~ News and Views ~
The 2014 Body Electric Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions
The Body Electric has just announced through its Facebook page that the 2014 festival, on April 26 in Fort Collins, Colorado, is now open for submissions. The rules and submission process are exceptionally simple, and last year’s festival was evidently a resounding success, so there’s really no reason not to submit. The deadline is February 16.
New essays on videopoetry at Awkword Paper Cut and Connotation Press
Just a reminder to check out the new posts from Marc Neys and Erica Goss in their respective monthly videopoetry columns at Awkword Paper Cut and Connotation Press. Most of the films shared in the columns have yet to appear at Moving Poems, so that’s an additional bonus for me as well as for readers. In “Swoon’s View” this month, Marc looks at two cinematic-style videopoems from the Bokeh Yeah! collective in Manchester, made in association with Comma Press, by Adele Myers, Ra Page, and James Starkey. November’s installment of The Third Form with Erica Goss focuses on the poetry filmmaking of Michael Dickes, who is, among other things, the editor of Awkword Paper Cut.
Swoon on leading a videopoetry workshop in Vilnius
Belgian filmmaker and musician Swoon (Marc Neys) gave a two-day videopoetry workshop as part of the TARP festival of audiovisual and experimental poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania earlier this month. His blog post about the experience should be of interest to videopoets and poetry teachers alike.
The participants get to experience the importance of timing, the power of coincidence, and, hopefully, the fun of playing with words and images. After that two groups were formed (making sure each group had someone familiar with film and/or video and someone willing to write) to work on a project of their own. Both groups took the results of the writing experiment as a starting point; One group used footage shot by one of the participants and combined two ‘poems’ of the experiment. In doing so creating two streams of thoughts played out against two streams of images. The other group wrote a new poem (using the same basic idea) and added self filmed footage and filmed some new material the day before the second part of the workshop.
The second evening we recorded the poems. Each group explained and showed their work in progress. Giving me a change to suggest, answer questions and help out where needed.
The Poetry Storehouse aims to connect poets with artists and filmmakers
Just a few weeks old, The Poetry Storehouse, poetrystorehouse.com, is already beginning to live up to its slogan, “great contemporary poems for creative remix.” Everything in the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and there are also links to off-site collections of work with remix-friendly CC licenses of one variety or another. The site’s editors, led by Nic S., are actively soliciting for submissions of poetry in English, and new material will be added on a weekly basis. The editors tag and categorize the poetry on the site fairly exhaustively in order to maximize its findability.
The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of freely-available high-quality contemporary page-poetry for those multimedia collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by copyright and other restrictions. Our main mission is to collect and showcase poem texts and, in some instances, audio recordings of those texts. It is our hope that those texts will serve as inspiration or raw material for other artistic creations in different media.
I’m one of the site’s advisors, along with Marc Neys. My primary agenda is probably pretty obvious: generate more videopoems/filmpoems to share on Moving Poems! But more than that, I strongly believe that poets should be more open to artistic collaboration, and stop viewing a printed book as the ultimate destination for their work. And I think any filmmaker looking for a great short subject should consider bringing a poem to the big or small screen.
I’ve added The Poetry Storehouse to our page of web resources for videopoetry makers in the “Free and Creative Commons-licensed texts and audiopoetry” section. (And while I was updating the page, I also added a new section with links to free online filmmaking tutorials, to make it even easier for poets who want to have a go at envideoing their own or others’ works. Thanks to beginning poetry filmmaker Graham Barnes for the suggestion.)
Live poetry readings on the web: the Transatlantic Poetry Community
The Transatlantic Poetry Community on Google+ is doing something which, as far as I know, has never been done before on such a large scale (and with such major poets): delivering regular, live readings of poetry over the web. It uses “Hangouts on Air,” which are basically souped-up Google Hangouts saved instantly to YouTube, where past readings are archived. Each show so far has paired a poet from the U.S. with a poet from the U.K., each reading for 20 minutes to half an hour, followed by a joint Q&A in response to questions submitted on the Google page or on Facebook. Here are Michelle Bitting and Andrew Phillip; Jane Hirshfield and George Szirtes; and Marvin Bell and Esther Morgan.
The next reading is on Sunday, October 13, and features a half-dozen British poets: Katy Evans-Bush, Isabel Galleymore, Chris McCabe, Andrew Philip again, Paul Stephenson, and Claire Trévien. It’s part one of a two-part series in cooperation with Silk Road Review, which will conclude on Saturday, October 19.
I commend the organizer, Robert Peake, for what must be a tremendous amount of work, drawing on his expertise as a tech consultant as well as an American expatriate poet living outside of London. A page on his website is actually the best, most uncluttered place to bookmark for news and videos of the readings. It includes a stats counter for total views on the videos: 887 views in 43 countries as of October 4. His latest post on that page is a manifesto which outlines an ambitious program for expansion and partnering.
One does of course need a fairly good broadband connection to watch the readings live; I haven’t been able to watch it here in rural Pennsylvania, though I did enjoy the first two shows this summer when I was in London. Peake is a very good live host, and I’ve also been impressed by how politely but firmly he’s dealt with the narcissists on the Google community page who only want to post their own (inevitably terrible) poems. The show has had a few technical difficulties: an abrupt cut-off a few minutes from the end of the first show, and a muffled reading from Marvin Bell which required a make-up (non-live) reading video. Obviously for Hangouts on Air to work, care needs to be taken that participants have good cameras and microphones. But beyond the technical limitations are the inherent problems of reading poetry to an unseen, unheard audience. When I met Andrew Philip at the Filmpoem Festival in early August, I asked him how he’d handled that. He said something like, “It was strange at first, but I got used to it after a while.” I find I don’t enjoy the readings as much as I enjoy videos of readings before live audiences because I miss that feedback from the audience. Perhaps as the audience for Transatlantic Poetry builds, live reactions via Google, Facebook and Twitter can be given more prominence — integrated into a combined stream, perhaps, right beside or beneath the embedded video on Peake’s website? Barring that, I guess I’d prefer shorter readings and more time devoted to conversation between the poets and with the host. Another thing that seems slightly odd to me is the lack of any mention of Canada so far.
But enough of my obnoxious criticisms! Join the community and spread the word. I’ll conclude with a quote from the end of Peake’s manifesto:
What Transatlantic Poetry on Air ultimately represents is something greater than the sum of its parts. It is a manifestation of the growing trend of communication technology breaking down geographic barriers for poets and poetry-lovers to connect. Furthermore, the approach is economical, environmentally friendly, and accessible for those with restricted mobility.
In addition to the technological paradigm shift, enabling us to engage poets and their audiences in new ways, there is great interest overall for poets and poetry-lovers to connect globally. Poets on one side of the Atlantic recognise that they have much to gain from exposure to their counterparts across the sea. Transatlantic Poetry on Air therefore lies at the intersection between what poets and poetry-lovers increasingly want, and what is increasingly possible.
Transatlantic Poetry on Air aims to produce enjoyable, high-quality experiences throughout the lifecycle of each event for everyone involved. It aims also to be guided by its stated purpose and principles to evolve and expand over time, making it a fulcrum for the upliftment of global poetry in the twenty-first century.
Why bad poetry videos suck
https://vimeo.com/74755473
Watch on Vimeo
The fact that I love the Wendell Berry poem makes this unimaginative video all the more painful to watch. It adds nothing to my understanding of the poem, and instead works to reduce it to a few, too-pretty images. And since it will be seen by tens of thousands on PBS, it sets a very bad example. YouTube is already infested with home-made versions of this poetry video, I guess because too many poetry fans would rather put poems on a pedestal and worship them as idols than take the risk of engaging them in dialogue. Add in the redundant images of the poem’s text while the poet reads it to us, and the over-all effect is of a poetry video that talks down to its audience. In a misguided effort to make poetry accessible, it has pretty much destroyed the poem.
(Please note, however, that the Bill Moyers interview, taped to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the publication of Berry’s landmark collection of essays The Unsettling of America, and due to be broadcast beginning October 4, sounds very worthwhile indeed. All the more irritating, then, that they would promote it with such a lousy poetry video.)
Some thoughts on collage videopoetry
Over at Via Negativa, I shared a new videopoem I made on a whim last night. This morning I added some process notes, which led to a few further reflections of possible interest to writers and poetry teachers looking for an easy way to get into videopoeming. First, the video:
I made this videopoem entirely out of found text and footage from American television commercials of the late 1940s and early 50s. I’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of collage in videopoetry ever since I saw what Matt Mullins did with a sermon by Oral Roberts in Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer). This doesn’t rise quite to that level, either technically or conceptually, but it was a fun experiment. Thanks to the Prelinger Archives for the material, all in the public domain.
Process notes: I’ve been downloading compilations of old television commercials for possible use in videos for poems from the new chapbook. While making poetry videos for pre-existing texts is fun, it’s easy to get sidetracked by a wealth of good material, and yesterday I decided to give in to the temptation. I went through one of the compilations, writing down all the good lines in a text document, in order as they appeared so I could re-find them easily. Then I wrote a rough draft with some of the most interesting lines, loaded the source material into Windows Movie Maker and began to cut and paste the snippets containing the lines I’d liked into the order I’d put them in the written draft. Once I had fully assembled the first rough draft of a videopoem, however, I found the words went by rather too quickly. I had the idea of using wordless or nearly wordless segments from a single ad both to give space to the lines of found poetry and to act as a sort of refrain.
At this stage, the working title was “Industry at Work” (taken from a clip that I subsequently removed). However, after a couple of hours of trimming and moving things around, it became clear that the refrain segments just weren’t gelling, and the video overall seemed too scattered and miscellaneous. I began looking at another compilation, and the very first ad in it — a commercial for Budweiser — had lots of wordless footage that I liked. It was only after pasting some of those segments into the draft project that I got the idea of using the first half of Budweiser’s then-slogan, “Where there’s life, there’s Bud,” as title and refrain.
I go into all this (hopefully not too boring) detail simply to show that the process of composition doesn’t differ all that wildly from the way regular poems are made. If I were teaching poetry, this is the sort of thing I’d make beginning students do. Of all the possible approaches to videopoetry, found-poem collage with public-domain (or otherwise free-to-use) footage has the lowest barrier to entry. All you really need is a computer with a DSL or faster connection and whatever video editing software the operating system came with. Moreover, this way of making videopoems comes much closer than the typical poetry video to Tom Konyves’ conception of videopoety as
the Duchampian “assisted readymade”. Consider the recorded image as the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover whether there exists something significant, yet still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface of the present moment.
New developments at Motionpoems
Some exciting news from our friends at Motionpoems, the Minneapolis-based arts organization responsible for a raft of well-made poetry films (especially animations) over the last few years.
Motionpoems will partner with Minneapolis-based Egg Creative as its production management team, and has engaged Jennifer David (formerly Executive Producer of Fallon Worldwide) to produce the coming season of 12 poetry films.
Egg Creative will provide production management assistance, and its music and sound division, Egg Music, will provide Motionpoems’ film projects with original scores, music supervision, audio production and finishing. Executive Producer Eric Fawcett says, “I’m inspired by how much raw talent exists in the ad industry, and we’re eager to connect those talents to Motionpoems’ film projects.”
Replacing Motionpoems co-founding producer Angella Kassube (who takes a seat on the board), freelancer Jennifer David brings 15 years of experience in agency work, including stints at Martin Williams and Carmichael Lynch before a 9-year run at Fallon serving as EP on Cadillac and Chrysler, and as Producer on accounts like Virgin Mobile, Travelers Insurance and Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. Her 5+ years on the board of the Weisman Art Museum acquaint her with the nonprofit arts sector.
Motionpoems’ annual season consists of 12 short films per year, adapted from poems cultivated in partnership with some of America’s most important poetry publishers. In recent years, Motionpoems has partnered with Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf Press, and Scribner’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. All will contribute poetry again this year, along with newcomers American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, FSG, Wave Books and others to be announced. Motionpoems has produced 40+ films over the past four years, working with Pulitzer Prize winners and early-career poets alike.
Read the rest. It’s good to see poetry videos continuing to gain mainstream acceptance in the American poetry establishment.
How to replace a video at Vimeo without changing the link
In the past two days, two different filmmakers have contacted me to let me know that they’ve changed the Vimeo links for their films in the Moving Poems archive. On the one hand, I’m grateful to them for letting me know. I do sometimes comb the archives here for dead links, but not nearly often enough, and I appreciate hearing from users of the site when a video has disappeared. On the other hand, they wouldn’t have needed to switch URLs just to replace the video with a new version; they could’ve simply swapped in a new file. This is actually one of Vimeo’s most under-appreciated killer features, in my opinion. (And the fact that you can’t do this at YouTube is a good reason not to use it.) From the FAQs:
Can I replace a video and keep the URL, Stats, comments, etc?
You sure can!
From your video page, click Settings below the video player. From there, head to the Video File tab and click “Replace this video.” This allows you to upload a new video file while keeping the video URL, comments, Stats, likes, tags, and all the other information associated with the video.
During the replacement process, the original video will remain viewable while the new one is uploaded. Once the replacement video finishes uploading and begins conversion, the original video will no longer be viewable, and will soon be replaced.
So there will be just a short time during which the video isn’t viewable (a few minutes if you have a Plus or Pro account, longer if you have a free account and are uploading during a busy time of the day).
