~ News and Views ~

Lucy English interviewed about filmpoetry on Carpool Poetry

On 12 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - craft, filmmaking, opinions

The latest episode of a new YouTube series from Burning Eye Books features a lovely interview with UK poet and poetry-film expert Lucy English.

Clive Birnie talks to Lucy English about her filmpoem project Book of Hours (http://thebookofhours.org), Liberated Words (http://liberatedwords.com) and Rebecca Tantony’s one-to-one poetry show All the Journeys I Never Took (http://rebecca-tantony.com/projects) which Lucy produced.

Burning Eye Books are “a small independent publisher in the South West predominately specialising in promoting spoken word artists.”

Incidentally, Lucy English wasn’t the first poet to draw a connection between Medieval illuminated manuscripts and poetry films; I suppose it’s a natural association to make. The Chicago-based poet Gerard Wozek, who has been making poetry videos with artist Mary Russell since 2000, has a good essay about poetry video on his website which was invaluable to me when I was starting Moving Poems back in 2009. I still quote his succinct definition on MP’s About page:

A poetry video is an illuminated electronic manuscript that records the voice, the spirit, and vision of the poet, and frames this technological intersection between visual art and literature.

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Weimar Poetry Film Award’s new trailer raises the bar for poetry film festival trailers

On 11 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - contests, festivals and other screening events

Look, I like the typical jazzy, brief trailers that festivals like to turn out, but this short film, directed by Guido Naschert, really makes me want to drop everything and go to Weimar in May. More than that, it’s a great introduction to the genre as a whole, as well as to some of its leading thinkers and practitioners:

(In case you missed last week’s post, here are the details.)

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Call for entries: Weimar Poetry Film Award 2017

On 4 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, contests, festivals and other screening events

Bauhaus University’s 19th annual Backup_festival will include an international poetry film competition for the second year in a row: the Weimar Poetry Film Award. The screening will be on the second day—May 18—of the five-day film festival, and the deadline for submissions is March 15.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Through the new Film Prize, backup_festival and Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. (LGT) 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 8:00 mins, which should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2014 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 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.

The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen, Thüringer Staatskanzlei and the City of Weimar.

Entry deadline: March 15th, 2017.

Form for submissions [pdf] by mail or e-mail.

The »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« call for entries is international. For the submission send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.

Presentation of awards: May 20th, 2017.

More information about the program: www.backup-festival.de.

Clcik through to Poetryfilmkanal or visit FilmFreeway for the German text of the call.

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Call for poetry films: MIX 2017 conference

On 4 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, conferences

conference banner

Bath Spa University’s bucolic Newton Park campus may seem an unlikely venue for an important international conference on writing and technology, but apparently it has “the best specialist digital and studio resources for teaching in the South West [U.K.] – equal to anything found in top commercial organisations and broadcast companies.” The MIX 2017 conference sounds truly interdisciplinary, with “a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions and workshops. Alongside scholars and researchers, artists, creative writers and creative technologists interested in literary forms are welcome to submit proposals.” More to the point for our interests, the organizers have issued a special call for poetry films.

CALL FOR POETRY FILMS

MIX 2017: REVOLUTIONS, REGENERATIONS, REFLECTIONS

BATH SPA UNIVERSITY, NEWTON PARK CAMPUS. 10-12 JULY 2017

www.mixconference.org

The themes for this year’s conference are revolutions, regenerations, reflections. We would like to encourage artists/poets and digital writers to submit poetry films/ film poems/video poetry to be screened during MIX in our Viewing Theatre at Newton Park campus. Poetry films/ film poems/ video poetry is an emerging genre that fuses the use of spoken-word poetry, visual images, and sound to create a stronger representation and interpretation of the meaning being conveyed.

 

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR FILMS

Short films should be submitted via email using a direct link to Youtube, Vimeo or an open link to Dropbox or WeTransfer. The email subject line should read ‘Your Name; Poetry Film Submission’ and the body of the email should include a 50-word description of the film.

Maximum 2 submissions per artist, these can be sent in the same email. This email should be sent to mix@bathspa.ac.uk by Wednesday 1st March.

The films will be selected and curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and Zata Banks (founder of PoetryFilm research art project https://poetryfilm.org)

 

VIEWING THEATRE TECH SPECS

4K HD projector and 5.1 surround sound

 

REQUIREMENTS

  • Poetry films/ film poems/ video poetry up to 3 minutes.
  • Submitted via email using a direct link to Youtube, Vimeo or an open link to Dropbox or WeTransfer.
  • Email subject: ‘Your Name; Poetry Film Submission’; and the body of the email should include a 50-word description of the film.
  • No more than 2 submissions per artist, these can be sent in the same email.
  • Films must relate in some way to the conference’s themes: Revolutions, Regenerations and Reflections.
  • English language or with English language subtitles.
  • Deadline: Wednesday 1st March 2017.

 

If you would like to attend the conference please click on the ‘Bookings’ tab.

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“Trump Draws”: satirical micro-videopoetry takes Twitter by storm

On 3 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, reviews

Behold the wonder that is @TrumpDraws: a Twitter account dedicated entirely to animated GIFs of Trump signing executive orders. The description reads, “i’m the president and i like to draw”. Created just four days ago, @TrumpDraws has 319,000 followers. It began with “house”


and moved on to “kat”, “horse” and “turkey” (evidently made with one of the president’s own, small hands)


before arriving at Trump’s favorite subject:


These alternative executive orders may seem silly and absurd at first, but cumulatively they do speak truth to power, critiquing the child-like capriciousness of President Trump’s so-far incoherent attempts to govern via poorly executed fiat.


What sorts of orders are these? Is it enough for the powerful to point and speak?


Is it fair to children to compare their crude yet often brilliant, uninhibited creations with the rambling, self-centered utterances of a sociopathic septuagenarian?


Like all effective poetry, these miniature videopoems lead not to any definitive solution but to a radical reappraisal of the quotidian, stripped of all deadening cliches. In an increasingly perilous political environment they offer levity, yes, but more importantly they serve the salutary goal, more often honored in the breach, of refusing to normalize what is in fact both deeply aberrant and abhorrent.

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Call for submissions: Rendez-vous vidéo-poésie du Festival de la poésie de Montréal 2017

On 29 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, contests, festivals and other screening events

I missed it last year (in part because I’m completely out of the loop with the Francophone videopoetry scene), but for the second year in a row, the Montreal Poetry Festival will include a videopoetry competition. Entries must have been made in 2016 or 2017, and either be the work of a Quebec artist or include extracts from Quebec poems. The deadline is March 6.

Video-poetry Rendez-vous will take place in the programming of the upcoming Montreal Poetry Festival, which runs from May 29 to June 4, 2017.

10 videopoemes will be selected to be screened at an evening at the Festival.

A jury of active members of the poetic and video community will present a prize of $ 500 to the winner of the competition.

Thus Google Translate. Here’s the whole call in French. It’s not clear whether videopoems in the other languages of Quebec, such as English or Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi, would be considered.

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Call for Entries: Juteback Poetry Film Festival 2017

On 21 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Juteback Poetry Film Festival poster

The late, lamented Body Electric Poetry Film Festival is back with a new name! The Juteback Poetry Film Festival will take place on May 20th at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, Colorado. Festival director R.W. Perkins will collaborate with Matt Mullins to program the festival. They note:

At the Juteback Poetry Film Festival we are looking for innovative and technically sound filmmaking, coupled with a strong grasp of poetics. It is our hope to showcase a wide range of talented film-poets from around the world to best represent the budding art form of videopoetry.

Submit online through the website. I’ll paste in the instructions:

THE JUTEBACK POETRY FILM FESTIVAL SUBMISSION GUIDE

  • All films must be submitted online. Please use the form below to complete your submission. To submit please load your film to Youtube, Vimeo or media sharing site of your choice, then provide the link in your submission. If you choose to use a privacy setting on either Youtube or Vimeo please be sure to provide us with a proper access code to view your film.
  •  All films must be completed before the deadline of April. 16th, 2017. As long as your film has been completed before the April 16th deadline please feel free to submit.
  •  All non-English films must have English sub-titles.
  •  All films selected for the festival grant Juteback Productions, LLC the rights to use all video images and press materials from the film for promotional purposes.
  •  Juteback Productions, LLC is permitted to retain copies of each film selected as part of our festival library and for media educational use.
  •  You may submit more than one film, please repeat process for each entry.
  • Films must be no more than 15 minutes in duration.

Submit here. And follow the festival on Facebook and Twitter.

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“Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry” opens with four-minute filmpoem

On 20 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events


Watch it at The Wrap.

A powerful, prophetic poem by Wendell Berry opens the film Look & See (previously titled The Seer, but changed at Berry’s request) by Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell, which is playing at the Sundance Film Festival as part of The New Climate program. Here’s the description on the Sundance Institute website:

Director Laura Dunn returns to the Festival with this fitting follow-up to her acclaimed documentary, The Unforeseen (2007 Sundance Film Festival). Her latest film, Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, where it received a Special Jury Award for visual design.

This gorgeously realized look at the decline of modern U.S. agrarian culture is highlighted through the writings and reflections of author Wendell Berry, who embedded himself in rural life upon returning home to Kentucky in 1965. Writing from a long wooden desk overlooking the landscape, Berry used that vantage point to eloquently praise the benefits of a life deeply connected to the land. Since then, society has shifted dramatically, with mass development of rural areas and corporate farming practices replacing the roles of small family farms.

In this visually stunning ode to a changing cultural landscape, rare photographs blend with farmers and family members expressing their own stories. Using original wood engravings to frame chapters, Look And See explores the graceful intersection between art, life, and the natural world.

The film is available for pre-order on Blu-ray and DVD.

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The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: Brent Green and Sam Green

On 7 January, 2017 by Cheryl Gross with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events, live readings and documentaries, reviews, The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Brent Green and Sam Green: Live Cinema at BAM’s (Brooklyn Academy Of Music‘s) Next Wave Festival.

I love alternative multimedia theater, especially when it includes animation. What was so special about this show was the fact that it’s not just the entertainment, it’s the whole experience. From the moment you walk into the theater and wait to be seated, the show begins. Seating is on a first-come basis and a good portion of it consists of old furniture. I had the pleasure of sharing a couch with the person I came with. A cash bar was available and everyone was encouraged to take advantage before and during the performance.

The show was billed as “live cinema.” I had never heard of Sam or Brent Green before this. As it turns out they are cousins and well known in the art world. Their credits include Sundance, Whitney Biennial and MOMA.

Sam is a filmmaker specializing in documentaries. What makes his work special is the fact that he chooses topics that are not necessarily what one would expect. The World’s Largest Shopping Mall, The Oldest Person in The World and a pet cemetery in Ohio (I believe the pet cemetery is a work in progress) are three examples. Although the theme may seem a little dark, there was nothing depressing about it. They were done with love and humor.

Brent on the other hand is the poet, musician and self-taught animator. A master of slam poetry, he too is considered a documentarian by Sundance.

Much of Brent’s storytelling is observational and unusual. His narrative is without judgment and reservation (OK, some judgment, but no reservation). He’s just reporting the facts and like Sam uses humor, which adds to the quirkiness to the show. Both artists set their stories to Brent’s animation and music. He reminds me of an older Bob Dylan, raw and fresh. In my opinion he is the quintessential Outsider artist.

I would say that if were to consider any of this video poetry, Brent would win hands-down. His animations are rough, exquisite and captivating. Hearing him recite his poetry live as opposed to on YouTube makes a huge difference. His ability to slam the story actually gave me chills.

It’s good to know that there are those out there who embrace subterranean lifestyles and spin them into art. If you can catch the performance at some point I highly recommend it.

Check out Brent Green’s work on Vimeo. Here’s an example:

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Ice Mountain

On 31 December, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - filmmaking, site news

I’ve made it a rule not to share videos of my own poems on Moving Poems, but I’m making an exception just this once. When the filmmaker and musician Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon heard I had a new book coming out, he offered to make a video trailer for it if I’d send him some footage, and naturally, I jumped at the chance. But the result is a new videopoem in its own right, and I think it’s worth careful study by poets and publishers who might be interested in producing videos based on poetry books. The usual approach is to select one poem to translate into video, but what Marc wanted to do was make a film based on a montage of lines and stanzas from throughout the book, which he asked me to select, giving guidance only on the maximum number of lines. That’s in the voiceover, which he had me record. Much to my surprise and delight, however, he supplemented that with additional fragments of text that he chose himself and included as text-on-screen. By the end of the film’s three minutes and 41 seconds, I think the viewer ends up with a pretty good idea of what the book is about.

For more on Ice Mountain, please see the publisher’s page (and, you know, consider pre-ordering a copy if you’d like to support the guy behind Moving Poems). It’s worth noting that it will also include visuals: original linocuts by the editor, designer and publisher Beth Adams. And if you’d like a further sample of the contents, I’ve posted a section on my author website.

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Paterson: the movie

On 31 December, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - related genres

I’ve always liked William Carlos Williams’ book-length poem Paterson, so I was intrigued to see this trailer for a feature film inspired by it. It’s not, however, based on Williams’ poem in any sense, as the director explains in an interview with Time magazine:

In Jim Jarmusch’s thirteenth feature, Paterson, Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson who also happens to live and work in Paterson N.J. And like an earlier Paterson resident, physician-poet William Carlos Williams, he writes poetry in his spare time. During coffee and lunch breaks, and in the moments before he begins his route, Paterson writes poems inspired by everyday things. For example, a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches sparks a meditation on the pure, quiet love he feels for his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a charming, stay-at-home DIY dynamo.

Jarmusch, too, loves poetry. He’s a fan, in particular, of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, members of what’s commonly known as the New York School of poets. (The poems in Paterson, in fact, were written by New York School poet Ron Padgett.) Jarmusch has drawn on that love, and more, to make a picture that shows how art—maybe even especially art made in the margins—can fill up everyday life. Here, Jarmusch explains how Paterson came to be, describes his admiration for the work actors do, and offers a mini reading list for anyone out there who may be a poetry lover, but just doesn’t know it yet.

TIME: I understand that you came up with the basic treatment for Paterson a long time ago. Did you set out to make a film specifically about poets and poetry?

Jim Jarmusch: I went on a day trip to Paterson 20, 25 years ago. I was drawn there by William Carlos Williams, a doctor and a poet whose work I liked. I went to the falls there, and I walked around and saw the industrial parts of it. It’s a fascinating place: It was like Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a new industrial city, based around the power from the waterfall, kind of an intended utopian city. And it’s incredibly varied in terms of its demographics, the variety of people there.

[William Carlos Williams’] book Paterson, by the way, is not one of my favorite poems—in fact, it goes over my head, I don’t understand a lot of it. But at the beginning of it, a man is a metaphor for the city of Paterson, and vice-versa. And I thought that’s just a beautiful idea. I thought I’d like to write a little treatment about a poet, a working-class guy in Paterson who’s actually a very good poet but not a known one. So I had that little one-page treatment in a drawer for years. I kept remembering it, but I never really got to it until now.

Read the rest.

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How to follow Moving Poems in the WordPress.com Reader

On 14 December, 2016 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - site news

A screnshot of Moving Poems as it appears in the WordPress.com Reader.

WordPress.com is the largest WordPress multi-site installation in the world, and for many people, it’s synonymous with WordPress itself — an understandable mistake. As an online publishing platform it’s hard to beat for reliability, security, and an idealistic corporate ethos focused squarely on creative self-expression and user empowerment (including data portability) that puts the likes of Facebook and Google to shame. One of the coolest features of the site is that, for logged-in users, the home page — WordPress.com — is a feed reader. The latest posts from all the WordPress.com blogs you subscribe to appear there in excerpt form, and if you click on a title, you’ll instantly get the whole post, and can even comment on it without clicking through to the site if you don’t want to. And it’s just had a re-design to make it easier to use and better looking than ever.

The feed reader is pretty hard to avoid for WordPress.com users, and therefore has gotten a high level of adoption as the site continues to evolve and take on some of the features of a social network. What a lot of users don’t realize, I think, is that they can subscribe to any site with a working feed — Blogspot blogs, sites on Squarespace, Weebly, you name it. That naturally includes Moving Poems and Moving Poems Magazine. Here’s how.

Go to WordPress.com and log in if you’re a member, or follow the instructions to sign up for a free membership if you’re not. Once you’re in the Reader, you’ll notice a left sidebar where the top item should say Followed Sites (if you’re using a mobile device, you may have that text appearing at the top, above the content: click on it to go to the sidebar items). Click on the button that says Manage, and you’ll go to a page with a listing of all the sites you’re following (if any) with a search bar at the top that says “enter a site URL to follow.” Try it! Go to any site on the web with regularly updating content, copy the home page URL out of your browser, and paste it in. If it has a feed, the site title will appear as an option immediately below with a link to click that says “Follow.” Voilà!

Moving Poems and Moving Poems Magazine are actually two separate, interlinked sites, but I’ve created a combined feed using a service called Feed Informer, so you could just copy and paste in that URL if you want: http://feed.informer.com/digests/GVVXE6OY6V/feeder.rss. This will give the full content of the posts, including videos that will play right within the Reader. But if you subscribe to each site separately by pasting in the respective URLs, movingpoems.com and movingpoems.com, that will not only give full content but also the ability to comment on posts without leaving the Reader — comments that will then show up on Moving Poems itself!* Whichever way you subscribe, as of the latest re-design you should now even be able to watch the daily videos without even expanding the excerpts to read the whole posts (though if you’re in that much of a hurry, you should really probably re-examine your priorities in life).

Lots of people already subscribe to Moving Poems (including the magazine content) through the weekly MailChimp newsletter, and if you’re an email-oriented person and you don’t follow very many other blogs, magazines and online newspapers, that will probably continue to be your most convenient option. But if you do follow a bunch of different sites, it might make more sense to use WordPress.com — or another feed reader such as Feedly. But for sheer ease of use and social network-like features (comments, likes, re-blogging) you’re unlikely to beat WordPress.com at this point.
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*For the tech-minded who are wondering how that’s possible, it’s because these are self-hosted WordPress sites and I use the Jetpack plugin from WordPress.com on both of them, in part because it’s the best “related posts” plugin out there.

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