~ News and Views ~
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?
Visible Verse Festival organizer posts detailed “post-mortem”
Heather Haley, indefatigable organizer of Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival, has just blogged a detailed account of this year’s festival, complete with descriptions of, and links to, each poetry film in the lineup.
“The best year yet!” is what I was told repeatedly. Good turnout, a bit of press coverage, and wonderful new staff to work with, the festival is definitely entering a new phase. Changing the date from November to October, immediately following the Vancouver International Film Festival helped raise our profile, and get more bums in the seats.
Moving Poems co-sponsors Greece’s first International Poetry Film Festival
Moving Poems is proud to be a co-sponsor, with +the Institute [for Experimental Arts], of Greece’s first International Poetry Film Festival, to be held this Saturday, November 10. It’s part of a larger event, EROS or NOTHINGNESS! International Solidarity Night for the 15 Antifascist Arrested Demonstrators // EΡΩΤΑΣ ή ΤΙΠΟΤΑ: 10/11/2012 ΜΗΧΑΝΟΥΡΓΙΟ ΠΟΛΥΤΕΧΝΕΙΟ: ΔΙΕΘΝΗΣ ΒΡΑΔΥΑ ΑΛΛΗΛΕΓΓΥΗΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΟΥΣ 15 ΣΥΛΛΗΦΘΕΝΤΕΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΝΤΙΦΑΣΙΣΤΙΚΗΣ ΜΟΤΟΠΟΡΕΙΑΣ, organized by the Void Network.
Sat. 10 / 11 / 2012
in Athens Polytechnic School
starts at 21.00
with participations from artists (poets, directors, video artists) from Europe, Asia, Africa and Americas. The show will create a historical line from 1830 to 2012 based on counter-culture poets.Will be presented Audio visual archives from William Blake , Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouak, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Κaterina Gogou, Κostas Kariotakis, J.Hope Stein, Martha McCollough, Ye Mimmi, Valerie LeBlack, Shabnam Piryaei, Dave Bonta, Alper Yildirim, Swoon, R.W. Perkins, blocsdelletres, immprint ltd and young poets from many different countries. The first International Film Poetry Festival will be hosted at the EROS or NOTHINGNESS Audio Visual Poetry Live Concert organized by Void Network and is dedicated to the international solidarity movement for the 15 arrested Greek Antifascist demonstrators of 30/9/2012. More than 4000 people expected to attend the festival.
Click through for the full program (which includes links to all the films for those unable to attend).
I’m pleased that my efforts to curate and index videopoetry from around the world at Moving Poems have helped the organizers of this festival. Here’s the poster they made [PDF] to advertise the event.
New reviews of recent poetry film festivals
Shannon Raye at reviewVancouver shared some impressions of the Visible Verse Festival of Video Poetry, which was held on October 13 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I have attended the last five years of the video poem festival, and this was my favorite year because of the diversity and quality of the work presented. Curator Heather Haley did a remarkable job bringing a full roster of culturally and artistically diverse video poems to the festival, which made for a fun and eclectic evening. Videos ranged from quirky anime and sci-fi fantasy to beautifully filmed short films with a narrative structure. I enjoyed the way the 38 video poems were presented, with funnier work following sentimental pieces, and experimental images following work that had more of a short-film feel.
One of the highlights for me was the number of international video poems. This year had a very global feel, with many European countries represented. In addition, there was a sizable selection of video poems exchanged from Argentina’s Video Bardo Festival.
Erica Goss travelled to Berlin for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival held October 18-21, and this month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press offers the first of a two-part review of the event.
Watching poetry films as part of an audience is a new experience for me. Before the festival, I had only watched them at home on my computer, and usually alone. Sitting with other people in a dark theater while a series of intense, image-rich films rolled by on the big screen allowed me to examine them critically; for every film, I asked myself these questions: was it interesting? Did it create an alternative world? Was there a social, cultural, emotional, or intellectual message? Did the video enhance or detract from the poem? Was I startled, amazed, frightened or bored?
Swoon interview and the upcoming ZEBRA festival
Erica Goss’ Third Form column for October features an interview with the amazing Marc Neys (a.k.a. Swoon) and a look ahead to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival this month in Berlin.
I enjoyed getting a bit more of Marc’s backstory than I knew before:
Although his work has the look of a seasoned professional, Swoon started making his distinctive videos only two years ago. “I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid,” he told me when we talked in August. “When I was fourteen, I told myself I would make a film someday. I watch movies with an eye to the way they’re made. It drives my wife crazy, but I’m always pointing things out to her when we watch films together, especially if the film isn’t very good.” Swoon’s experience – from running “the smallest theater company in Belgium” – just he and his wife – to playing in a band and singing in English when he was sixteen – come together in his poetry videos.
His remarks on craft and technique were also interesting:
Craft is very important in Swoon’s work. “I spend a lot of time looking at footage, but I have an eye for what I want. A bad film can make a great video poem – it’s in the editing.”
He’s made most of his videos with “a cheap DV camera and some cheap German editing software. I need to upgrade my equipment, but I’m worried that better equipment will make me lazy. With my old equipment, I’m forced to be a better filmmaker. I want people to be impressed with my eye, not the camera’s.”
As far as what the video shows, Swoon advises, “Videos should not just show what’s going on in the poem – as in, the poem mentions a leaf falling and sure enough, you see a leaf falling. I want something that takes more imagination.”
Be sure to read the whole thing and watch the embedded videos.
Moving Poems and Motionpoems profiled in Connotation Press
I was pleased and honored to have been interviewed by Erica Goss for her second column on videopoetry at Connotation Press, along with poet Todd Boss, the founder of Motionpoems. Todd and I do have some differences in perspective, but Erica highlights our areas of agreement — especially our interest in widening the audience for poetry.
It’s always useful to see one’s work through another’s eyes. What struck me in Erica’s description of Moving Poems was her quite reasonable analogy between author-made videopoetry and self-publshing, which had for some reason never occurred to me before.
Since the site focuses on poets and poetry, the videos Dave shows must include the poem’s text, whether spoken or as a visual element. This is a site for DIY, creative types, and therefore Dave features many poet-made videos. (Poets are well-known for self-publishing; Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense, and gave away more copies than he sold.)
I guess I am so focused on the creative side of things, and so accustomed to looking at the web through a blogger’s eyes, that the act of uploading to Vimeo and YouTube just seems like a natural and necessary final step of making a video these days. I am of course aware that some poet-filmmakers market their work on DVDs, and so don’t upload more than a sample to video-sharing sites, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
But this has me thinking, because I’ve always considered author-made videopoems the ideal to strive for, and I most admire those poets who have taught themselves filmmaking in a serious way (or were smart enough to take film in college). Is it possible that in a literary culture in which self-publication is significantly less prestigious than publication by others, that the poet-filmmakers I so admire are at a disadvantage?
Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival goes global!
Reposted from the Visible Verse Facebook page
We have lots of exciting changes in store for this year’s Visible Verse Festival! The date has been moved from November to Saturday, October 13, directly following the Vancouver International Film Festival and the program, still in the works, will include entries from 56 international artists and 100 videopoems from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Russia, the U.S. and Canada. And for the first time, we are exchanging videopoems with Argentina’s VideoBardo Festival and featuring a selection from their 2012 program. As well, we are happy to host Alberta artist Phillip Jagger who will perform his poetry and present “Reigning In Chaos: Words Into Video”, a hands-on workshop demonstrating the use of handcrafted video, a Kaos pad, iPod and video jamming software.
With videopoetry and poetry film festivals and sites popping up all over the world, Vancouver and Pacific Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival maintains its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant videopoetry. As founder of the Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, curator and host Heather Haley has provided a venue for the genre since 1999 and vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Haley is to be honored for her work with a Pandora Literary Award and has been invited to present a keynote address at the 4th VideoBardo Festival/Conference in Buenos Aires in November on the theme of “Videopoetry; New Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Practice.”
New column on videopoetry/filmpoetry at Connotation Press seeks submissions
The innovative online magazine Connotation Press has just launched a new column dedicated to videopoetry and related forms called The Third Form. It’s authored by San Francisco Bay-area poet Erica Goss, who writes:
My intent with this column is to open up a conversation about video poems. Every month I will feature a selection, so if you make video poems, please send me your work. We’ll post several submissions here. I will explore other topics such as the origins of video poems, their significance as an art form, screenings at festivals, and in-depth interviews. I’m also interested in the technical aspects of making video poems, so feel free to send me any craft tips you’ve picked up, whether they deal with cameras, software, royalty-free film footage, or sound.
Goss devotes the rest of her inaugural column to a brief survey of the field, sharing a few films and videos that illustrate the diverse range of approaches one encounters on the web these days, and I was pleased to see some of my favorites among those she cites. I like her conclusion:
In 1969, William Carlos Williams wrote that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words” and “as in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.” A video poem is also a machine, small or large, and capable of transporting the viewer to a new place of understanding.
I’ve updated the list of Journals that publish poetry videos to include The Third Form.
