Posts By Dave Bonta
“Descrambled Eggs” wins 2017 Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition
Descrambled Eggs—the film by Kayla Jeanson with poet Steve Curry that I just shared on Moving Poems—has won the 2017 IndieCork award for best poetry film!
Congrats to Kayla Jeanson @Shadling for winning the 5th Ó Bhéal @IndieCork Poetry-Film Comp, with Descrambled Eggs! https://t.co/uljcHvCzo0 pic.twitter.com/0uHpPPpdGV
— Ó Bhéal (@OBheal) October 15, 2017
I swear I had nothing to do with this. (I didn’t even notice that it was on the Ó Bhéal shortlist when I shared it.) The winner was chosen by poet Lani O’Hanlon and filmmaker Shaun O’Connor from among the 30 films screened earlier today as part of the IndieCork Festival. Congratulations to Kayla and Steve, as well as to all the other filmmakers and poets selected for this increasingly competitive and highly regarded annual poetry film festival.
Call for submissions of poetry and film: Magma 71
The British literary magazine Magma Poetry is now soliciting work for Magma 71 — The Film Issue, guest-edited by Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, who are looking for both poems about films and film-poems themselves. There’s also an opportunity for poets to get their lyrical film-scripts turned into films.
As usual with traditional literary magazines, they’re insisting that the poems be complete virgins to publication, which I suppose means that the videos, too, must not have been shared anywhere before, not even on YouTube or Vimeo. But if that forces filmmakers and video artists to create brand new work, and possibly initiate new collaborations with poets in the process, so much the better! Here’s the call.
Closing date: 31st January, 2018
The submissions window for ‘Film’ is open from October 1st 2017 until January 31st 2018.
We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online. Poems may be sent via Submittable, or by post if you live in the UK. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.
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“My poetry seems to be something I make up as I go along. Certain movies strike me that way — going in and out of one’s dreams.” From “John Ashbery goes to the movies”
Whether it’s a film you always go back to, a director you follow, a cinema that holds a particular story for you, or a poem that simply reads like a short film, Magma 71 is set out to celebrate the poetry of cinema.
Take us with you to the movies. Send us your takes on Neorealism and Nouvelle Vague, Hollywood Golden Age or the cinema of today. Or perhaps you’d like to create your own film script, presented to us in the form of a poem. Send us your films noirs, your indies and your blockbusters. In short, make us believe in films that don’t exist and send us to watch the films that do. Show us the ways poetry and film are connected and explore with us whether it is even possible for contemporary poets to write without the cinema screen at the back of their mind.
We are also calling for submissions of film-poems. We are particularly interested in collaborative work between poets and filmmakers. The poems, as always, should not have been previously published, either in print or online. The chosen film-poems will be screened at Magma events, showcased on the Magma website, and the poem texts published in the magazine. We are interested in collaborations that challenge and converse with each other’s form rather than simply echo it. In other words, if there’s a moon in the poem, we probably don’t need to see it represented as a moon in the film.
Look out for regular updates during the reading/viewing period on the Magma website where we’ll be posting examples of recent film poems we’ve loved and discussing the boundaries between film poems and music video clips, from Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade all the way back to Bob Dylan’s 1965 Subterranean Homesick Blues.
We look forward to going to the cinema with you!
Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, Editors, Magma 71
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Magma Poetry in Collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and the Festival of Creative Learning
We are thrilled to announce our first collaboration for Magma 71.
More details here
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Wanting to submit to the Film Issue? You may submit:
Up to 4 poems in a single Word document
Up to 2 film-poems— each no longer than 2.5 minutes. (If your film is longer, please submit the first 2.5 minutes of it)
Note that if you submit film poems, you must submit the poem texts as well.
Go to Submittable for more details.
If you click the link for the collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, there’s news of an additional contest for poets:
During the Call for Submissions for Magma 71, we will choose a number of poems to be handed over to the University of Edinburgh filmmakers to create film-poems, using the written poem as a starting point. The film-poems will be featured on the Magma Poetry website as well as on the Festival of Creative Learning website.
The complete films will be showcased during the Festival of Creative Learning event or the Festival Pop-Up event in 2018, and at the magazine launch in London. The poets will be invited to read at the events.
If you would like your poems to be considered for this project, you will need to submit your poems no later than November 1st 2017. (Note that the closing date for the general Magma 71 Call for Submissions is January 31st 2018).
Cheryl Moskowitz and Stav Poleg, Editors, Magma 71
Pretty cool.
Life, Life by Arseny Tarkovsky
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It’s always fascinating to see how different poetry-film makers will deploy the same text. In his film, Cameron Michael juxtaposes the dreamy text and soundtrack with time-lapse shots of New York City, while in Exiles, Bangladeshi director Amirul Rajiv uses black-and-white footage of a vast Rohingya refugee camp. Which is a better fit? How does our understanding of the poem change from one film to the other?
Poetry-film fans should recognize the name Arseny Tarkovsky: his son, the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, included his father’s poems in some of his most memorable scenes. Here, the title poem from Virginia Rounding’s recent volume of English translations comes to us via an album by the film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, which he offered up for an international short film competition earlier this year. Here’s how the website No Film School described it:
The composer behind ‘The Revenant’ has teamed up with Apichatpong Weerasethakul to give out awards totaling $5,000 cash.
This past spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto released his album async, which he described as a “soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film.” Today, he announced the async Short Film Competition, in which he asks filmmakers to create a movie around his music.
The short films will be judged by Sakamoto and acclaimed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). In addition, one filmmaker will be given an “Audience Award” based on the following method: One point for every time the submitted film is played on Vimeo; 10 points for every “like” on Vimeo; and 10 points for every “like” on Facebook by September 30th, 2017.
Sakamoto will decide on a winner based on the following criteria:
- Originality
- Creativity
- Unique expression of the relationship between the music and the images
- The general appeal of the film
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Apichatpong will decide on a winner based on the following criteria:
- Originality
- Creativity
- The general appeal of the film
Links to all the films entered in the competition are currently on the front page of Sakamoto’s website. You can see more film interpretations of this poem by doing a Google video search for Arseny Tarkovsky “Life, Life”.
Sun-Up by Lola Ridge
The title poem from a 1920 collection by New Zealand anarchist and poet Lola Ridge as envideoed by Catalan remix artist Josep Porcar.
I haven’t done a very good job of keeping up with Josep Porcar’s videopoetry output over the years, but he’s certainly Catalonia’s most active and visible proponent of the art, often combining (as here) his own Catalan translations with his audiovisual interpretations of classic and contemporary poems. His truly international focus should not be surprising; far from what outside observers of its independence movement might assume, Catalonia has much more of a crossroads culture than an insular or provincial one. (These days, it seems as if it’s mainly the declining empires, such as the UK and the US, which are bedeviled by insularity and xenophobia.) But enough of my editorializing. Go browse more of Josep’s work (or view the archive here).
Mining Poems or Odes by Robert Fullerton
Working-class voices are all too rare in poetry, so I’m delighted to be able to share this profound and lyrical documentary by Callum Rice in which Glaswegian poet Robert Fullerton reflects on how his approach to writing was shaped by his experiences as a welder. It was featured three years ago in Aeon (which I clearly don’t read faithfully enough) in partnership with the Scottish Documentary Institute, which produced it. Thanks to a Facebook friend, Luis Andrade, for alerting me to the post:
The Scottish poet Robert Fullerton is a former shipyard welder who was an apprentice when he found his love of books thanks to his mentor. Drawing inspiration from the sparks that he imagines as ‘wee thoughts, or wee possibilities, or wee ideas’, Fullerton began crafting poems while working at the shipyard, finding his dark, solitary days provided the ‘perfect thinking laboratory’ for mining words. Like its subject, Mining Poems or Odes finds beauty in language and in the docks of Glasgow, combining Fullerton’s thoughts on mining and lyrical readings of his poetry with scenes from the Govan shipyard’s distinctly working-class milieu. This celebrated short documentary by the Scottish filmmaker Callum Rice played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and won a BAFTA Scotland award for best short in 2015.
See the film’s page on the Scottish Documentary Institute website for a complete list of awards and screenings (which don’t include any poetry film festivals, sadly). Mining Poems or Odes was Callum Rice’s first film, as a newly minted graduate of the Glasgow School of Art.
I love how Fullerton identifies mining as a root metaphor for artistic discovery. There’s no ignoring—nor should we want to ignore—the nitty-gritty, industrial or post-industrial reality underpinning our civilization. After several days’ wrestling with the nitty-gritty of modern web-hosting technology as I moved Moving Poems and Moving Poems Magazine to a new host with SSL, this was just the film I needed to watch.
Call for poetry films: Newlyn Film Festival
A new international film festival slated for April 6-8th, 2018 at the The Centre, Newlyn, Cornwall, UK will include a poetry film section, selected by judges Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett, who should be well known to readers of Moving Poems. The deadline is January 31 February 21, 2018. Here are the guidelines. To see the categories and submission fees for each, click through to Film Freeway and look on the right-hand sidebar. Poetry films can be up to six minutes long, and are “limited to one per applicant.”
The other categories are Fiction Film, Student Film, and Documentary. General advice on eligibility notes that “The Festival is open to short films of all production techniques, including animation, documentary, drama, experimental or artist film and hybrid work from low to high budgets.”
Updated 2 October to correct information about the maximum duration of poetry films.
