Joint forces: collaborating in poetry film by Janet Lees
My Instagram tag is ‘everything is poetry’. Writing this piece, I’ve been thinking of changing it to ‘everything is collaboration’. I love what the poet Matthew Rohrer says about poetry: ‘I’ve come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration’. He talks about collage poetry, ekphrasis and ‘collaborations with the voices that I heard on the brink of dreaming’. He asserts, ‘There is no creation out of nothing on this Earth. There’s only making new things in collaboration with other things.’
I’ve sometimes said that I stumbled into making poetry films and then stumbled into collaboration. Recently I’ve come to realise that this is not true (top fact: the Estonian word for making poetry is lluletama, which also means to lie). As a child I drew, painted and wrote poetry and stories as a matter of course. From the moment I was given my first camera, my beloved Grandad’s box Brownie, at the age of 11, I took a lot of photographs too. I listened to music endlessly as a teenager – not all of it great, but most enduringly Kate Bush, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and other similarly poetic songwriters. So there was some early cross-fertilisation going on between the three key elements of a poetry film: words, visuals and sound/music.
My undergraduate degree was split equally between visual arts and writing. Ultimately my focus was photography and poetry, and key to the course was integration of the arts. My thesis was on the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, with whom I corresponded for several years. He collaborated with a wide range of artists – his famous gardens and temple at Little Sparta are in part a homage to collaboration. So the principles of integration and collaboration became formally embedded into my creative DNA.
After graduating I lived in a creative wilderness for many years due to depression and addiction. I didn’t write poetry, I didn’t make visual art and except when I was out of my head I didn’t listen to music – it was just too painful. In the spring of 2011, a few years into recovery, I spontaneously began noting down words and phrases from ads on the London Underground. Suddenly, the words bewitched me: their music, their dark comedy, the other things they were saying – the way they compelled me with great urgency to rearrange them into skewed, oddly lucid pieces. I didn’t know then that there was a term for what I was doing and that poetically speaking it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do: found poetry.
An accidental (or intuitive) collaboration
I showed these strange broken little poems to a photographer/videographer I worked with, Rooney, and he combined them with his footage to make strange broken little films. Again, we had no idea that what we were doing was part of an established and rapidly burgeoning genre within the art world: poetry film.
Sarah Tremlett says that poetry films “link and fuse previously separate art forms as well as both intuitive and measured decision-making, and are often made as collaborations between poets and filmmakers.” Rooney and I were certainly fusing separate art forms, we were obviously collaborating, and we were most definitely making both intuitive and measured decisions. Our process was at first entirely intuitive, from my noting down of words from adverts to Rooney’s initial decision to put the text with video footage. The measured decisions included my rearranging the found text into new poems, and Rooney choosing specific clips from his large portfolio of footage to pair these with.
high voltage acts of kindness
This was the beginning of my return to poetry: reading it, writing it, falling back in love with it. I enrolled on a Masters’ degree in Creative Writing, driven by the need to better express the latent poems of my own that were storming through me, and demanded to be written. It was also the beginning of a series of collaborative poetry film partnerships.
Rooney has been a huge influence on me; we have worked together for many years and his creative and philosophical vision is there in some form in all of my poetry film work. The hours of darkness, one of the first films I created independently, shows his direct influence – for example in the single take, fixed viewpoint and, crucially, the dissonance between the text and the visual.
This is something we’ve both always felt strongly about: that what you see on screen should not generally be a literal illustration of what you hear, or read. It doesn’t have to be an outright dissonance, sometimes more of a slant approach, in which the visual echoes, or converses with, or helps to unpack a certain aspect of the poem. And when there is dissonance, it can have consonance at its heart – perhaps there is an energy, or atmosphere, or emotion in the poem that is mirrored in the visuals, even though they do not literally illustrate the words.
I like what Tom Konyves says about the poetry in a videopoem, “My view is that ‘poetry’ is the result of the judicious, poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound; the poetry in a videopoem thus ceases to be simply the text element…Instead, an entirely new form of poetic experience can be produced.” As he says, this new poetic experience is “more than a narrative told in visual terms.” It’s in the judicious poetic juxtaposing of text, visuals and sound, through a series of intuitive and measured decisions, that the magic happens.
The hours of darkness
Collaborating with composers and musicians
Of all the art forms, for me music is the purest vehicle of emotion; it speaks directly to my soul. A few years ago I was lucky enough to see Suzanne Vega live. I wept through the entire show, transported back to a time in my early twenties when I was bereft after a break-up and would spend night after night curled up on the floor listening to her, the epitome of a ‘small blue thing’. Sound, too, is incredibly evocative – wind chimes, the old-fashioned telephone pips, a cricket match being played, the soundscape of a beach in summertime – and lends you the same ability to travel in time.
Over the past few years I’ve collaborated with several different musicians. My most recent collaboration is with the composer Mablanig, aka Bruno Cavellec, who is also a well-known painter. Bruno’s paintings have always touched me deeply, and it’s the same with his music. There’s something he does, an interweaving of darkness and light, sorrow and bliss, whether in paint or musical notes, that completely resonates with me – and his voice is quietly devastating.
Bruno says, “Ever since I first saw Janet’s videopoems, I’ve been an admirer of her very distinctive style and powerful narrative. With her work, it’s almost as if I discovered a brand-new language, so unique and expressive, which I find deeply moving and inspiring. There is such beauty and a great sense of aesthetic in what Janet creates. This collaboration is a dream come true, a soul-to-soul project. The resulting film is a deeply introspective piece in which past and present share the space to pay tribute to those who left a mark on us.”
This was an ambitious project and a true multidisciplinary collaboration from the start. We set out to make a triptych entitled Nine moons, incorporating Bruno’s music and painting, my poetry and film/photography, and both our voices. Using Zoom, as we are in different countries, we had several sessions in which we talked generally, and then more specifically about the project. We already knew we had a lot in common, and through these sessions we discovered many more commonalities.
Through this process we realised we wanted to bring more of ourselves to the work. This manifested in the form of personal photographs of people close to us, which Bruno, a Photoshop expert, edited into some of my photographs of abandoned and derelict places. This sequence forms the third part of the triptych, in which the music, visuals and text come together in way that to me feels seamless and transcending – and which for both of us is a deeply emotional experience.
On its first screening in June 2024, Nine moons won Best International Poetry Short at the Bloomsday Film Festival in Dublin.
Nine moons
The first musician I collaborated with was George Simpson, whose awe-inspiring music I came across via Instagram. I was blown away by his album Still Points in the Turning World, notably the tracks Sextacodareprise and Artemis. So I got in touch and asked him if he would allow me to use his music. Thankfully he said yes, and the results were the films A boat for sorrow and Huntress. The former was a collaborative work in more ways than one; I made the poem using randomly (intuitively) selected words and lines from a pocket edition of selected poems by W.B. Yeats.
I sent George early drafts of each piece to check he was happy with the pairing of the music and visuals which in both films were abstracted and animated stills. In the case of Huntress I changed the title of the poem to more closely tie in with the music, Artemis being the Greek goddess of hunting (and I’d never come up with a title I was happy with before). The notion of being a huntress in the context of bearing witness to the inescapable realities of the Anthropocene worked with the poem and also felt empowering; better to feel yourself to be a huntress than a helpless observer.
Huntress
The composer Richard Quirk and I collaborated on a project which became the poetry film Still here, and we’re currently in the contemplation phase of our next collaboration. He had shared some of his music with me and I was particularly struck by the haunting, bleakly beautiful track Dream Thieves. Richard also writes poetry and in his music I think there is a particular poetic sensibility.
All the elements of this collaboration just fell into place. I’d been to visit Dungeness, a place that is deeply embedded in me even though I only spent a snatched few hours there. I knew I had to make a film that somehow conveyed the essence of this irredeemably bleak yet somehow comforting place, which seemed to tell a momentous, universal story of what it is to live in the Anthropocene and simultaneously evoke an intensely personal, profoundly felt response that transcends this life.
Dream Thieves was just so exactly right, tuning directly in to this story and this response. I had taken quite a bit of footage while at Dungeness, but made the (measured) decision to populate the film only with stills, apart from the moving footage at the beginning and at the end – these are akin to a curtain rising and falling, bookending a contemplative experience which happens in its own ‘beyond’ space. Also while at Dungeness, a poem that I’d written some time ago kept coming into my mind. It was made on a Poetry School course, a found text piece incorporating words and lines from a beautiful short prose piece by Majella Kelly about the last man on an otherwise abandoned island.
Of the effortlessness that marked this collaboration, Richard says, “Collaboration at its best takes no struggle with combining ideas. It provides the inspiration that shows the creative goal. It may not show you how to get to that destination, but you know with certainty that there is something you are working towards and the creative energy is primed and waiting to be utilised. It will provoke new methods, a sudden and fresh way of thinking without any conscious request for different resources. When it works it is highly enjoyable and rewarding. When it isn’t working, your gut will know very quickly and in my experience the project should be abandoned immediately.”
A composer and musician I’ve collaborated with on several projects is Tromlhie, aka Martyn Cain. As well as being an outstanding creator in his own right, Martyn is part of Post War Stories, a dark, dynamic three-piece band with the sound of something much greater. I’d worked with Post War Stories on the videopoem The worst thing by far, and Martyn shared some of his own music with me. One track in particular resonated deeply. The result was the poetry film Nowhere to go but on, which again has a collaborative poem at its heart; in this case a Cento, a traditional form dating back centuries, in which the poet borrows lines from published poems to create a new poem.
This film is a mix of footage and animated stills. I typically use apps to create animated stills, most notably Motionleap. I’m no animator – although this is a skill I would love to learn, given the time (which there is never enough of) – so find this kind of off-the-shelf app really useful for bringing subtle motion and effects to photographs.
Nowhere to go but on
Martyn and I also collaborated on the film What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, based on a poem by Katerina Gogou, which won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition in 2021.
I was invited to make this film by filmpoetry.org, the excellent videopoetry platform of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, who commissioned 10 poetry filmmakers from around the world to celebrate the work of 10 Greek poets. Katerina Gogou died as the result of an overdose in 1993 so I was unable to work with her, but I researched her life exhaustively which brought me closer to her and her poetry. She was a blazing spirit, Greece’s greatest modern anarchist poetess. Born into the Nazi occupation of Greece, she lived through the years of far right military junta oppression and the country’s resurgent anarchist movement in the 1980s. An activist herself, she became a prophet of the movement and her poems anthems for it.
So, turning one of Katerina’s poems into a poetry film was a huge responsibility. I felt it was important to have a piece of music specially created to do justice to her legacy, so commissioned Martin to compose a piece for the film. Again, this film is made up of animated stills; I sent Martyn several of these, along with the poem. The soundtrack he created was, as I’d hoped it would be, perfect: a brooding elegy to defiance, fear and incipient despair. Fire and smoke are twin visual motifs running through the film; the fire broadly representing social unrest and Katerina’s burning desire for social justice, the smoke a sense of being burned out by life. Both these recurring motifs worked so well with Martyn’s simmering, off-kilter soundtrack.
What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’
I’ve learned through experience that collaboration only works when the partners are on the same wavelength. This is most definitely the case with Martyn, who says, “Janet and I have similar creative visions, which makes the process of producing the films an enjoyable one. Our mutual stylistic approach leaves me open to really explore the themes without worry that something will be suitable or not. This makes the final film a true collaboration despite us being in different rooms or countries when creating our pieces.
As a self-taught musician, when we were commissioned to create What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, the subject instantly resonated with me. I knew there was a need to break some of the music theory rules so decided to offset the timing of the violin. This not only played with the classical convention of keeping strictly to a theory, but also helped to give a sense of disorientation that Gogou felt as a poet. The constant low distorted crackles are samples of the Greek shipping forecast, another reference to being lost and found.”
Collaborating with poets and artists
The poet, artist and composer Paul atten Ash and I embarked on a collaboration during the first coronavirus lockdown, and while we didn’t exactly make a poetry film together, I’ve realised that the video I created in response to his brilliant track Stasi probably counts as one (text can be spoken or sung in a poetry film).
Also, this was a truly all-encompassing collaboration which helped to keep us creatively absorbed and sane during difficult times. It started out as a linear ekphrastic conversation; we agreed to respond to each other’s poems and images. It rapidly escalated into a multi-layered storm cloud of interrelated creativity – images, poetry, film, music – one of the results of which is a multimedia book featuring Paul’s prose poetry and my art photography, alongside a series of poetry films, currently in progress.
Stasi
My next-to-most-recent collaboration was with the poet Jane Lovell, on her poem ‘Blame the Fox’, which won the 2022 Rialto Nature & Place competition. I love Jane’s poetry and we share a longstanding concern for nature and the environment. Jane had seen some of my poetry films and had liked what she’d seen, so all this was a good start – we clearly had quite a bit in common. Nevertheless, it’s a huge deal to take the precious thing that is someone else’s poem and turn it into a poetry film. Even when you like each other’s work, there’s no guarantee the poet will like what you do with their poem.
I spent a lot of time with this incredible poem, feeling my way into it, letting it inhabit me, thinking about scenarios that could work – particularly what kind of visuals might complement the poem in a slanted way, without telling it literally. One day I went out with my camera on the North Yorkshire coast and there was a haar, a dense sea mist which didn’t lift all day. As soon as I started filming I knew it was right. There is such a strong sense in the poem of being disconnected and deluded, of being blind – the line Blame us. Born blind. was tolling in my heart all day. The mist felt like the perfect metaphor for this blindness and disconnection.
I told Jane about the footage and images, and she liked the approach. We listened to some potential music tracks and there was one we both liked. To my immense relief, Jane was happy with the final result: “I was blown away by how closely Janet’s film matched my own imagined landscapes of the poem, perfectly capturing the atmosphere and mood.”
A note on the music here, which was licensed via www.artlist.io. I have an annual subscription with Artlist which allows me to use any track from their vast library. In the instances where I’m not collaborating with a musician, I prefer to use licensed music because the range and quality are outstanding, there won’t be any rights issues (which can be a risk when you download music for free from the Internet) and, crucially, the artists get paid each time their music is used.
Blame the Fox
Collaborating with poetry filmmakers
I wasn’t quite sure where to place this in the essay, because my collaborators in this case are both creative polymaths. As giants of the poetry film scene, Marc Neys and Dave Bonta are both long-time poetry filmmakers who need no introduction. But Marc is also a visual artist and prolific creator of phenomenal experimental music, while Dave is a poet whose profoundly transformative poems made while walking I sincerely hope will be published as a collection soon.
In 2020 Marc and I collaborated on his album The Secret Language of Light, a transcendent mix of field recordings, strange sounds and hauntingly beautiful ambient music, complemented by my meditative abstract videos made from animated stills.
Reflecting on our work together, Marc says, “It has been an inspiring journey. Each time, I composed music for Janet’s short videos or edited photographs, finding the process akin to drifting with a current. Her images are so evocative and atmospheric that the music seems to create itself. The synergy between her visual vignettes and my compositions feels effortless and profoundly satisfying.”
In 2023, in a completely unplanned way, Marc, Dave Bonta and I collaborated on what I guess you could call a trilateral ekphrastic video poem. It started when I threw a pebble in the river. When I shared a mirrored version of the clip on Instagram, Dave responded with a stunning poem, Psalm 2. Then Marc responded to the video and the poem with several different pieces of music. We chose one of these and he put all three elements together to make a video poem. It was a magically effortless experience, and I’m sure this was at least in part due to us all being poetry filmmakers.
Marc went on to make a series of videos with different loops of the footage, pairing each one with original music to create a whole range of moods and interwoven, flowing stories in one cohesive, mesmerisingsymphony-like piece. This features on his Bandcamp as a mini-album entitled we meet ourselves, while the whole audio-visual piece can be heard and viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
Internal collaborations, interpersonal connections
Something that has come into focus for me while writing this essay is the process of collaborating with one’s own pain. We all carry pain, it’s the inevitable price of being human. But we don’t like pain, so our learned response is to push it down, to look the other way. This can lead to much deeper trouble. My descent into addiction, for example, was the direct result of trying to avoid pain. Living this way was an often nightmarish experience, caught in a relentlessly self-punishing compulsion and severed from my own creativity. The fallout of addiction is layer upon layer of pain and shame – way more than you started out with before becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs, or whatever your poison is.
If you’re an artist, you’re sensitive. If you’re sensitive, you feel pain acutely – I think this is particularly true in these times of terrible wars and ecological breakdown, with the numberless losses that are happening every hour of every day. Many of my films have entailed honouring pain, feeling it fully, working closely with it – whether it’s a specific personal sorrow, as with It is said or pain for the world, as with Huntress and Nowhere to go but on. Making each one has been a deeply cathartic and transcendent experience that for me is an integral part of the poetic experience itself.
It is said
As well as being a creatively potent release, working with pain can be powerfully connecting. I have been profoundly affected by poetry films that focus on subjects ranging from personal grief to planetary devastation and as a result have felt an instant connection with the poet/filmmaker – felt them as a kindred spirit. People have told me how deeply they’ve been touched by a poetry film, and how it mirrored or echoed their own emotional experience. Someone once said, “You have shown me your soul and it spoke to mine.” The viewer, of course, completes the meaning of the work; the deeply meaningful, ultimate collaboration.
References:
https://lithub.com/all-poetry-is-collaboration/
https://www.sarahtremlett.com/about.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261724253_Address_to_E-poetry_Conference
