~ 2019 ~
Song of the Soil by Jessica Mookherjee
Jessica Mookherjee‘s poem “Song of the Soil”, from her collection, Tigress (Nine Arches Press, 2019), is given heartfelt filmic treatment by Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron, under the auspices of their production house, Elephant’s Footprint. According to the book’s webpage,
Jess Mookherjee is of Bengali heritage and grew up in Swansea. She has been widely published in magazines, including Under the Radar, Agenda, The North, Rialto, Antiphon and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is author of The Swell (Telltale Press) and Joyride (Black Light Engine Room Press) and Flood (Cultured Llama). She was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2017 for best single poem. Jessica works in Public Health and lives in Kent.
The poem expresses a deep connection to the Earth in an elegy of lost origins and disappearing ground. Giving further voice to these themes, the film is imbued with overexposed images of a natural world scorched yellow and burnt brown, and a soundtrack made ominous by ambient bass. Mookherjee’s solemn, rich narration rounds the elements of this powerfully organic piece.
The film is part of a series Helen and Chaucer have been doing for Nine Arches Press. They note that “The film-poems are not only viewed by Nine Arches’ existing readers and online audiences, but are a tool for their poets to engage more easily with their existing and new audiences.” The press, however, does not appear to embed any of the videos on the books’ pages, which is kind of baffling.
L’homme et la mer (Man and the Sea) by Charles Baudelaire
German film-maker Patrick Müller here adapts to the screen Charles Baudelaire‘s poem, “L’homme et la mer (Man and the Sea)”, from the poet’s most famous collection, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), first published in 1857. This is his second adaptation of a Baudelaire poem, after Le Chat (2013).
The piece displays a distinctive approach by the film-maker, who shot it on the tiny and mostly obsolete super 8 celluloid format, popularised as a home movie medium from the time of its release by Eastman Kodak in 1965. Müller’s artisanal work includes hand-processing the film himself, then transferring it to the high-quality 4K video format for completion. This combination of analogue and digital creates uniquely beautiful images, with the sensuality of the film grain rendered in uncharacteristic clarity, and the choices in colour grading adding further to the poetry of the visual stream.
The softness and quiet passion of Müller’s voice entices us inwards to the text and the film. As with Caroline Rumley’s, Open Season, shared on Moving Poems yesterday, the soundtrack of L’homme et la mer is punctuated by sudden breaks to silence, as if to give moments of contemplation before beginning anew with the next fragment of the film.
The French-English translation of the poem in the subtitles is by Lewis Piaget Shanks (1878-1935).
Müller’s detailed process notes on the film may be read at filmkorn.org.
There Are Bullets in This Poem by Jan Bottiglieri, Chris Green, cin salach, and Tony Trigilio
This is Semi-Automatic Pantoum, directed by Matt Mullins, made to accompany the collection Semi-Automatic Pantoums: A Collaboration on Gun Violence [PDF] by the Chicago-based collective Poetic Justice League. According to their origin story,
In 2018, in the season of Donald Trump and longing for another time, Chris Green was driving down a Chicago road to see his poetic super heroes Jan Bottiglieri, cin salach, and Tony Trigilio. He proposed The Poetic Justice League, a group for poetic non-silence on the big issues of the day. They dreamed up PJL to unfold group poems, to wake up poets and readers to a sense of newborn responsibility. [links added]
The pantoum is one of those forms with repeating lines, which makes it a good if macabre fit for the subject of semi-automatic weapons and the semi-automatic reactions of various political factions to the American epidemic of mass shootings. Matt Mullins added some lines of his own to the video, but otherwise the text is the same as “There Are Bullets in This Poem” (page 5 of the collection). As Matt said in an email on Monday,
It’s intensely disturbing that these horrific mass shooting events just won’t stop happening (I write you this the morning after we realize that families can’t even go to a food festival without being murdered by someone with an assault rifle.) American gun violence has gone far beyond insanity, and yet, as we all know, the politicians in the palm of the NRA will do nothing.
To write your own semi-automatic pantoum, see the collective’s instructions for teachers.
The Poetic Justice League hopes that high school students form their own PJL chapters! You will receive a PJL hat and will be included in all publishing and promotional ventures . . . and we will continue to include you in all future PJL political poetry adventures.
The only requirement is that students contribute their own collaborative political poems modeled after PJL projects. For now, we’re seeking semi-automatic pantoums–we will post the pantoums on our site.
Poetry + Video Project: July 2019 Update
Dave has kindly asked me to share news of the Poetry + Video Project, a touring program I have curated, including 25 video poems from around the world. Here is an adapted version of the latest update sent to contributors.
Our premiere screening event in Murwillumbah, Australia on 4 May went very well. It was a boutique gallery venue that held 50 people, and booked out a few days before the show. The live poets on the night, Matt Hetherington and Bronwen Manger, were awesome. It was especially great that they have both been involved in video poetry projects themselves, and were able to comment on this in the Q & A. The audience that arrived was open, curious and engaged about a form that almost none had encountered before. We couldn’t have asked for better. Here is a mini-doco of the event:
In other news, the Kathmandu screening I have been excited about will now be happening later in the year, with the exact date to be decided. Meanwhile, I will be sending the program by USB stick to Ball State University in Indiana very soon, for a screening there in the US Fall. Starting 1 November, the program will be exhibiting online as part of the huge global biennale of digital art and culture, The Wrong.
Other possible screening venues are in process of discussion. Thanks to Maria Vella, Caroline Rumley and Fiona Lam for sending through possible further leads. In other pleasing news, Jane Glennie has agreed to take on the role of UK Manager for the tour, and has very nearly secured a great venue there.
The brochure for venues now includes info on how the tour logistically works. All the videos, stills and promotional materials are ready to be sent by USB stick anywhere in the world, at a moment’s notice. As discussed previously, screening fees are entirely negotiable. For independent groups with little or no budget, fees are waived. The main thing is to share widely the fabulous films in the program.
The website has been updated with links to where all of the videos can be seen, from their individual website pages. Viewing is just one click away by hitting the film still at the top of each video’s info page. These can be accessed via the sidebar links, or from the page titled ‘The Program’.
Please contact poetryvideoproject (at) gmail (dot) com to express interest in bringing the hour-long program to your location.
Commit to Memory: The Precipice of Extinction by Nicelle Davis
What better way for Moving Poems to return from hiatus than with the latest video collaboration between artist Cheryl Gross and poet Nicelle Davis? And as a nature lover, the subject matter is close to my heart. I feel that way too few poets really grasp the severity and horror of the extinction crisis, let alone the threat it poses to the human imagination and, arguably, our very souls. I found this cycle of poems so moving, especially accompanied by Cheryl’s inimitable, unsettling animation.
Nicelle has a brief column about the collaboration up at Cultural Weekly:
Death is a charmer; nothing makes us feel more alive than brushing shoulders with Death at a bar, in our cars, or at 5,000 feet in the air. Every time we risk and survive there is a thrill. We feel like we won more life because we are not the one dying.
There is something sexy about Death, how when poachers take a machete to the face of an elephant, the gaping wound resemble a wet vagina, how sex is always better once it’s gone, or when whalers take a grenade harpoon to a whale—even more so when an entire species is gone, how life looks for life even inside a zoo.
But Death is a trickster. We can never win at Death’s game. We remain alive, while our humanity is dying. Soon, there will be nothing of our lives worth living for.
Commit to Memory: The Precipice of Extinction is a multi-platform project that addresses the eventual disappearance of our culture using animals as metaphors. We explore issues of global warming, displacement, assault and poverty.
Poetry film at the MIX 2019 conference
Over at Liberated Words, Sarah Tremlett has posted a detailed and fascinating report on what went down at MIX 2019, the conference on digital media held at the beginning of July at Bath Spa University in the UK. I considered attending myself, but like most such conferences it was way out of my budget as a non-academic dirtbag poet, so I’m grateful to Sarah for this erudite summary of the talks, screenings and panels. Check it out: “MIX 2019: Experiential Storytelling – poetry film meets profiling and the panoptic gaze“.
Visible Verse at the NYC Poetry Festival
For the third year in a row, the New York City Poetry Festival will be partnering with the Visible Poetry Project for a Poetry Film Festival within the festival.
Yet again PSNY is partnering with the Visible Poetry Project to bring you the third annual Poetry Film Festival at NYCPOFEST! The Visible Poetry Project pairs 30 filmmakers with 30 poets each April to create 30 videos that present poems as short films.
As usual, it’s the last weekend of July on Governor’s Island.
Every year on the last weekend of July, The New York City Poetry Festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds, which are ringed with a collection of beautiful Victorian houses and tucked beneath the wide, green canopies of dozens of century old trees. By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye.
It’s great that such quality films will be reaching this kind of large, live audience of poetry fans. Though poetry film screenings have become almost an expected part of regional poetry festivals in the UK, I don’t think they’re too common in the US yet. And as far as I know, the nation’s largest poetry festival, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival held every two years just outside NYC in Newark, has never screened films. (Poetry filmmaker Lori Ersolmaz attended in 2016 and wrote it up for Moving Poems.)
If you can’t make the festival, you can of course watch all the films on the VPP website. Not that that’s any substitute for the live experience.
