~ News and Views ~
What comes first, the video or the poem?
…The videopoet’s version of the chicken-and-egg question. I was discussing this with my fellow amateur videopoet Brenda Clews over at a new online community site called Writing Our Way Home, where Brenda set up a videopoetry group, and I thought I’d pose the question here, too. Brenda wrote:
Do you plan out beforehand what you might create a videopoem out of, and then go looking for footage? Or do you take what you find and make something out of it?
I am fully in the latter camp, working with ‘found’ images, sort of ‘oh that looks good, can I videotape it, & then what can I do with this footage?’ though think to try to storyboard a little might be good just to see what that might produce.
My reply is a bit long-winded, but I guess it boils down to “sort of”:
I rarely plan anything in advance, and when I do, it doesn’t tend to work. For example, for that Egyptian poem, I thought it might be cool to start with some footage of the front of my woodburner, which has an isinglass window with bars on it — I thought the image of flames dancing behind steel bars would be interesting and suggestive. It wasn’t. Instead, I decided to make my first documentary-style videopoem, without hopefully getting unbearably literal: for example, when the poem says, “From Tunisia, to Egypt, to Lebanon and Yemen,” it would’ve been cheesy to flash shots of each of those countries — but I still had to do something to suggest movement. And I was pleased when, during my playing around with juxtapositions, images of police soaking a crowd with a water cannon coincided with the line about people becoming as combustible as dry wood.
But that was a rare-for-me example of a videopoem done on assignment. Usually I am working with my own footage in an ekphrastic manner: watching the raw footage prompts a poem — maybe right then, maybe a week later. When I’m satisfied with the text, I record and edit the audio. Then I start cutting video to fit and looking for other sounds or music to fill out the soundtrack. It is usually at this point that I become acutely conscious of my limitations as a visual artist…
I’d love to hear from other videopoets on this.
Advance screening of Korean film Poetry in NYC Feb. 9
The following press release from Poets House just came over the transom, and I thought it might be of interest to those in the New York City area. —Dave
Poets House is delighted to present an advance screening of the new, award-winning Korean film Poetry with an introduction and discussion by film critic Michael Atkinson. A reception to follow.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 6pm
Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street
This event is FREE FOR POETS HOUSE MEMBERS. To renew your Poets House membership, click here. $10 for the general public.
RSVP by Friday, February 4, 2011 to rsvp@poetshouse.org or by phone 212-431-7920, ext. 2832. (Email strongly preferred.)
Advance praise for the film Poetry
“An extraordinary vision of human empathy.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“A life-size movie about loss and self-discovery.” – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
Acclaimed Korean director Lee Chang-dong (“a major figure in world cinema” – The New York Times) follows his award-winning Secret Sunshine with the story of another woman raising a child on her own.
Mija (an extraordinary performance by veteran actress Yun Jung-hee) is a proper, sixty-ish woman struggling to provide for her adolescent grandson. Faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime, she finds strength and purpose upon enrolling in a poetry class — a creative process that allows her to understand and escape her own pain.
Best Screenplay winner at the Cannes International Film Festival and an official selection at the New York, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, Poetry is a masterful study of the subtle empowerment of an indefatigable woman.
Poetry opens in New York City on February 11. Click here for the film’s official page.
MICHAEL ATKINSON is a former film critic for The Village Voice and has written for The Believer, Spin, Details, LA Weekly, The Boston Phoenix, The Stranger, Interview, and more. He is also the author of five books, and he lectures on film history and screenwriting at C.W. Post/Long Island University and New York University.
Alex Cigale becomes Moving Poems’ Russian-language editor
This week, Ukranian-American poet and translator Alex Cigale became the first foreign-language editor at Moving Poems, contributing translations and analysis of videopoems for works by Alexander Vvedensky and Anna Akhmatova — see Alex’s author archive to view both posts.
I know Alex from his work as an author and now issue editor at qarrtsiluni, and I’ve come to appreciate his enthusiasm for poetry of all kinds and passion for bringing it to ordinary readers. In addition to qarrtsiluni, he’s placed poems in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n and McSweeney’s, among others. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
I’m excited by this sudden broadening of the site’s horizons, and I’d welcome volunteers for other languages, as well (Dutch? German? Spanish?) presuming that we could agree on the quality of the videopoems in need of explication. Contributions could be as regular or as occasional as you like — I have an aversion to schedules. Contact me via email, bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, if you’re interested.
2011 Visible Verse Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- 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.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information contact host and curator Heather Haley at hshaley[at]emspace[dot]com or visit the website.
Vimeo unveils video school
The freemium video sharing site Vimeo, source of the majority of videos featured at Moving Poems, has just unveiled what it calls Vimeo Video School, “a one-stop shop for Vimeo Lessons and user-made video tutorials about a variety of video-making topics.” For those of us who didn’t go to film school, this looks like a great way to get up to speed on professional filmmaking techniques.
Heather Haley reports on Visible Verse festival
The organizer and instigator of Visible Verse blogs about this year’s special restropective of the first ten years of what has become the premiere videopoetry event in North America. A sample:
Friday night’s Vancouver Videopoem Festival 1999-2002 retrospective screening was the biggest challenge as we had to mediate the clunkiest and oldest formats: ¾ inch tape and beta. I rolled up my sleeves and got down to business around 9 AM. At 6, PC Art Director Steve Chow expressed shock that I was still there. “Real time, my man!” I said. “No way around it. And remind me never to do this ever again.” It was nerve wracking!
Konyves on mediocrity in videopoetry
Tom Konyves has a new comment in the thread to his “Brief Summary of Videopoetry,” in response to a question of mine: As videopoetry goes mainstream, what does that mean for the more avant-garde pioneers of the genre such as yourself? Do you worry about more serious work being drowned in a sea of mediocrity? Here’s his response.
Motionpoems fundraising campaign breaks $10,000 mark
I’ve included notes about the fundraising campaign for Motionpoems in several recent posts at the main site. The donation page is now reporting that they’ve raised $5,112 from 53 donors, exceeding their goal of $5000 — but why stop there? It’s great to see poets and artists working so hard to bring compelling videopoetry to the masses, and they deserve all the support we can give them. An article at mnartists.org tells the story of how Todd Boss and Angella Kassube teamed up in 2008.
(Update) Angela tells me via email that the GiveMN fundraiser will be done next week, and pointed out that they qualified for $5,000 in matching funds — “kind of amazing that we’ve had ZERO money for 2 years and suddenly we have $10,000” to support Motionpoems! And they’ve just been accepted into the Kickstarter fundraising program, as well.
Suddenly the future is looking very bright for professionally made American poetry films.
ONandOnScreen is a unique online poetry journal in…
ONandOnScreen is a unique online poetry journal in which “videos are linked with poems and poems with videos, widening the spectrum and essential strangeness of each … a conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on.” Ekphrastic poems in response to films are a little outside the scope of the main Moving Poems site, but are very interesting nonetheless. Do check out the site (and note that their next reading period will begin on November 1).
On Poetry
http://www.vimeo.com/15430101
Film student Sebastian Lasaosa Rogers found a great visual metaphor for the pressure to write.
