goes to an English-language schedule of events.
FOCUS USA / International film guests
The Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival will take place for the fifth time from November 29 to December 1, 2019 at the METRO Kinokulturhaus in Vienna. In addition to four competition programmes, Poetry Live and film talks with international guests, numerous curated film programmes will be shown. This year’s focus is on poetry films from the USA. Founded in 2013 by Sigrun Höllrigl, the Poetry Film Festival has grown steadily since its beginnings and, with 101 film screenings on three days it is currently the second largest poetry film festival world-wide. In addition to Todd Boss (Motionpoems USA), film guests from Dubai, Belgium, Germany and Ireland have announced their arrival and are expected to attend. Including the domestic film scene, 40 contributing artists will join the festival.
FILM COMPETITIONS AND AUDIENCE AWARD
In 2019, two international competitions were announced and 170 films submitted, 63 art works came from Austria. The festival will award cash prizes to 4 films: The Main Jury Prize and Special Award (poem by Sophie Reyer) will be awarded on the recommendation of the jury. The Hubert Sielecki Prize goes to an Austrian poetry film of his choice. This year, for the first time, the Audience Prize will be awarded among international films. Have a look at the festival and vote for the winner on Saturday night! Festival tickets can be ordered via the ticket service of the Metro Kinokulturhaus. Phone +43 1 512 18 03 daily from 14:00–21:00 or via reservierung@filmarchiv.at
Find the festival programme online https://www.poetryfilm-vienna.com/en/timetable/2019
We are looking forward to welcoming you at the festival!
* * *
My co-editor Marie Craven is currently on the road (for the poetry film cause) but alerted me to two new-to-me festivals that are still open for submissions:
This Welsh festival includes a POETIC CINEMA section for the first time this year:
Poetry film is a subgenre of film that fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound to create a stronger presentation and interpretation of the meaning being conveyed. This fusion of image and spoken word (both independent and interdependent) creates what William Wees called the “Poetry-film” genre.
We are looking for Submissions that:
• Are based upon an interesting concept;
• Are innovative;
• Are well crafted; and
• Create an emotional resonance
The sidebar category dropdown elaborates:
Poets, filmmakers, and media artists are called to submit their work to this brand new category. We will accept submissions of poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word films, videopoema, visual poetry, poetrinca, media poetry, and all films that are visually driven by text. Eligible submissions must have a maximum length of 40 minutes. CBFF cannot be held liable or responsible for any claim involving copyright, trademark, credits, or royalty infringement.Entries that are not in English must be subtitled in English.
Unfortunately, it’s rather pricey to enter—currently USD $45—so I kind of doubt that they’ll get many submissions from the more avant-garde sub-genres they include in their list. This strikes me as a bunch of film industry types wanting to add a bit of experimental cachet to their program, while not actually welcoming scruffier poets and auteurs. Interesting as a possible sign of the times, though.
AT THE FRINGE International Arts Festival will take place in Tranås (Sweden) from 27th June to 4th July 2020.
The film section of the festival is focused on screening experimental films and videopoems from all over the world and we are happy to open the new call for films!
Submit your film in one of these three sections: […]
GEMS – OPEN CALL FOR VIDEOPOEMS
A collection of precious stones. We are looking for videopoems, those films that stand on the border between audiovisual languages and words – written or performed. The festival is open to national and international filmmakers. Any film with no limitation of theme or duration is welcome to apply.
[…]
The videopoems submitted must have a duration of maximum 30 minutes (opening and ending credits included). They must include subtitles in English or Swedish (where the original language is not one of these two). There is no limitation for the number of works that each author can submit.
It’s great to see something like this in Sweden. And this time, the entry fee is more affordable: USD $10. The deadline is 31 March.
Poetry film festival season is now in full swing. Major festivals are just ’round the corner in Vienna, Berlin, Mexico City, and Athens.
First up is the biannual Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival scheduled for 29 November to 1 December in Vienna. Though mainly a German-language event, this year it includes a special focus on the US-based production company Motionpoems.
Then it’s time for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, whose full programme is now online. They sent along a press release, worth reproducing nearly in full due the central importance of this festival to the poetry film genre.
Once again, Berlin becomes the centre for the poetry film. From 5 to 8 December, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will for the 10th time be presenting the poetry film in all its facets in the Kino in der KulturBrauerei cinema. For the first time the current poetry film from Germany is the centre piece of the festival. Poetry film creation in the United Kingdom will be given a special spot in the limelight. The programme is now online. And Tickets go on advance sale in mid-November.
FESTIVAL OPENING
THU 5 Dec | 20.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauereiGuest of honour will be Jochen Kuhn, artist and film maker. A voice of contemporary German poetry, Özlem Özgül Dündar, is reading her latest poems. The music of the British and Berlin based multi-instrumentalist Rowan Coupland is often referring to poetry.
GERMANY-WIDE COMPETITION
Part 1: Yearned-For Places FRI 6 Dec | 19.30 (Repetition SAT 7 Dec | 14.30)
Part 2: Common Values SAT 7 Dec | 19.30. (Repetition SUN 8 Dec | 14.30)
all in Kino in der KulturBrauereiFrom more than 500 submissions from all over Germany the Programme Commission has chosen the best poetry films for the Competition. The international Jury of three will be awarding the prizes to the winning films at the awards ceremony on 8 December.
AWARD CEREMONY
SUN 8 Dec | 20.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauereiThe international Jury, comprising Jana Cernik (AG Kurzfilm), Charlotte Warsen (poet) and Tim Webb (filmmaker), will be awarding four prizes: the ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Haus für Poesie, the Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute, the Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance, donated by the German Foreign Ministry and the Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG. Musical accompaniment for the evening will be provided by F.S. Blumm.
FOCUS UK
We Are Poets FRI. 6.12. | 5 pm
Very British FRI. 6.12. | 10 pm
State of the Art SAT. 7.12. | 5 pm
Stiff Upper Verse SAT. 7.12. | 10 pm
all in Kino in der KulturBrauereiThe country focus this year is on the United Kingdom. The programme ‘State of the Art’ shows the latest British productions, curated by the poets and film makers Chaucer Cameron, Helen Dewbery, Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett. The ‘Very British’ programme is a Best Of from the past few decades of the British poetry film. The documentary ‘We Are Poets’ by Daniel Lucchesi and Alex Ramseyer-Bache celebrates its German première at the festival. In ‘Stiff Upper Verse’ the British poets Simon Barraclough, Lucy English and Roseanne Watt will be reading in English, Welsh and the dialect of the Shetland Isles.
PRISM
Journey in the Mind FRI 6 Dec | 19.30
Transit SAT 7 Dec | 17.00
Parlour Games SAT 7 Dec | 19.30
Interrelations SAT 7 Dec | 22.00 | all in Kino in der KulturBrauereiThe Programme Commission has selected 35 films for Prism; three programmes present the broad spectrum of the German poetry film including animations, experimental films and features. The programme ‘Transit’ shows documentary portraits of poets.
NEW TALENTS
design akademie berlin & Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau FRI 6 Dec | 17.00
UdK Berlin & KHM Köln FRI 6 Dec | 22.00
HFBK Hamburg & Hochschule Düsseldorf SAT 7 Dec | 14.30
HFK Bremen & Hochschule Mainz SAT 7 Dec | 22.00
Bauhaus-Uni Weimar & HBK Braunschweig SUN 8 Dec | 16.00
all in Kino in der KulturBrauereiColloquium: The Eye of the Poem SUN 8 Dec | 11.00 | Haus für Poesie
Master Class: Between Film and Poetry FRI 6 Dec | 14.00 | Haus für PoesieThe poetry film is a popular genre at universities and film academies. Students at ten German higher education institutions will be showing poetry films made in the course of a collaboration over a year. In the Colloquium Anna Anders (UdK Berlin), Sophie Maintigneux (KHM Cologne), Ulrike Almut Sandig (poet), Tim Webb (Royal College of Art) and Sarah Tremlett (Liberated Words CIC) will be discussing the position of the poetry film in German and British higher education institutions. And the director Jochen Kuhn will be giving a poetry film master class.
FESTIVAL POEM: [native vegetation a natural resource]
SUN 8 Dec | 17.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauereiIn response to ZEBRA’s call for entries, film makers have submitted their film versions of this year’s festival poem, [dieses regionale getreide] ([native vegetation a natural resource]) by Daniel Falb. Film makers Zihrong Lu, Gruppe Leuchtstoff, Holger Mohaupt and Gabriele Nugara will present their film versions and be talking to the poet about poetry and film. You can read the poem on lyrikline.org.
WORD PICTURES – A ZEBRA NIGHT OF READINGS
FRI 6 Dec | 22.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauereiPoems by Özlem Özgül Dündar, Adrian Kasnitz, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Kathrin Schmidt and Raed Wahesh are the basis of this year’s films in the Competition and Prism. In the ZEBRA Night of Readings the poets will be reading their texts and talking to Alexander Gumz about making films based on poems.
PROGRAMM FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG POEPLE
Media Workshop: The Spirits We Conjured up
WED 4 Dec | 9.00 | Haus für Poesie
Sorcerer’s Apprentices in the Moor of Horror: Programme of Ballads
THU 5 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
Holes in the Head: Programme in Focus Language English
THU 5 Dec | 9.30 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
I Made It Myself: Films by Children for Children
FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
ZEBRINO Competition FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
Poetry Workshop Writing Netflix! FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Haus für Poesie
Workshop Slam: Rucksack and a Journey FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Herder-GymnasiumThe Best Poetry Film for Children and Young People will be chosen by the young audience themselves in the ZEBRINO Competition. There will also be a colourful programme of workshops and films for Berlin schoolchildren with, among others, the Spoken Word artists Bas Böttcher and Nicole May.
As great as it is to see ZEBRA continuing to flourish, now to the point of becoming an annual festival, I’m equally excited to see a new poetry film festival springing up — in Mexico City. Check out FESTIVAL FOTOGENIA, I missed the call-out (sorry) but thanks to social media posts by filmmaker Helmie Stil, this didn’t escape my radar altogether. The description on their website suggests an avant-garde perspective on the genre:
FOTOGENIA, FIRST INTERNATIONAL FILM POETRY & DIVERGENT NARRATIVES FESTIVAL promotes a space with alternative conception of films, a celebration of experimentation and avant-garde framework, the love of curiosity and research of the seventh Art. Everyone is invited, taking into consideration the disruptive nature of the selected works.
We welcome you to watch films in another way!
If you are an audiovisual maker interested in provoking the cinematographic image through the exploration of the frontiers and limits of film narrative, genre, format and the nature of film itself, in order to converse with the viewers in innovative and critical ways to ignite a confrontation between reality and cinematic phenomenon, this is your place to exhibit your passion.
Meanwhile in Athens, the International Video Poetry Festival will be held on the weekend of the 14th and 15th. (But submissions remain open until November 20!) Special events this year will include a screening of videopoems by my co-editor Marie Cravens as well as the touring program of videopoems from around the world that she’s pulled together, Poetry + Video, plus the Margaret Tait 100 program celebrating the first Scottish woman to make feature films, who was also a pioneer of poetry in film. And there will be a videopoetry seminar panel including film-makers, writers, performers, and musicians.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a reminder that submissions are still open for REELpoetry/Houston TX 2020 (Deadline: December 9) and the 2020 Newlyn PZ International Film Festival (Deadline: February 24) .
As of November 1, the fifth annual Weimar Poetry Film Prize is open for submissions. And this time, it has its own festival.
Through the new film award, the Literary Society of Thuringia and the study field Multimedia narration of the Bauhaus University are looking for innovative poetry films. Filmmakers from any nation and of any age are welcome to participate with up to three short films of up to 10:00 mins, which should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2017 will not be considered.
From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main prize (1000 € Best Animation, 1000,- € Best Video). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.
In 2020, the Weimar Poetry Film Prize will be awarded for the first time as part of its own festival – the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia – which will take place from May to July 2020 in several cities in Thuringia. The core program (with the award ceremony) takes place from June 12th–14th in Weimar.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen and the City of Weimar.
Deadline: March 31st, 2020
The Form for submissions [pdf] by e-mail to info[at]poetryfilm.de is coming soon.
The »Weimar Poetry Film Award« call for entries is international. For the submission please send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.
Presentation of awards: June 13th, 2020 at the Lichthaus cinema Weimar.
In 2014, Belgian film-maker, Marc Neys (aka Swoon), made a video of Bill Yarrow‘s poem, Bees in the Eaves. Five years later, Marc has just released a new video for the same poem, with new images and music.
Watching the two very different treatments of the same text suggests the changes in sensibility an artist may undergo over time. Even the voice performance, from the same recording by Nic S., has a distinctly varied aural quality, pace and mood in this new version.
The disturbing images in the 2014 video display a directly metaphorical relation to ideas in the poem. In a way akin to the horror genre, the earlier film evokes a strongly emotional response.
In this latest video, the connection between image and word is much more oblique, creating a more contemplative, yet still dynamic, meaning of the poem. While both videos employ repetition to great effect, the 2019 version is more graceful in its approach to film form.
Marc’s striking approach to editing, and his surprising rhythms, remain evident in both videos. This new video is further testament to his unique and masterful work in video poetry.
No Good Deed Goes Umpunished features a performance of the poem of the same name by John Giorno, who died, aged 82, on Friday 11 October 2019. He passed away in New York, the city where he was also born. This video of him is a piece complete in itself, and additionally forms part of a longer film of Giorno’s performances from 2007, titled Nine Poems in Basilicata, from Italian film-maker, Antonello Faretta.
Giorno was part of an illustrious community of American artists in the 1960s, including the major figures of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. One of Warhol’s first experiments in film was Sleep, from 1963, which focused a camera for five hours and 20 minutes on a young Giorno asleep.
The influence of Pop Art on Giorno’s poetry included incorporating found text and imagery in his work. On at least one occasion a found text formed the entirety of one of his poems. In other poems, he employed cut-up and montage techniques. Later he abandoned these approaches for a poetic style that has been described as experimental realism.
In 1965 Giorno founded the non-profit organisation, Giorno Poetry Systems. The aims included connecting poetry with audiovisual media. One of its notable projects, inspired by a conversation with his collaborator, William S. Burroughs, was Dial-A-Poem, in which pre-recorded poems with radical political content were played to anyone calling in. Collaborators on this included John Ashbery, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and Laurie Anderson.
Giorno was open and political about his queer sexuality. During the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, he founded the AIDS Treatment Project. The charity has since distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to sufferers.
Many thanks to the highly esteemed film-maker, Mark Rappaport, for drawing our attention to the obituary in the New York Times, and to Giorno’s substantial contribution to the development of poetry in performance and audiovisual media. More poetry performances can be seen at the website of Antonello Faretta.
Giorno’s life and creativity was rich and generous. Enduring is the vitality of his spirit.
This has got to be one of the best student animations I’ve ever seen. Jake Mansbridge animates a poem from American poet Claudia Rankine‘s Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen: An American Lyric as part of an exciting new initiative from the Forward Arts Foundation, which sponsors both the Forward Prizes and UK’s National Poetry Day. Here’s how their director, Susannah Herbert, described it in an email:
National Poetry Day UK, which falls on the first Thursday in October, is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Effectively, this is a huge mass participation cultural festival that gives everyone in the nation an excuse to share a favourite poem, or line of poetry – through readings, displays, performances and, increasingly, through social media. The theme this year is Truth.
A friend who ran the MA course in Animation at the University of Hertfordshire invited us to give her students a “brief” that they could work to as part of their degree course. We gave them 100 Prized Poems, an anthology of poems drawn from the shortlists of the Forward Prizes over the years… plus a few other poems, all loosely connected to the theme of Truth, and suggested they each create an animation that would bring the poems they chose – and National Poetry Day – to new audiences.
This stunning Jake Mansbridge animation of a poem from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is just one of the films that came out of the process… and the best are being shown next month at London’s Southbank Centre.
That 20 October screening at the Southbank Centre is part of a six-day festival, Poetry International. If you can’t make the screening, all of the videos are being uploaded to a playlist on the National Poetry Day YouTube channel.
Rankine is no stranger to poetry film. She collaborated with her husband, filmmaker John Lucas, on a series of video essays, a few of which I’ve shared here, and Citizen included both stills and transcripts from those videos. So I was happy when Citizen became so celebrated and widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s also one of those books that every clueless white person should read.
Liz Waldner voices her poem in this newly uploaded video from Denise Newman. Newman, whose experimental work I’ve shared here twice before after encountering it randomly on Vimeo, is a published poet, translator, and multimedia artist who teaches at the California College of the Arts. Liz Waldner is an even more widely published poet with many honors and awards to her name. According to the Poetry Foundation,
Waldner’s work is known for its formal experimentation, reliance on quotation and pastiche, and often playful rhyme schemes. Using long titles, made-up words, and expansive proselike sentences that change topic quickly and constantly, Waldner’s verse, according to poet-critic Stephen Burt, “pays constant homage to the delights of the senses; beside her, most similarly difficult present-day poets seem arid, theoretical, no fun.”
Newman told me in an email that they made I thought I had a very nice time five years ago, and are collaborating on a second video now, which is what prompted her to dig out and share their earlier piece.