~ News and Views ~
“Another new kind of poem is made”: Michelle Bitting on the making of poem-films
In an interview at Connotation Press, American poet Michelle Bitting, author most recently of Notes to the Beloved, answers a couple of questions about her poem films:
Second, I see that you have created poem-films. Does the strong visual component of films influence your poetry? Is it the other way around (does the visual element of poetry influence your films)? Or is it both? Or that you’re (like me) a very visual person?
I made the poem-films in much the same way I believe I want to make poems. Going intuitively on what I want it to feel and look like and then seeing what actually falls in my path as I go along. So, the illusion of control and then surrender to what’s happening. That’s a truly fun tight-rope to walk. I try to be willing to fall, meaning fail, and I do, a lot. Sometimes the chemistry just ain’t happening and sometimes it’s an alchemical triumph. To me, the films are poems made out of images and sound. Then, informed by the text, another new kind of poem is made. When it’s working right, it’s all poetry.
On the subject of poem-films, how do you approach and understand them? Do you have expectations for them?
I’m pretty much called to create a visual text for a particular poem and then I just start to see it and keep following the thread that spins out of whatever I’ve begun. I let what naturally falls into my lap (or lens) enter into the conversation. For instance, in the film I did for my poem “In Praise of my Brother, the Painter”, at one point, I took photos and filmed bits of an exhibit on Houdini that was showing in my city (Los Angeles) at the time. Later I wanted a particular person to be in the film as a kind of muse-slash-nod to Houdini. Eventually, I realized I was supposed to wear the top hat and so the configuration of Brother, Houdini, Me and the final images led me to a new understanding of what the piece was trying to tell me, or I was trying to tell myself, in the first place. I could never arrive at that stage of revelation without just simply putting one creative step in front of another into the unknown.
Read the rest of the interview (and scroll down to read the poems). (h/t: R.W. Perkins)
Moving Poems adds a Twitter feed
You can now follow Moving Poems on Twitter: @moving_poems. Though I continue to favor RSS feed readers myself, I have to admit that the Twitter feed proved its utility this week when Vimeo went down for several hours at midday on Wednesday — exactly the sort of thing worth mentioning on Twitter, where savvier web users tend to look for updates about site performance.
Cliché and meaning in videopoetry
I don’t share videopoems of my own work on Moving Poems; that’s confined to my literary blog Via Negativa, where earlier this week I got a little carried away with introducing a new video. In fact, I’d been meaning to say something about common videopoetry images and strategies, and it occurred to me that the popularity of at least a couple of them — moving landscapes from a train or car window and P.O.V. shots of walking feet — may suggest that something deeper is going on:
Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem.
Date set for The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival
As just announced on their Facebook page,
The date is finally set. On Saturday May 4th 2013 at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins CO. The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival will come alive! So now you can tell everyone you know, to tell everyone they know about the what, where and when. Also, don’t forget we are still open for submissions.
Videopoetry classification: a Russian system
A Russian videopoetry classification scheme shows some interesting parallels with British and North American thinking about the hybrid genre, which — I’m guessing from the name of the site — is called Videopojezija (Видеопоэзия) in Russian. Since the site includes foreign as well as Russian videos, I assume their classification is meant to be universal, and as the closing note indicates, they welcome criticism and suggestions.
Here’s a Google translation of the page, amended to reflect the word choices in a summary at the Text in Art blog (which is how I learned about it). I’ve done my best to render Google’s amazingly good machine translation into something resembling idiomatic English, but this has invariably involved some guess-work since I don’t know any Russian. I invite Russian speakers to suggest corrections and improvements, and I’ll amend the post accordingly.
Classification
Depending on the purpose, videopoetry can be categorized in various ways: by content, by technical devices employed, on a territorial or chronological basis … Plus one can also add all the known classifications for each of the included arts and combinations of these. But in the synthesis of two arts there is at least one base, which describes the nature of communication of one art with another. Let’s try to identify this classification, and since it seems most interesting to the authors of this resource, it will form the basis for the structure of the site.
Note that in any art it is very difficult to strictly classify anything — there are too many variations, and our case is no exception, so any one videopoetic film or video can be assigned to multiple categories simultaneously.
So, in our view, taking the nature of the poetic text and the visual aspects into account, videopoetry should be divided into:
- documentary (dokumentalnaja)
The reader is at the center in this videopoetry type. It can move in a certain space, its image can be combined with other visual images or alternate them, but most importantly: reading is the main object of the image. It is very difficult to distinguish this case from a simple video-recording of poetry recitation. Usually videopoetic clips contain additional meanings introduced into the text by the video. Whereas simple video carries no additional imagery.
We think that such works can be called documentary because they contain a particular record, a real-life act of reading the poem.- textual (tekstograficheskaja)
In the center of the clip: the image of the written text. It can be superimposed on a shaped video sequence, can pass in a running line or move, as titles. May be reproduced in sign language or even as a physical object is made of a material and filmed. In this video a written text is always present in the frame. A feature of this species is that it can be free of audio or only contain music, without sounding text.
- illustrative (illjustrativnaja)
In these videos, visuals are almost a verbatim repetition of all the images of the poem. These clips are called “akin” (?) because they are made on a “what I see, I sing” basis. Technically, this method is embodied in different ways: through drawings or photos illustrating every word in a poem, or by picture-stories very similar to the plot of the work.
- conceptual (konceptualnaja)
Here the storyline visuals are associated with a poem on the level of ideas, while making it more meaningful. In the video and in the text of such a project, the different images used relate on an associative level. The video may contain a completely different reality than the ones described in the verse, but they look like an organic whole, complement each other, creating a new one.
- story/plot (sjuzhetnaja)
In this film, the poem itself is pushed to the background, giving way to a video scene. The sound of the text in this video may take even less than 50% of the duration. Usually, this is more like a video/short film containing poetic inserts.
- musical (muzykalnaja)
The focus of the film isn’t the poem, but the music to which it is put. Visuals are rhythmically linked to a greater extent with the music, part of what’s lost without words (?). These are close to music videos.
- visual (vizualnaja)
This is a special genre of videopoetic movies from which a poetic text is absent. Poetic quality in such videos is achieved by other means. Rhythm is present directly in the video.
This classification is not definitive. Constructive criticism and additions are welcome.
When using this classification, please refer to us.
Close readings/viewings at The Third Form
This month’s “Third Form” column by Erica Goss features close readings of three videopoems: Profile by R.W. Perkins, The City by Marie Silkeberg and Ghayath Almadhoun, and I-poem 6 by Pablo Lopez Jordan. A couple of snippets:
Jordan is a filmmaker, not a poet, but he states that “to use a poem as a script for a video is a great exercise of liberation. When you work with a poem, the structure is more open and increases the chances of experimentation.”
[…]
“I wanted to show little things from ordinary life; words make those insignificant things grow in importance,” Jordan said. The poem appears as text on fragments of torn paper at the bottom of the screen, where it becomes part of the visual collage of shadows, graffiti, trees and sky. Jordan writes that he stayed away from high definition for this video, preferring what he calls a “domestic camera.” This gives the video a handmade look, like that of a very well-done home movie. This was to honor the poem, which Jordan describes as “very emotional, bright and totally real.”
Event review of Alastair Cook’s “Absent Voices”
Writing for the Scottish Review of Books, Theresa Muñoz reviews a live screening and performance of Alastair Cook‘s “Absent Voices” series of filmpoems. Since I’ve never personally seen a filmpoem screening done in what might be called a karaoke-like fashion, with the poet present to read the text while live musicians performed the soundtrack, I was especially interested in hearing how well these videos worked in that context.
When folk read poems, images sparked from the narrative float through their minds. Alastair Cook’s own brand of Filmpoems, whereby the poet reads his work against a running 8mm or 16mm short film, provides the audience with a firm set of visuals. It’s an intriguing art form which both expands and contracts the poem’s possibilities, as the audience tries to thematically integrate the text with the established visuals of the film (and soundtrack). The majority of Cook’s Filmpoems are lush, evocative and dark creations filmed in the derelict sugar shacks on the James Watt Dock in Greenock.
Set in the Scottish Poetry Library’s cosy downstairs area, the setting was that of a makeshift cinema. A white screen hung from the high wall. A golden clarsach, later trilled by Rita Bradd, stood in the corner. Musician Luca Nasciuti was on hand to provide a haunting soundtrack. Cook began by describing how the batch of film poems came about. Commissioned by the arts collective Absent Voices, Cook asked seven poets to contribute a work: Gerard Rudolf, Jane McKie, Brian Johnstone, John Glenday, JL Williams and Sheree Mack. The poets were each given archived pictures of the sugar industry and watched a short film about the dilapidated buildings.
New at Moving Poems: a mobile-ready theme and a links page
This week, the main site of Moving Poems got a facelift. Videos now fill almost the entire width of the page, and will automatically resize, along with the rest of the site, to fit any screen. Check it out and tell me what you think!
A fresh look often prompts fresh ideas. This week I also decided it was high time to add a links page to the main site. That way I could not only include more links than what I can fit into the footer, but I can also make the footer links section more useful by restricting it to a handful of top sites (and linking to the full list). The links page is still nowhere near exhaustive; too lengthy a list can overwhelm visitors and thereby defeat its purpose. But I welcome suggestions for additional links I should include. For example, I’m thinking there have to be a few more poetry presses with video divisions…
The nitty-gritty
For fellow web publishers and others who may be interested, here’s a more detailed account of what changed and why. The device-responsive video resizing is thanks to a jQuery plugin known as FitVids, which is bundled into the new WordPress theme: Origami Premium from SiteOrigin. I’d been putting off the change to a more modern theme because I liked the look of the old one a lot, but the upgrade to WordPress 3.5 forced my hand — it no longer made sense to keep trying to re-write the code of an aging theme to keep up with changes.
This is the third major redesign of the site. When I started Moving Poems nearly four years ago, few videos looked good at much beyond 600 pixels wide, and it made sense to devote the remaining screen real estate to a sidebar. Now, even most non-HD videos, whether uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo, look decent at full-screen size on a desktop monitor, so why shouldn’t a site devoted to video appreciation take full advantage of that? The smartphone and tablet revolution worried me for a while, especially after Apple decided to stop supporting Flash, but the major video hosting platforms have found work-arounds for that. I’m told that the small viewing area on most mobile devices is compensated for by an ever-increasing sharpness of the display. In any case, the fact is that more and more people are interacting with the web primarily through their phones and tablets, even sometimes watching full-length movies on them. So whether we like it or not, this is the new media landscape that web publishers have to adapt to.
Call for submissions: apocalyptic-themed poetry videos
InDigest magazine is asking for video submissions from poets and storytellers for an end-of-the-world YouTube compendium to be issued next Friday, December 21. Although the submission guidelines state that the video “can just be you reading a poem,” they add: “the submissions must have great writing or be an exceptional video.” Editor Dustin Luke Nelson said in a contact message to Moving Poems, “I’m not asking all poets and writers to create short films, but I hope to get a few that are a little more in line with what you curate here as opposed to just people reading into a camera, but either way I thought this might be of interest to you or your readers.”
Be advised, however, that previously web-published videos are not eligible, so if you’re interested, you’d better get busy. The end of the world is less than a week away!
Call for submissions: The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival
Professional filmmaker and poet R.W. Perkins (whose award-winning videopoems may be viewed on Moving Poems) has announced the formation of a new poetry film festival in his hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado.
The Body Electric is set to be Colorado’s first ever poetry film festival. To be held at The Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, the festival will be directed and curated by poet/filmmaker R.W. Perkins.
At The Body Electric 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.
The festival opening day has yet to be determined, likely in late April or early May, but submissions are now open to all. Please check back with us soon for an updated schedule.
Visit the website for submission guidelines. There’s also a Facebook page and Twitter feed. According to the latter, submissions are already flowing in.
Call for submissions: 4th DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival
2013 will be the fourth year for Italy’s DOCtorCLIP international poetry film festival, held in Rome each fall. Submissions are now open for “films of no longer than 10 minutes relating to an edited poem, aesthetically or in their form or content and produced after January 2010.” Visit the website to download an application form.
New paper/videopoem on “Videopoetry: The Hegemony of Image or Text,” by Alison Watkins
Via a link from Tom Konyves on Facebook, I was delighted to discover this presentation, which takes the form of something quite like a videopoem (rather than using the dreaded Powerpoint). It includes one of the most thorough responses to Konyves’ Videopoetry: A Manifesto that I’ve seen. While Alison Watkins acknowledges the effectiveness of poetic juxtaposition between textual and filmic images, she also argues that it isn’t always sufficient or even appropriate; sometimes a more literal match might well better serve the viewer.
Diversity of viewpoint is of course essential if this nascent field of what might be called videopoetry studies is to really get off the ground. Watkins made the presentation for NYSVA Annual Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, 2012. Her description on YouTube frames it as follows:
This video takes a look at what’s become of word and text in a visual world. The power of image, in particular moving images, in collaboration with words has unleashed an avalanche of new media artists, and videopoets who have let loose a jumble of poetic text, sound and images on our omnipresent computer screens. Have words and text been turned into mere accessories?
