~ News and Views ~
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.
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’.
