With more than 12,000 attendees, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs or AWP conference is by far the largest gathering of creative writers and writing teachers in North America. This year it’s being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to Motionpoems, and if you’re attending, be sure to check out the Motionpoems display at the book fair.
Visit us in Booth #1036! We’ll have:
- a preview of Season 6, produced in partnership with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
- free lesson plans with prompts by Janet Burroway
- more information on our Big Bridges contest
- and much, much more!
(That’s from their email newsletter.)
AWP is this very week, April 8-12, so I’m a little late in getting this out, but I was excited to see nine different panel discussions that are directly or indirectly related to videopoetry and multimedia. I think this is as good an indication as any of the growing literary prestige of multimedia experimentation. Only two of the following panels conflict with each other, so if you’re attending, be sure to check out as many of these as you can. (I’ll be happy to post reports if anyone wants to write them.) Click on the titles for more information, including biographies of the panelists.
R204. Hypertext: Bookish Writing for a Digital Age
Room 200 H&I, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Susannah Schouweiler, Halimah Marcus, Dustin Luke Nelson, Jamie Millard, David Doody
Panelists will speak to the interplay of medium and message as lit mag fare and literary journalism migrate from print to web-based platforms. We’ll highlight new forms of online storytelling and innovations in meaningful reader engagement in this new wave of bookish writing, marked by an increasingly interdisciplinary way of writing and publishing inclined toward more inclusive critical conversations and contributions by “professional” journalists and critics, writers and readers alike.
R237. Reimagining the Author: Pedagogies of Collaboration, Chance, and New Media in Poetry Workshops
Room 205 A&B, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Timothy Bradford, Susan Briante, Joseph Harrington, Cheryl Pallant, Grant Matthew Jenkins
Collaboration, digitization, automation, and conceptualization are just some of the ways traditional notions of authorship can be reimagined in the classroom. Panelists will discuss how rethinking these notions can unlock students’ creativity and critical thinking about their own writing, and they will share lesson plans geared toward helping community, undergraduate, and graduate students generate innovative work and practice new methods they can later apply in more traditional assignments.
R280. Ut Cinéma Poesis: Using Film in Poetry Workshops
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Thursday, April 9, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: James Pate, Sandra Lim, Lisa Fishman, Arda Collins, James Shea
Pasolini wrote poetry. Frank O’Hara made a film. Poetry and film have long found inspiration in one another. This panel of five poets explores ways to use film (Bergman, Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Trecartin) in poetry workshops. How can film lead to writing exercises and discussions about poetic form, image, repetition, sound, and juxtaposition? We also address new, evolving technologies, such as iMovie and the iPhone, and consider how they might be used in a poetry class.
R234. The Essay Blinks: Multimedia Writers on Crafting the Visual Essay
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panelists: Sarah Minor, Mark Ehling, Amaranth Borsuk, Eric LeMay
As literary publishing adjusts to the presence of both small-scale presses and web-based magazines, more publishers are adapting to and even selecting for writing that experiments visually. But what makes a multimedia essay? And what makes a good one? Specifically, which techniques render multimedia elements inextricable from rather than extraneous to a text? On this panel, four writers focus on the craft of visual texts and address how ancient essay forms are thriving in the newest media.
F204. Word Meets Image: The Video Essay
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Friday, April 10, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Ned Stuckey-French, Eula Biss, Kristen Radtke, John Bresland
New technologies (iPhones, editing software, YouTube, etc.) have made possible a new literary form—the video essay. This panel will investigate the video essay, including its relationship to other genres (e.g., print essays, graphic memoirs, film, documentaries, etc.), the relationship of text to image, video essays in the classroom, collaboration, curating essays for online magazines, developing scripts, editing, and the use of animation, sound, found footage, titles, and other techniques.
F274. Writing with Media: Poets, Printers, and Programmers
Room 200 D&E, Level 2
Friday, April 10, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Kevin McFadden, Todd Boss, Katherine McNamara, Lisa Pearson, Steve Woodall
The art of the book in the digital age is the art of collaboration. Writer, poet, printer, programmer, filmmaker, animator, composer, publisher: all play vital roles in new media, widening the role of authorship. This panel of writers who are also editors-printers-filmmakers-programmers-publishers demonstrates, on screen and on the page, the emergence of the book as a total work of art, from text to voice, photo, scan, and video, forming a unified expression where codex meets multimedia.
S172. Literature On Air
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panelists: Marianne Kunkel, Jeffrey Brown, Don Share, Michael Nye
The panel will explore innovative ways in which the literary arts have achieved renewed life through various broadcast media, including video, vimeos, and the exciting rise in literary podcasts. Editors of Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Missouri Review, and PBS NewsHour will discuss strategies, challenges, and opportunities that come with creating on-air media platforms for the literary arts and what these productions mean for their vision for their pages.
S204. Video Poems and Cross-Genre Collaboration: A Conversation and Screening with Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich, and Trevino Brings Plenty
Room 101 F&G, Level 1
Saturday, April 11, 2015
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panelists: Jocelyn Hale, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Louise Erdrich, Heid E. Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, National Book Award-winning author of The Round House, collaborates on video poems with her sister Heid and an all-indigenous filmmaking crew including musician-poet Trevino Brings Plenty and filmmaker Elizabeth Day.
S284. Creative Writing in the Digital Age
Room M100 J, Mezzanine Level
Saturday, April 11, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panelists: Joseph Rein, Doug Dechow, Janelle Adsit, Trent Hergenrader, Michael Dean Clark
Digital technology has a profound and ever-increasing impact on creative writing; however, this impact is often overlooked in the traditional creative writing classroom. This panel addresses creative solutions to utilizing technology in traditional and hybrid genres, from digital poetics to social media to game theory. The panelists discuss traditional, hybrid, and online-only classrooms, and how instructors can integrate digital tools to enhance creativity both in process and product.
Back on March 7, I posted a list of poetry-film screenings and festivals for the spring in which I lamented the apparent lack of events in April. Since then, I’ve learned about quite a few, thanks to web and Facebook postings from Zata Banks (nee Kitowski), Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, and Helen Dewbery.
11 April in Swindon, UK
Poetry Film Workshop with Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery. According to the Facebook event page, there were only eight places available as of March 22, so don’t delay if you’re interested in signing up.
The objective is for participants to create a poetry film.
Part One: Short introduction on the history of film poetry with examples.
Part Two: Exercises using sound, words and images.
Part Three: Creating a film poem using newly created poetry and images.
Equipment: participants bring their own laptop, camera/phone if they have them.
With permission, and if suitable, the films will be shown at this year’s Poetry Swindon Festival in the Central Library on National Poetry Day (1st October 2015)
17 April in Hawick, Scotland
TRANSMUTATIONS programme at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and Zata Kitowski from PoetryFilm have co-curated this special screening, mixing films from our open submissions with classics of the genre. It features a diverse selection of film artworks, chosen for their alignment with poetry, with poetic structures, with poetic experiences, and with the visual, verbal and aural languages of poetry in various forms. The 45 minute screening will be followed by a 15 minute Q&A with some of the filmmakers, including Richard Bailey (USA) and Sean Martin (UK).
20-24 April in Münster
Poetry Film – Seminar mit Daniel Huhn & Julian Isfort. It’s great to see these workshops cropping up. This one, sponsored by Filmwerkstatt Münster, sounds very intensive, a five-day-long seminar with basic filmmaking knowledge recommended for participants.
22 April in Münster
Best of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2014: HEIMATKLÄNGE. The first of three events presented by Filmwerkstatt Münster in the Palace Theatre, each consisting of two, 45-minute screenings on a given theme, compiled and moderated by the ZEBRA program director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel. (The others are on 29 April—see below—and May 6.) The description for the first one reads:
Der deutschsprachige Raum ist bekannt für seine mannigfaltige Dichtkunst. Konkrete, Digitale und Lautpoesie, Naturlyrik oder Lieder beweisen: Die Varianten sind schier unbegrenzt.
23 April – 5 July in Montreal
Carrefour Vidéo-poétique. A very cool-sounding video installation featuring videopoems from Québec and the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival.
The Goethe-Institut and Vidéographe are pleased to collaborate on Carrefour vidéo-poétique, a video installation presented in the windows of the Goethe-Institut from April 23 to July 5, every evening from sunset to midnight.
This presentation of video-poems aims to offer a fresh perspective and a new way of hearing contemporary poetry, in addition to innovating on how it’s disseminated: Video becomes a new means of spreading the word, thereby making poetry accessible to the general public.
24-26 April in Athens
PoetryFilm programme on body and gender identity at sound acts.
sound acts will be the first such event in Greece, introducing the athenian audience to work not frequently seen and hopefully opening a dialogue about gender and identity politics within sound production.
25-26 in Wenlock, UK.
PoetryFilm at the Wenlock Poetry Festival
For the Wenlock Poetry Festival, PoetryFilm is contributing a curated programme of ten short poetry films, which will be played on a loop at The Edge cinema venue. A real festival first!
29 April in Münster
Best of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2014: TANZREIME.
Tanz und Musik schwingen im Dreiklang mit der Lyrik. Moderne Rhythmen interpretieren bekannte Gedichte, ausdrucksstarke Tänze und Performances vermitteln uns die geballte Kraft der Sprache.
UPDATE: Visible Verse will continue after all!
Vancouver’s long-running Visible Verse Festival, which justly described itself as “North America’s sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry and film,” is coming to a close. Festival organizer Heather Haley first mentioned the likelihood of discontinuing it in an update to her personal Facebook page last fall, after the successful completion of the 2014 festival. She’s now made it official with a post to the Visible Verse Facebook group:
It is with great sadness that I must inform you, my fellow videopoem and poetry film aficionados, that the Visible Verse Festival is coming to a close. My circumstances have changed drastically in the past few years and I can no longer afford to donate my time, especially as the work load, along with the festival, continues to grow. I now have a *real job,* rather a crappy job but one has to pay the bills, so neither do I have time to seek funding or find a sponsor. I am very grateful to the Cinematheque’s volunteers and staff, especially Artistic Director Jim Sinclair. We had a great run! I will keep this group page up, please feel free to continue posting and sharing.
Originally known as the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, it had its first run in 1999, found a home at The Cinematheque the following year, and ran every year since, with Haley doing most of the work single-handedly. Historically speaking, along with VideoBardo in Buenos Aires (biannual since 1996), Visible Verse bridged the gap between the Poetry Film Festival/Cin(E)-Poetry Festival in San Francisco—the world’s first poetry film festival, which ran from 1975 to 1998—and ZEBRA, PoetryFilm, TARP, Sadho, and all the other poetry-film festivals and organizations that sprang up in the new millennium. Haley also helped set the tone for many of these later festivals with her eclectic and inclusive approach to programming, representing mainstream, avant-garde, and spoken-word communities in roughly equal measure. She was a major inspiration for Moving Poems, as well. Visible Verse will be missed, but here’s hoping that Haley continues to direct her own poetry films and collaborate with other filmmakers as time permits.
In a Tub
Poem by Amy Hempel
Directed by Ryan MacDonald
In a Tub is simple yet captivating. The poem offers a solution to our fast-paced world. Found footage of a family vacation is interlaced with Ryan MacDonald’s images. What appeals to me is the use of that crackling noise that one hears on an old LP that has been played over and over since childhood. The imagery is old and fragile, which is visually appealing. The footage is compromised, scratchy, damaged and blurry, and the saturation is high. This gives the work an abstract quality that so many other poetry videos miss.
Amy’s reading of the poem is a bit robotic, but I find her pacing a luxury. I am impressed with the fact that she is alone and searches for places where one can be comfortable, even if it’s interrupted by the goings-on of the surroundings. We can still observe our lives as if we were in a film, or in this case a video. And In a Tub is all about observation and its relationship with water and silence, which at times can be very soothing and is probably the most important aspect, hence the title.
The poem was commissioned for the Juniper Literary Festival, 2012.
Hat-tip: “Poem as Screenplay: Six Video Collaborations“
The videopoetry exhibition Text(e) Image Beat, curated by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas, is now showing at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It runs through May 1.
With: Heid E. Erdrich + R. Vincent Moniz, Jr + Jonathan Thunder; Hannah Black; Matt Mullins; Martha Cooley; John D. Scott; Tom Konyves; Swoon (AKA Marc Neys) + Howie Good; Michel Félix Lemieux; Kevin Barrington + Bruce Ryder; Maryse Arseneault; Fernando Lazzari; Matthew Hayes + Sasha Patterson + Lee Rosevere.
[…]
The call for Text(e) / Image / Beat did not specify particular themes. Through the necessity of paring down the choices and assembling a flow of works that complemented and gave space to each other, we became aware of recurrent elements. In spite of the fact that the videos originate from many distinct locations, ideas of awaiting / finding miracles and mysteries of living, are frequent. Each work exhibits innovation and imagination, calling upon a wide range of skills to layer meaning. Slam poetry, rants, softly spoken words, hand written notes, and remixes are all used to articulate.
Click through to read the rest of the detailed and annotated curators’ commentary.
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I discovered this week that videos of presentations from the “Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” conference at FACT in Liverpool have been posted to the web at artplayer.tv. The videos are embeddable, but with code that will probably not show up in feeds or email, so I will just link to the presentations here. Check out presentations by: Suzie Hanna; Zata Kitowski; Marco Bertamini; Deryn Rees-Jones; Jason Nelson; George Szirtes; Judith Palmer; and Roger McKinley (the host). They’re all worth your time, but I found Rees-Jones’ talk to be especially thought-provoking. (See also the earlier report at Moving Poems Magazine: “Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views.”)
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News emerged this week from Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, that Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. Venturebeat reports.
A lot of poetry videos, especially of the more rough-and-ready sort (e.g. self-recorded recitations), are only uploaded to Facebook, so it will be helpful to have the freedom to share them on sites like this one. But Facebook launching a proper video hosting platform isn’t necessarily something I welcome, given the corporation’s poor track record with privacy and its ambition to swallow up the independent web, which Facebook succeeds in reproducing about as well as the Mall of America reproduces an agora.
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More details are emerging about Media Poetry Studio, the multimedia poetry summer camp for girls in Silicon Valley. The website now lists the time and location (July 20-31 at Edwin Markham House in San Jose’s History Park at Kelley Park, home of Poetry Center San Jose). And a March 27 article in the San Jose State University newspaper Spartan Daily interviews camp organizers Erica Goss and David Perez:
In terms of tuition, Goss said the program is “pretty reasonable,” costing $799 for two weeks.
The three poet laureates started planning the camp last spring.
“We had to secure funding, we had to write grants, we had to come up with curriculum—which we’re still working on—we had to find a place to do it and a fiscal sponsor since we’re not a nonprofit,” Goss said. “There’s lots of work and we’ll be doing it right up until the day it starts.”
Goss said they want to be able to give each student individualized attention so there is room for about 20 young women.
The Indiegogo campaign is now 62% funded, with $3,075 raised toward a $5,000 goal.
*
And finally, speaking of Erica Goss, she has an essay in The Pedestal Magazine about her experience at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October.
dollhouse
Poem and film by Shabnam Piryaei
We witness the devastating aftermath of war. I think this subtitle in and of itself is a powerful opening statement for dollhouse and perhaps it should have stopped there.
In all fairness I find the video too long and the poem too short. Somehow it doesn’t match up. The visuals are also quite effective, but knowing a bit of technology, I think it could have been pieced together more effectively. It’s obvious that Piryaei was using green screen, which should have or could have been made to look seamless. The color saturation is high and should have been adjusted. I love the sea of dolls, but again if the poem had been longer, the piece would have had more of an impact. The whole piece should be cut in half. I think we get the point within the first 2 ½ minutes.
I found the cries for Momma a bit melodramatic and again I would have been happier with more words rather than sailing through a poorly shot video.
The Minneapolis-based poetry-film organization Motionpoems, in cooperation with the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, is seeking submissions to a poetry-film installation called Big Bridges.
See your poem turned into a film! Calling all artists, designers, engineers, poets, and the entire community…Join us in a creative dialogue to establish the expectations, possibilities, and aspirations for the future of our Big Bridges over the Mississippi River. America’s bridges are failing. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 25% of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
To inspire future engineers, Motionpoems and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota invite poets to dream big about bridges. We want poems to inspire our nation’s designers, engineers, and architects to reimagine the future of America’s big bridges. You might send us a poem that imagines a physical bridge of the future or one that conceptualizes the idea of bridging in a big way or you might send us a poem that reinterprets bridge-crossing for a new age. Broad interpretations of the theme encouraged. Executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn will judge this poetry contest.
Five winners will:
- receive $1,000
- see their poems turned into short films
- see those films at the Weisman Art Museum
- receive airfare/accommodations to attend the premiere in Minneapolis (date to be announced).
The deadline for submissions is April 30, and only poets resident in the U.S. may enter. Click through and scroll down past the images to read the terms of entry. There will be a second call for entries, this time to U.S. filmmakers, at a yet-to-be-determined date after the five poems have been chosen.
British students between the ages of 14 and 18 are encouraged to “bring a poem to life” by making a poetry film. The contest pitch is aimed at teachers:
Encourage your students to enter our multimedia poetry competition for their chance to win some fantastic prizes.
Engaging students with poetry is often a challenging and difficult area of teaching English. To help you encourage your students to develop an appreciation of poetry, we invite your students (recommended for KS4 and 5) to enter our ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, a multimedia approach to exploring and enjoying poetry.
How to enter
To enter, students must submit a ‘poem film’ with an audio recording of one of the poems below and film their own video clip or clips which will fit the mood, tone and meaning of the poem for a chance of grabbing a great prize.
Submissions can be from an individual student or a group of students (maximum five students per group). Students or teachers can choose from one of four poems from the current AQA Poetry Anthology ‘Moon on the Tides’.
The poems the students can work with include “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “London” by William Blake, “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew, and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. Author Trevor Millum is the judge. The competition is open to all UK students, recommended for KS4 and KS5, and closes on 5th May 2015. Click through for complete rules and guidelines.
The Typemotion exhibition most recently in Liverpool, and before that in Karlsruhe and Vilnius, has now moved to Taiwan. TYPEMOTION: Type as Image in Motion opened today at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and will run through 7 June. As before, the exhibition includes examples of concrete poetry and sound poetry as well as a generous selection of poetry clips. But it sounds as if this incarnation will have a distinctly Taiwanese cast:
The exhibition TYPEMOTION presents 159 outstanding examples of Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films from more than sixteen countries, including twelve works of art by Taiwanese artist, dating from 1897 to the present. The exhibition focuses on artistic films, videos, and new media art works, but also includes feature films, title sequences, commercials, music videos and works from the computer demo scene. It is the very first time to introduce a grand international exhibition which focuese on writing and dynamic images in Taiwan. To highlight the particularity and artistry of Chinese characters and the mature development of new media and filmic art in Taiwan, twelve Taiwanese works are brought into the curitorial context, juxtaposed to reflect the contrasts between Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films in oriental and occidental cultures. This also features the main characteristiscs of TYPEMOTION. Type as Image in Motion exhibition in Taiwan.
The exhibition TYPEMOTION presents over 150 outstanding examples of Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films from more than fifteen countries, dating from 1897 to the present. The exhibition focuses on artistic films, videos, and new media art works, but also includes feature films, title sequences, commercials, music videos and works from the computer demo scene.
We define Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films as analog or digital films or film sequences in which mainly animation, graphic design, or music open up possible uses of type far beyond conventional ways of communicating with type. Referring to those sites and situations where we encounter type in motion, the exhibition examines the multiple possibilities for the presentation, perception and ways of communicating with type.
Democracy
Poem and performance by Leonard Cohen
Directed by Mark Pellington
See also the music video.
I have only known Leonard Cohen as a singer/songwriter. To my surprise I came across his video poem titled Democracy.
Cohen is an outstanding poet and I have been a devoted fan since my adolescence. However I have never seen or heard him just read his poetry, not without musical accompaniment, which was and remains the perfect blend by which Leonard Cohen presents himself. Neither genre supersedes the other. He is indeed an icon and has influenced an entire generation.
Visually, with the exception of the backdrop (flag changing into a bar code at the end), Democracy reminds me of a static poetry reading. Not much movement going on. Perhaps all we need is to watch Cohen stand there, and be the spoken-word artist. He does it very well. There is something to be said for letting purity be the platform and downplaying the drama. The camera plays a significant role in this by switching to close-ups of Cohen, zooming in and out, silhouetting, and coming back in while respecting the graphic element of the piece. This works well, and as we know, his words carry the weight. His voice is juxtaposed, rough but smooth, and he reads with feeling. The bar code provides the perfect ending to this political statement. The background music in my opinion is as important as the visual, which makes them combined vehicles that work well together. I only wish I knew what he is fondling.
This video poem was part of a series called The United States of Poetry, produced by Bob Holman, Josh Blum and directed by Mark Pellington for PBS. Sixty poets were featured, among them, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ruth Forman.
An interesting bit of information that I learned is that former president Jimmy Carter became the first U.S president to write a book of poetry: Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, published by Crown in 1995 and illustrated by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko. (Crown also published Jimmy Stewart and his Poems, which I happen to have illustrated.)
Bob Holman’s website will give you more of an idea of the series.
London’s Usurp Art Gallery is planning a film festival this summer, and the call for entries explicitly mentions poetry films as one of the things they’re interested in. I also like the emphasis on films or videos made with little or no money:
Free submission!
Submission deadline: 20 April 2015
Festival dates: 17 July – 2 August 2015Usurp Zone5 – an eclectic festival curated by the Usurp Art Gallery that will showcase inventive work by low-budget / no budget film and video makers in a gallery setting.
Think – abstract, absurd, activist, animated, asemic, clandestine, collage, conceptual, cut-ups, environment, experimental, glitsch, graffiti, graphic, identity, kinetic, outsider, paracinematic, performance, plunderphonic, poetry, radio, rebellious, scores, sci-art, scratch, silent, sonic, subterranean, subversive, surreal, synesthetic, typographic, video art…This is a UK and International call out so show us what you have!
Usurp Art Gallery develops opportunities for creative and critical voices from the margins – open to experimental ideas in all media. The Usurp Zone5 Film Festival will also launch our Usurp Film Club.
Visit the festival website for submission forms and more.