~ News and Views ~
The Confession: poetry and conversation with Yehia Jaber
Lebanese poet Yehia Jaber discusses his beliefs about war and peace, God and poetry, and recites one example of his work in Arabic (with English in subtitles). The British/Iranian filmmaker Roxana Vilk got help from Maryam Ghorbankarimi (editing) and Pete Vilk (music and sound design).
Yehia Jaber is also a visual poet — see Everitte.org for a beautiful and easily comprehensible example of vispo/concrete poetry in Arabic calligraphy.
Road to Damascus: Journey with a Syrian poet
An anonymous Syrian poet muses on real terror versus sleep terrors:
The same man who is trying to shoot me is me. I have no face in the dream, I am the man and me. This horror of the dream stays long.
British filmmaker Roxana Vilk explains:
This film is one of three shorts I made during a week in Beirut in May 2011. The films were commissioned by Reel Festivals and Creative Scotland and the remit was make a series of short films “inspired by” the festival of poets. It was an amazing week, it’s not every day that you get to meet poets from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Scotland.
We were also meant to go to Damascus but as the political situation worsened that leg of the festival was cancelled. However, I still wanted to reflect the current situation in one of the films, so I interviewed one of the Syrian poets about his dreams. That was the starting point for this film.
New list of journals that publish poetry videos
I’ve added a new page here gathering links to journals that publish poetry videos. As it says at the top of the page, it’s a list specifically of places where filmmakers and videopoets can submit unsolicited work: online journals, webpages of print journals and similar venues. I hope to keep this updated with new journals as I become aware of them (and regularly prune out those that stop publication), so please keep me apprised, via comments or email (bontasaurus[at]yahoo[dot]com), of any others I should add.
This joins two other lists of resources on the site, the list of poetry film festivals and web resources for videopoem makers, which includes links to free audio, film footage and the like.
Looming deadlines: litlive.ca videopoetry contest (July 1) and Co-Kisser Poetry Film Festival (July 3)
Don’t miss two great opportunities to showcase videopoetry/filmpoetry, both from the frozen north. The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance, litlive.ca, is paying actual money for three winners of its inaugural videopoetry contest. Entries may originate from any part of the world, but must be received no later than July 1. Meanwhile, the Co-Kisser Poetry-Film Festival is in its second year of hosting
an annual Poetry-Film Festival at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Co-Kisser is a local Minneapolis arts organization, but our festival showcases poetry-films from Minnesota and all over the world. The festival has open submissions and we’re looking for films that are inspired by poetry, based on poetry, and about poetry and poets. Live action, animation, short and feature films share an evening with live poetry readings, Q&A with filmmakers and poets, and live music.
Submissions are due by July 3. Here are the guidelines.
Antwerp poetry festival features videopoems
Last week, the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp, Belgium, organized by Michaël Vandebril, included a feature on videopoetry, with filmmakers Alastair Cook and Swoon Bildos (Marc Neys) as invited participants. It garnered some good press in De Standard newspaper, including a mention of Moving Poems! Marc also sent along this report on the proceeedings. —Dave B.
I didn’t attend the first day. Alastair was just arrived and we were both a bit tired. (Day one was about Belgian Poetry, including a discussion of whether there’s actually such a thing as Belgian poetry, being a bilingual country.) So for starters, here’s a small video-impression I made of the second day of the festival:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duz6WL1DChE
This is an impression of the second evening, the international evening with poets. Jan Lauwereyns is from Belgium, but lives in Japan. He did a poem with a simultaneous Japanese translation and later he also translated a small part of a Ron Silliman poem into ‘Aantwaareps’, our local dialect. Ron Silliman was there, Will Stone, Chus Pato (Spanish), and Emilian Gaaicu-Paun (Romanian), who was translated into Dutch by Jan H. Mysjkin.
Leonard Nolens was also there (and on the video). He’s more or less the greatest living poet in Belgium. You could hear a pin drop during his reading. We also had Ronelda S. Kamfer, but I didn’t get to shoot footage of her — a shame, because she was very good.
Alastair and I had a short talk about videopoetry and showed some of our work. Alastair showed two of his ‘Absent Voices’ project:
and an older one:
I showed:
and
After that, we both showed our commisioned work for a Bernard Dewulf poem (Bernard is ‘City-Poet’ of Antwerp this year), ‘Aan Het Water.’ (See the main site to watch the two films. —Dave)
In the afternoon of that same day, Alastair and I — it was the first time we actually met — had a 90 minute lecture about filmpoems and videopoems. No images from that, but we each showed 10 of our videos and films and talked about our working process and projects. (That’s why there was that interview in the paper, BTW. It’s one of our leading and most respected papers.)
So, there you go: a good festival and a good chance for video- or film-poetry to ‘get out there’.
New deadline for 2012 Visible Verse Festival: August 1
The deadline for Visible Verse Festival 2012 has been changed to Aug. 1. The festival will take place Saturday, Oct. 13 at Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver.
Please help spread the (visible) word!
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL @ Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, Canada
Call for Entries:
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit.
- The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2012
For more information contact Artistic Director Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident” featured as a “last poem I loved” at The Rumpus
The popular arts and culture magazine The Rumpus has a regular feature called “The Last Poem I Loved,” and the April 26 installment, by Dena Rash Guzman, focuses explicitly on the film version of a poem. This is of note not simply because it will be widely read, but because such detailed and highly personal reader/viewer responses to videopoems are far from common.
I didn’t really read the poem. The poem is a movie, too. I heard and saw and loved the poem.
It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. That reads as little bit new age, but I can explain the metaphor no better than Schomburg does in his poem-film. It is his own. It could be a redneck metaphor, or a hippie one, an academic one, or a Freudian one. Sometimes a metaphor is just a cigar.
I mean only to say, I met this poem at a time when it might have saved my life and I have returned to it many times since for CPR.
Filmmaker seeks poet
http://vimeo.com/40802011
I am looking for a writer who is willing to let these three films inspire him/her to write three poems for them…
Look and listen…absorb…look and listen some more…and write…
I’m looking for three new poems (please use the titles of the films) written for these three videos:
Disturbance in the maze
Wailing Wall Crumbs
Ghostless Blues (The story of Vladimir K.)
More info, mail me: swoonbildos@gmail.com
Billy Collins and his animated poems at TED conference
You’ve probably seen these animations before — if not, check out the dedicated site Billy Collins Action Poetry, or watch them (and others) on Moving Poems. What I found interesting here was Collins’ explanation for why he decided to let the animators go ahead and illustrate his poems, since in general he didn’t understand why a poem would need to be animated. His remarks evince little familiarity with the genre, and in questioning why any poem would need to be illustrated in this manner, strangely echo Ron Silliman’s criticism of one of them:
Thus Billy Collins’ The Dead is animated by Juan Delcan, neither poem nor cartoon threatening to break any new ground whatsoever. … [It’s] nothing more than a reading of the piece over which a cartoon has been superimposed.
But he gave in because he says he’s always loved cartoons, and because he figured it would bring his poems to a wider audience.
Call for submissions: 2012 Visible Verse Festival
FYI, notice no more DVDs necessary for previews.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL @ Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, Canada
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2012
For more information contact Artistic Director Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Reposted from the Visible Verse group page on Facebook.
“Poetry & Film” feature at Lyrikline blog
Lyrikline.org, an international audiopoetry site, is celebrating World Poetry Day with a feature on Poetry & Film at their blog. Since their parent organization, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, also sponsors the ZEBRA poetry film festival, they were in a good position to solicit statements from a number of practitioners of the art. Begin with their own statement:
Diverse as the entries might be, there’s one thing that all the good ones have in common: they succeed if one can experience in some way a clever and maybe even poetic relationship and correspondence between the words and images. When poetic principles and features, such as rhythm, tempo, meter, imagery, denseness, and tone unfold, poetry and film together can reach another level and merge into something unique.
Then read the statments by Paul Bogaert, Avi Dabach, Tom Konyves, J.P. Sipilä, and Uljana Wolf.
I particularly liked the statement by Wolf, a German poet and past member of the ZEBRA film jury, for its concision and gnomic quality:
Like a translation, and like poetry itself, or perhaps like prose poetry, or the prose poem—already we see the problem here—a poetry film exists in a between-space, a Zwischenraum. It can not be named. It can only be invented with each attempt; its inability to occupy a name or a space or a genre is what generates these attempts to create something that is true to its name. It will fail every time.
But I think the most interesting thing about the feature is the extent to which these diverse filmmakers agree about what makes a good videopoem or filmpoem. There’s far less disagreement among them than one might have supposed.
