ON THE CUTTING EDGE FIVE: Romances without Words / In Solitary – Larry Beckett’s Translation of Verlaine A Spirited Misreading
A Spirited Misreading of Romances without Words / In Solitary –
Larry Beckett’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans Paroles and Cellulairement
by Marc Zegans
“The soul of an immortal child,” says one who has understood him better than others, Charles Morice, “that is the soul of Verlaine…especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation.”[i]
As an author concerned with the conditions that define, sharpen, and successively replace cutting edge verse, I’m grateful to Larry Beckett for introducing to contemporary English-speaking audiences the transformative poems in Verlaine’s famed Romances sans Parole, and Cellulairement, his recently gathered prison poems,[ii] translated now, for the first time, into English. In fitting homage to their author, Beckett uses these poems as symbolic agents that evoke the physical and moral conditions, the love, spiritual, and sexual relationships, passionate spirit, psychological torment, and urgent need to communicate that filled the life of this man who, eroding and displacing the binding strictures of poetic tradition, freed French verse from the vice of hieratic technicians.
PAUL VERLAINE (1844-1896). Credit: Album / Oronoz
Central both to Verlaine’s persona and to his poetic innovations was a rare capacity to dispense with social constraint and to write transgressive scripts. Beckett’s pairing of Cellulairement with the better-known Romances sans Paroles vivifies the evolution of Verlaine’s poetic affinities, and the motives and the methods that gave rise to the Symbolist movement. And it foregrounds the progression of Verlaine’s craft under two contrasting permission structures: libertine self-expression,[iii] and supplicating entreaty for grace, embedded in deep worldly sorrow.
As a translator, Beckett neither fetishizes the original text, nor does he aim for functional, poly-systemic, or deconstructive interpretation. He is not interested in assigning philosophical priority either to an element of the text or to an interpreter’s operations. Instead, Beckett provides a loose, vital, contemporary (mis)reading[iv] that succeeds in bringing Verlaine, the man behind the poems, to life.
Characterizing storied and mythic figures—from “Song to the Siren,” co-written with Tim Buckley in 1967, through his magisterial gathering of verse epics in American Cycle, to his recent Book of Merlin, a reimagining of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s medieval (circa 1150) Vita Merlini—is central to Beckett’s oeuvre. In this translation, in contrast to prior work, he vivifies Verlaine not by narrative account but through the poems themselves. Beckett’s informal language and controlled shape of line, bringing a familiar American tone and a pronounced beat structure to the effort, are his means of animation. Reading Beckett’s translation is to find oneself in the room with the debauched, hedonistic, young Verlaine, and with the tortured, isolated, conflicted, unreliably repentant prisoner, who, awash in shame, turns to the Christian church he willfully abandoned during his wild eighteen-month ride with Rimbaud. It is to meet the man whose appetites and moral struggle gave rise to a poetics that, forswearing conventional French verse’s historicism and academic formality, fathered the symbolist movement and unleashed a century long cascade of innovations in French verse.
The strong poetry Beckett makes from Verlaine’s verse demands no less than its own spirited misreading. That, I shall attempt here. In what follows, I discuss some features, aspects, and particulars of his vibrant translations of Romances sans Paroles and Cellulairement. I concentrate in the former on Beckett’s approach to translation, and in the latter, on the evolution of verse in this lesser-known collection. I do hope that you find in these admittedly imperfect perceptions more than ample reason to take up Beckett’s novel translation.
ROMANCES SANS PAROLES
Romances Sans Paroles, largely written during Verlaine’s travels with fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud. drew inspiration from the lyrical beauty of Mendelsson’s eight books of short works for piano, “Leider ohne Worte,”[v]restoring music to the poetic line at a moment when French verse had gone flat and dry. Taking lived experience as his subject matter, substituting symbol for specification, and eschewing narrative clarity in favor of mood, nuance, and emotional resonance, Verlaine, in Romances sans Paroles, shifted the landscape from the didactic rhetoric, ornate formality, and classical motifs of the dominant Parnassian movement toward looser, less cultivated, more vital sources of inspiration.[vi] Verlaine’s self-referential turn, twenty years before Freud performed the unconscious, ruptured the conventions of French art and verse, shifting power from guardians of the tradition to individual artists and poets guided by their passions, preoccupations, and lived experience.
Beckett brings two versions of himself to this translation—the poet who sees the world and its major characters in epic terms, and the accomplished lyricist deeply immersed in the craft of songwriting. As epic poet Beckett’s central focus is dramatizing the libertine legend. As gifted lyricist, Beckett undertakes an innovative reworking of Romances’ text, inverting Mendelssohn’s concept of songs without words into beat driven lyrics awaiting melody, harmony, and musical arrangement—words inviting song. His procedure, rooted in contemporary American speech, delivers a sustained version of the effect Rimbaud describes in “To a Reason’s” opening line, “A drumbeat from your finger releases all sound, and a new harmony begins.”[vii] Beckett’s beat driven reconstruction of Romances endows readers with the capacity to sing through the words on the page and to enter Verlaine’s ecstasy, his torture, his filth, his call to spirit, and his heaven bound flights toward the sublime.
Consider “Birds in the Night.” Here, Verlaine describes his wife Mathilde as his beauty, his darling, and the cause of his suffering, wondering if she remains his “patrie”, a creature, as young and as wild as his homeland.
Vous qui fûtes ma Belle, ma Chérie,
Encor que de vous vienne ma souffrance,
N’êtes-vous donc pas toujours ma patrie,
Aussi jeune, aussi folle que la France?
End rhyming souffrance and France, Verlaine entangles notions of love, home, and suffering in this reductive conceit. Beckett elides, instead, the rhyme, and conflates country with homeland, erasing the distinction between political unit and locus of cultural belonging that Verlaine stressed by his choice of “patrie,” homeland, over “pays,” country:
You were my beauty,
My darling, my suffering,
And always my
Country, so young, so crazy!
Beckett further generalizes the proposition, removing direct reference to France, shifting the locus of Verlaine’s analogy from the place of his birth as a register of belonging to the poet’s young country,[viii] as a thing possessed. Because the generic appellation “my Country, so young, so crazy,” readily applies to the wild, young land described by Tocqueville and portrayed in Beckett’s American Cycle, decontextualizing the reference not only contemporizes but sharply Americanizes the text.
Having opened a door to the American vernacular with “Birds in the Night,” Beckett invokes the blues, employing the idiom as a recurring device, to capture Verlaine’s anguish and his delight, reducing the French poet’s more sonically complex, but less rhythmically precise lines, to impeccable blues phrasing.
Long as you wiggle,
My blues are back.
…I’m tired of the holly,
The firs and the view,
I’m tired of it all,
Except for you.
Like John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,”[ix] these lines point straight to the body. To directly encounter their viscerality, try singing the verses from “Spite,” quoted above, responsively with the classic guitar lick on Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy.”[x]
Beckett’s sharp songwriting skills carry throughout the text, appearing with telling effect in his translation of “Dansons la Gigue,” “Let’s Tango!”
I loved the pretty lies
Like the stars in the skies
In her malicious eyes.
Let’s tango!
She had ways to uncover
And desolate a lover;
It was so charming of her!
Let’s tango!
As a refrain, “Let’s tango!” is arresting, and far sexier than the original — “Let’s dance the jig”— though not, perhaps, more so than David Bowie’s iconic cue, “Let’s Dance,”[xi] Beckett’s tender being entwined with desire for things lost, Bowie’s, fully situated in the present.
In pursuing his epic project, Beckett takes broad interpretive liberties, proceeding by appropriative subversion: animating the character, while engagingly reshaping and contemporizing the material. Though playing loosely with the poems’ language, Beckett consistently situates his translations in tight formal structures. His rigor in satisfying these stanzaic strictures conveys a sense that he is engaging in some degree of emotional distancing.
This might be read as a sophisticated, quasi-ironic posture, drawing attention to Beckett’s role as a pawky reader operating on a body of work written a century-and-a-half earlier. Yet there’s an opaqueness here, one that appears also in his recent translations of Jacques Brel’s songs,[xii] a step back from, without abandoning, the emotion that suffuses the originals. This pattern has a distinctly American male aspect, a reaching toward voices outside the norms of American masculinity for something missing, yet a tamping down, rather than integration and full expression of what is found there.
In “Beams,” the final poem in Romances Sans Paroles, Verlaine crosses a crucial turning point in the development of his symbolist verse and arrives at the culminating statement in his romantic dream. Earlier poems in Romances incorporate symbols as elements, but none is fully anagogic.[xiii] “Beams,” by contrast, in Beckett’s translation, is a unified projection—a wish for dispensation consolidated into the image of Verlaine’s wife, head held high, joyously free from shame.
Beckett’s “Beams” opens with a woman dreaming that she is “walking on the waves.” A literal translation would simply observe, “She wanted to walk on the waves.” The distinction is important. The strict account introduces a dream woman whose image can point to a variety of possible referents, among these: Rimbaud, a passing glimpse of a woman who triggers a fantasy, Verlaine’s abandoned wife Mathilde, or poetry personified. Because it situates the poem in gestural space—ambiguous in motive and intent, varied and shifting in possible meaning, refusing reduction to a static interpretation—faithful translation, in this instance, is connotatively expansive.
Shifting the image from a dream woman’s expression of desire to a woman’s dreamed experience, has the opposite effect. Positioning the woman as the dreamer, not the dreamed, places her relationship with Verlaine at the poem’s center, strongly implying that the unnamed “She” is Mathilde, and that the ensuing action is the fulfilment of his wife’s imaginative conceit.
With a beam wind blowing on the calm,
We, giving ourselves to her craziness,
Went strolling on our salty way.
When Mathilde turns to face Verlaine at the poem’s conclusion,
… a little anxious,
Not believing our faith would hold,
But seeing us joyous in her circle,
She went on walking, her head high.
We are given to believe that her perception of the joyous two—which could be an extension of her appreciative system to include Verlaine and Rimbaud, the “us” being ambiguous—signals that their bond will remain. In this light, Beckett’s “Beams,” reads as an imaginative bid to preempt the pain that will precipitate Verlaine’s desperate quest for moral redemption, and as a precursor to and natural segue into the more complex symbolic landscape that will emerge from the prison poems that follow.
Larry Beckett
CELLULAIREMENT: Verlaine Struggles to Rewrite Himself and Rewrites Poetry Instead
In this intense, tortured, and passionate collection, Verlaine seeks reform, spouts nostalgia, voices regret at the humiliation he visited upon his wife, recognizes a self-gone-wrong and, diverges sharply from the Parnassian formalism that had held contemporary French verse in its grip. In “Dear Reader,” a prefatory poem, Verlaine describes Cellulairement as a man’s dreams in illness offered in good faith and acknowledges that he has been pilloried for his actions.
let’s just say
That I’ve been maladroit.
I lost my life, and I know all
The blame showers on me
The poems that immediately follow unfurl via a highly personal, at times childish, poësie, made manifest in the appeals for mercy and for brotherhood found in “Another.”
I’m in this scared circus,
Submissive, too,
And ready for
Anything bad.
And why, if I’ve gone
Against your wishes,
Society, go
Easy on me?
Let’s go, brothers, thieves,
Sweet vagabonds,
Swindlers in bloom,
My good old boys,
Let’s smoke philosophy,
Go for a walk
In peace, and ah!
Nothing to do.
In “Lowlife,” a transitional poem Verlaine employs a gestural strategy incorporating illustration, vocalization, archetype, and metaphor that anticipates but—presenting complication rather than producing integration—does not achieve the symbolic depth and complexity of the later poems.
With an old man’s rasp,
In a last hurrah,
My guilt—call it my past—
Sings tra-la-la.
With a hanged man’s green fingers
On a cracked guitar,
The fool dances the future,
Elastic star.
—Old jester, enough; stop
That song and dance.
He answers —This is no
Kick in the pants; (Lowlife, 103)
His tarotic invocation of the “hanged man” “fool” and “Old jester” evoke traveling carnival—trashy, trivial, noisy, lurid, and eventually banal. In going for the cheap, Verlaine lampoons but can neither reject his huckster’s need to raise a throng nor escape the debasing effect of this compulsion. Rather, he offers gaudy “Pictures for a Penny” to the milling crowd.
At the bottom of my still,
In the fire of love, blushing. . .
Come and see my magic!
It’s so fine. Come one,
Come all. Come in, Slut!
…
That bad actor, the Jester,
Will tell your fortune. Look,
Charge It is at the till.
Come quick! Hurry, hurry!
“Pictures for a Penny’s” ticky-tack vulgarity and shoddy sleaze anticipate the vacuity of auction-driven contemporary art, the lurid films of Tarantino, and the enduring sub-cultural fetish for the sordid. And they are necessary to Verlaine’s larger project: To celebrate the hustle, embrace the profane, draw us by lures and snares into his garish masque, and nevertheless receive God’s grace.[xiv] Verlaine opens “Pictures for a Penny” by announcing the method that will lead him to remake his verse, if not, ultimately, relieve him of his torment.
“Out of sweet suffering
I make my alchemy!”
In “Old Stanzas II” Verlaine brings us back to 1870 and the dry scholastic procedures with which he broke in Romances sans Paroles, a process he extends in Cellulairement by again revising his poetry.
In the arcade, it smells like the old days,
And where are they? It’s eighteen seventy,
Back in the time of Napoleon’s nephew,
And our style was a little pedantic, like
The Master, as each did his play in verse.
…
All’s cracked: I sang in the hot weather;
Now I moan on a wet bunk in a prison.
In the stanzas that follow, Verlaine’s approach is crude and immediate, situating his reader directly in life profane—witness his sharp and deflating use of simile in “Out to St. Denis.”
We were in a bad mood, and fighting,
As the flat sun of summer spread its light
Over the vacant lot like a piece of toast;
Verlaine’s conscious centering of the mundane prefigures William Carlos Williams’ poetry of the vernacular but is presented with a crucial difference. Williams found and celebrated meaning in the ordinary. For Verlaine, life quotidian is dégueulasse. Yet his petty disgust is subordinate to a more fundamental concern. In “Criminal Love,” he voices this foundational revulsion, decrying the filthy struggle between the seven sins and the three virtues, then begging for their reunion.
O all of you, O all of you sad Sinners,
O you sweet Saints, why this hard schism?
Who haven’t made, as master artists,
One and the same virtue out of our work?
Enough, or too much, of this unequal agon!
We’re going to have at last to reunite
The Seven Sins and the Three Virtues!
Enough, or too much, of this dirty wrestling!
And here we see his attention shift toward search for adequate means by which to seek redemption. In “Bouquet for Mary” Verlaine yearns to raise his voice to the Virgin ear yet feels he is too debased.
I wish I could join my heart to my soul
In a canticle to the blessed Virgin Mary.
But no, I’m a poor sinner too unworthy,
My voice howling in the choir of the just
His prayerful song, to reach Mary without tainting her virtue, must, he believes, be purified by symbolic filter.
It takes a heart like water from a spring,
It takes a child in white to be our symbol,
A lamb bleating, blameless, for innocence
To come circle us with a burning crown.
And it is in this call for a “child in white…a lamb bleating, blameless” that the function of a symbol in Verlaine’s verse shifts from denotative proxy—one thing standing for another—to active intermediary between the earthbound poet and the heart of the divine.[xv] The transformation of symbol from proxy to devoted agent Verlaine achieved in “Bouquet for Mary” and the application of this device in the poems that follow allowed Verlaine to convey a call from his spirit that his sorry person alone could not, and equipped poets with a capacity to mediate between high and low, previously unavailable to French verse.
In Cellulairement’s final poem, “Last,” Verlaine speaks with God, confesses his weakness, prays to be uplifted, and, with wry sapience bordering on rue, equates the Almighty’s charms to those of evil.
Ah! Lord! What’s wrong with me? I’m all
In tears. In unexpected joy. Your voice
Is good and evil to me at the same time,
As good and evil have the same charms
Having railed in “Criminal Love,” against the corruption of pitting sin against virtue, and having called upon saints and sinners to render their work with comparable integrity, he now extends to the voice of God the polarity it per force must encompass, for the God of all cannot be one-sided, and yet the God of “Last” is something less. This God is transactional, laying a fine table in return for love.
And in return for your zeal in all this,
I’ll let you taste the still ineffable delights,
Needy and pathetic, more mirror than deity, the God of “Last” is a manipulative, richly endowed narcissist applying coercive means to cumulate praise. Awash in self-pity, Verlaine shamedly appeals to this embodiment of conditional providence for help. God rejects the poet’s claim of incapacity and tells him to “Offer blossoms of repentance by choice.”
So, what has delivered Verlaine to this place?
Romances sans Paroles is the outpouring of his libertine break with the weak and demanding stern father morality imposed by his religious upbringing. Cellulairement is an expression of his return in mournful disgrace to that same religious precept.[xvi] Sadly, what has changed is not the God he sees but his desire for, relation to, and form of frustration in eliciting compassion from this immutable figure.
And yet I seek you, so long, feeling for you.
I wish your shadow would cover my shame.
The flailing about and the piteous entwinement of pathos and hope that pervade Verlaine’s prison poems display extraordinary poetic innovation, but not moral evolution.
And full of low-down prayer, yet trouble
Is obscuring the hope your voice reveals,
As I breathe in, shaking. . .
Poor soul, that’s it!
Exiting prison on January 16th, 1875, Verlaine has found neither peace nor redemption. He departs instead possessed of the method that will guide his creative efforts for the remainder of his life.
Larry Beckett
Beckett’s Resounding
Beckett’s paired translation of Romances sans Paroles and Cellulairement delivers to his readers both the experience of exhausted capitulation that Verlaine had reached by the end of his prison term, and the urgent sense of new possibility that his fellow poets must have felt on encountering this work—a profound recognition that something greater has been achieved, and that poetry could never be the same. That these innovations were seeded in a time of reckless abandon and subsequently birthed during a period of searing torment, reminds us that work which changes how we see and which alters the scope of what we can achieve is rarely abstract to those who make it. Work of such enlivening potency emerges from hard experience, intense struggle, and determined effort. To live on the cutting edge is to bleed. Intoning the beat that moves all blood, Beckett’s Romances without Words / In Solitary revives Verlaine—his mad freedom and his agon. That is its gift.
…………………………………………………….
[i] Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William Heinemann,1899), p.85.
[ii] The prison poems were written by Verlaine while incarcerated for shooting Rimbaud, completed 1875, and published in their entirety as Cellulairement Suivi de Mes Prisons, edited by Pierre Brunel, for the first time by Gallimard in 2013.
[iii] On the ethics defining the limited grounds for professions and professional institutions “minting moral permissions” see Arthur Isak Applebaum. Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999). The case on this view for individual whim in the stamping of moral hall passes is weaker still, made plain by Verlaine in his prison poems. While there’s something eternally sexy about a rock star poet flouting social convention whatever the cost, authoritarians employ the same logic in setting themselves above and outside moral constraint.
[iv] On meaningful misreading, see, Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
[v] Book 1, Opus 19b, 1830…Book 8, 1842-5. Fauré, following Mendelssohn’s influence composed for piano three “Romances Sans Paroles” Opus 17, 1863, Though these were composed prior to Verlaine’s collection of poems, they were published in 1880, well after the release of Verlaine’s book and did not influence its composition. Fauré later became enamored of Verlaine’s work and set several Verlaine poems to music (e.g. Cinq Mélodies “de Venise”, Op. 58, 1891. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJb33AwyJjw&list=RDtJb33AwyJjw&start_radio=1 ; La Bonne Chanson, Op. 611892–94. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nnIU1eDe8s&list=RD1nnIU1eDe8s&start_radio=1 )
[vi] The Parnassian movement in 19th Century French poetry, backward looking in its affinities, placed craft and classical subject matter above the florid sentimentality and worldly involvement of the Romantics. Responding critically to the movement’s intellectualism and valorization of workmanship in shaping artistic process, Gerad Manley Hopkins in a private letter to William Mobray Baillie (September 10, 1864) wrote, “The second kind I call Parnassian It can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself.”https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69476/selections-from-hopkinss-letters
[vii] Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (Zone Books 2020), p. 3. I view Hampton’s translation as more elegant than Ashbery’s “A tap of your finger releases all sounds and initiates new harmony.”(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54557/to-a-reason ) and Paul Weinfield’s, “Your finger tap on the drum sets every sound free. And so begins the new harmony.” (https://paulweinfieldtranslations.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/arthur-rimbaud-to-a-reason/’’
[viii] The Third Republic was newly formed at the time Verlaine penned Romances, the former in September of 1870, the latter primarily during his travels with Rimbaud in 1872 and 1873.
[ix] John Lee Hooker and the Groundhogs – Boom Boom (The Beat Room, BBC2, October 5, 1964). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLOXCzobsT4&list=RDyLOXCzobsT4&start_radio=1
[x] Muddy Waters, Mannish Boy (Chess Records, 1955). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl0xvB-U6vU&list=RDWl0xvB-U6vU&start_radio=1
[xi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4O6l6O-tgA&list=RDc4O6l6O-tgA&start_radio=1
[xii] Though We Only Have Love: The Songs of Jacques Brel, Larry Beckett and Stuart Anthony (The Orchard/Sony, 2026).
[xiii] On anagogy, see Northrup Frye, “Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad,” in (Anatomy of Criticism: Second Essay, Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 115.
[xiv] Following the title of Belgian historian Luc Sante’s, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1991).
[xv] In Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination (MIT Press, 2025), Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby characterize models as surrogates, simple substitutes for a more complex reality whose freedom from limiting detail invites and welcomes “imaginative occupation.” Models in their view are endowed with a limited form of agency that consists in a “wish to act as a simulacrum for another object,” and provide a “helpful wrongness” that invites aesthetic exploration and encourages imaginative flight. Verlaine’s use of metaphor, simile, and symbol throughout much of Romances sans Paroles bears analogy to Dunne and Raby’s description of a model. These devices, though more connotative in nature than a model and not intended to serve functional ends, act as analogues to less penetrable and perhaps more complex aspects of reality. And it is not beyond reason to impute to them the sort of agency that Dunne and Raby ascribe to models—the wish to serve as proxy for other things. Indeed, there is something wordlessly romantic in assuming that these small substitutions possess innate desire to stand for the things that go unnamed. Beginning, though, with “Beams” at the end of Romances and reaching full force in Cellulairement’s religious poems, Verlaine’s symbols no longer play the role of simple proxy. They become intermediating voices endowed with a more powerful and potent form of agency than that inhering in a proxy— the capacity to speak for a fallen other.
[xvi] On strict father morality, see George Lakoff, (Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Cadence Video Poetry Festival: Messages from America – Light in the Darkness
Now in its ninth year, Cadence Video Poetry Festival (the brainchild of Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San) is now in full swing at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, USA. Celebrating National Poetry Month (in April in America), this year you can see a wide variety of genres, with live and online screenings (taking place in person April 17–19 at Northwest Film Forum, and online April 17–30) with two artist gatherings. The Sunday matinee includes new work created by participants in the Dreaming Ecosystems: Film Poetry Workshop, led by poet Mita Mahato and filmmaker Caryn Cline. Thoughtfully, the directors have also initiated a Poetry Bookshelf [Online]: for publications by Cadence artists: cadencevideopoetry.org/bookshelf
As they say: ‘The festival’s five showcases and two satellite screenings include the outcomes of a generative workshop and more than 50 video poems from 21 countries in 18 languages, with 19 World Premieres and 11 US Premieres! It is the only festival of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. Works featured are from an open call for submissions, new work from Cadence workshop participants, and pieces from the Cadence programming team. Pacific Northwest video poets contribute over a quarter of the works in the whole festival,” notes co-director Rana San. “We’re proud to be an international festival with excellent regional representation.” In a fascinating piece of information which bodes well for the genre, apparently, 84% of films are by artists Cadence has never shown work from before.
Snow, Hai-Li Kong, USA, 2025.
“Unique to the 2026 festival is the screening of a feature-length video poem from Belgium in 10 languages. This is only the second time Cadence has presented a long-form video poem at the festival, and we’re excited to share the US premiere on Sunday evening. Accompanied by a screendance from Mexico, this showcase wraps up the festival showcases with an appeal that we cherish the collective memory created by poetry.”
Short film programs at NWFF (online Apr. 17–19; in-person showtimes listed below)
- April 17, 7pm | you flew from my eyes: Giving shape and voice to what’s felt but can’t always be seen, touched, or retrieved, these video poems meditate on the marks we leave and with which we are left. Between earthly boundaries and open sky, dances, phone calls, and a trampoline become buoys for self and other within the sea of time.
- April 18, 4pm | the gaps in me: What lies beyond the watery weight of a body? Do mirrors reflect the dusty light of truth? Part ghost story, part performance art, and part art object, these video poems forsake flesh and revel in repetition. Emerging from the sand and slime of our collective grief, they reveal the shared realities of loss and persistence, as told through sutures, similes, and mise-en-scènes.
- April 18, 7pm | a sculpture of echoes: Vegetal time meets time travel, demonstrating the subtle ways in which we are interconnected and influenced by our environments. Urban infrastructure defines new habitats, the hand that feeds nourishes a new intimacy, and a surreal spell brings new life into being. Creation myth, memory, humor, and history combine in unexpected ways as these video poems ask: Is it cake? Or is it chaos?
- April 19, 4pm | proof that we were here: Inventing realities not as escapism but as determinism, these video poems perfect the alchemy of dreaming. A love story emerges out of the polluted atmosphere, plant life blooms into a collage of words, and ice melts into a procedural poem. Through new channels of communication with nature, these shapeshifting films prove that the key to providing a sustainable future is protecting the past.
- April 19, 6:30pm | an imperceptible mark: Tracing a multilingual lineage through the condensation of our collective memory, this showcase peers into the abstract spaces of female poets. A feature-length video poem and an accompanying screendance expand our understanding of mother tongue and of presence, even in absence. Have we forgotten what the women before us bore, broke, and buried to survive? A chorus of layered voices invites us to remember.
Satellite screenings:
April 14, 2026 A Current Wells Inside at Boathouse Microcinema, Portland, during Portland Panorama!
- April 30, 6pm | ceaseless, of the earth – closing showcase at Frye Art Museum; and a showcase in conversation with the fertile ground of the floral still life explored in the Frye Art Museum Wallflowers exhibition.
- July 2, 5–8pm | imagine a mountain running – Free First Thursday at Seattle Art Museum
A showcase in conversation with the lucid dream depictions of landscapes and daily life exhibited in Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest at Seattle Art Museum.
The Sky After Rain, Aseman Bad Az Baran, Australia, 2021.
I was fortunate enough to be included in the satellite screening at Seattle Art Museum in July, with my family history poetry film Nocturne for a Lighterman. I particularly like this happy conjunction because the film includes the painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (1872–5) by American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). I like to think he would have been happy to ‘come home’ in this way. More importantly, this allows me to have open access to all the films, and I am thrilled to have such a finely curated selection on tap this month. Each programme takes pains to match films together in a very attuned way, and so narratives seem to reflect each other and continue a joint conversation. Not only this, but the very thoughtful way they have presented the films onscreen, with descriptive details alongside, is extremely helpful. Whilst it is best to follow the descriptions and contextual information from the festival itself, I would just like to say a few words about the first main event in Seattle.
shadowtree, Livia Glascock, USA, 2026.
you flew from my eyes
‘Giving shape and voice to what’s felt but can’t always be seen, touched, or retrieved, these video poems meditate on the marks we leave and with which we are left. Between earthly boundaries and open sky, dances, phone calls, and a trampoline become buoys for self and other within the sea of time.’
In this richly international programme, all the nine selected films could be described as video diaries or video essays, with varying lengths. As someone used to watching much shorter poetry films I found these works liberating. Also the binding of factual information with experiential and expressive emotions over longer, perhaps a more fluid time frame, quite accessible and thought-provoking. To this end, I myself have been working in a longer more personal format recently. However, mostly I realised that having direct, first-hand accounts on film of this world today feels like the most important way to communicate. And I applaud each and every one of them.
All the films reflect the world in crisis, the climate catastrophe and political exile and or dispossession, and the importance of nature in enriching our souls (particularly at this moment in time). Many of these films were spoken with lack of faith in the planet’s survival, either through climate change or the governments who aren’t effecting change. In some cases, the elemental nature of this curation: desert, snow, rain, water, the sea, came with hope, but for others complete resignation. Total connection to land, a spiritual connection to land was front and centre, alongside family history and ancestry.
At this time of constant bombardment not only in physical locations worldwide, but by media coverage, the fragility of most of the films is a reflection of the states of mind of the narrators, who like all of us have concerns for human rights and the future of the planet. It is as if we are on a precipice, as in the flower image in the film Oracle (by Youssef ElNahas and Leena Aboutaleb) about the love of the Mediterranean Sea. We see the turquoise blue water and the sun, but also how the sea brings adversity and presentiments about encroaching unrest: ‘the edge of the world cradling us’. In truth, all of us (East and West) are mentally on our knees asking regimes to stop and become accountable and listen to the people. Idealism is over. Cynicism is prevalent. Who are the leaders we can have faith in? Ecological systems must be put in place, as much to provide water and sustenance, as saving species. How can we fight corruption at the top that insinuates itself into the decisions of world leaders and will not be stopped?
Oracle, Youssef ElNahas and Leena Aboutaleb, Egypt, Palestine, United Kingdom, 2025.
Whilst I cannot go into every film, in What Goes Up US-based artist and writer Samar Al Summary shows us the intermeshing historical complexity of her own and the broader relationship between the military in America and Iraq. Here, with a journalistic narrative style, we encounter the hidden stories of two Iraqi airmen training in the US, whose planes crashed in Arizona. This quest is combined with her need to return home. An inspired approach to filmmaking uses a trampoline to create shots of her waving, jumping in and out of view of the camera, denoting her attempts to get attention outside the wire fence of an airbase.
In terms of the construction of all the films, each brought a delicate tonal quality, (textural, misty or using blinding natural light) and/or gentle voices (enhancing by contrast the terrible, all-consuming context). These were set alongside fractured, partially visible, or random visuals (sometimes offering wonderful juxtapositions with text on screen) defined by some truly innovative soundscapes. All were drawn from a duality (perhaps always a historical force): a love of the land and belonging against abuse by political regimes where the experiences of the individual show us the truth of the system. How ‘the other’ is a ‘normalised’ term to make war in order to take resources. The drive to expose the ‘real’ behind the ‘fake news’ of warmongers, of the disappeared being given a voice, the search for factual information where apparently none exists, establishes how we are all lone voices in the face of government dealings (and let’s not forget it). But please take note, these films cannot be repressed, where the vatic voice (bordering on elegy) though quietly assured, rings loud and clear. Each deals with the unspeakable nature of the subject matter, in a sensitive yet darkly informative way. We feel their experience and their bravery. Here filmmaking can give us humanity at its best. A maternal point of view where we value life itself for all creatures and the strength to survive.
Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2026
(In-person Apr. 17–19; Online Apr. 17–30)
Festival Information: cadencevideopoetry.org/festival/2026
Festival Tickets: filmfreeway.com/CadenceVideoPoetryFestival/tickets
Virtual Festival: cadencevideopoetry.org/festival/2026-cadence-virtual-festival
DEADEYE: a poetry video response to an environmental catastrophe – Ian Gibbins, January 2026
I have known the leading Australian poetry filmmaker Ian Gibbins for a number of years now, and marvelled at his skill as both an auteur poet and filmmaker, as well as his extraordinary evolution from an earlier life as a neuroscientist. However, unfortunately his work has become more and more prescient, timely and relevant. His environmental films document and shed light on the overwhelming changes that are happening to our planet on a daily basis and which we might feel powerless to prevent. In terms of climate change, many of us find the impact of loss to nature too overwhelming, shocking and affecting and we are suffering from our own eco grief. We have to make a choice. As artists we can turn away or, like Ian, confront what is happening and through our art and volunteering, work with the authorities to try to find solutions. Here he takes us into the very heart of a recent horrendous toxic eruption, devastating South Australian marine life, and literally taking the breath out of living creatures. With his love of the ocean and surfing, this affected Ian very directly. However, it also turns out that with his particular background across the sciences, he was also the right person in the right place to advise on marine biology and analyse the causes and effects of global warming. Ian not only makes videos but he gets involved in giving talks and discussions with ‘key citizen scientists’, providing much needed hope through sharing information. He also has put together data to create an overview that can demonstrate what is happening and why. His video Deadeye (see below) is an emotional, moving and arresting series of stills of the eyes of dead fish, alongside a soundscape created from their living counterparts, before the deadly bloom struck. With lines such as: ‘they used to think that the last thing you saw before you died remained etched on the back of your eyes’ it has never failed to bring a tear to my eye. As poetry filmmakers we can often be witnesses and/or take a vatic role that we can share on platforms worldwide. Ian has stepped one stage further: as a scientist he has also brought experience and knowledge to bear on a critical situation, thereby, in some way, effecting real change for the planet.
Sarah
DEADEYE
Ian Gibbins
All art is political, whether we like it or not. So, what is the place of art in the midst of environmental catastrophe? Can art ever fully communicate our lived experiences and emotional responses to disaster? When ecosystems collapse, is it possible for art to influence public policy?
Since the middle of March 2025, South Australian coasts have been afflicted by a harmful algal bloom of unprecedented size and duration. The effects of the bloom on marine life have been devastating, with hundreds of thousands of dead creatures, from tiny worms to large sharks, washing up on beaches along hundreds of kilometres of coastline. Underwater surveys indicate that mortalities seen on the beaches are only a small fraction of what is happening off-shore.
This bloom primarily consists of dinoflagellates, a remarkable group of microscopic single-celled planktonic organisms. They are classified as algae, since they contain chloroplasts and carry out photosynthesis. However, they are highly motile, moving quickly by the combined activity of two whip-like flagella. Furthermore, many species actively feed on other plankton. When conditions suit them, they can quickly proliferate and dominate the ecosystem by their sheer numbers, creating a bloom.
Many dinoflagellates produce potent toxins of various sorts. Initially, the dominant dinoflagellate species identified in the bloom was Karenia mikimotoi which produces a potent cytotoxin that kills any cells that it contacts. Although the exact chemical nature of this toxin is not known, it causes severe damage to the gills of fish and other aquatic organisms, leading to their death. In November, 2025, another species, Karenia cristata, was identified as a dominant species in many samples of the bloom, especially those taken later in the year as the water cooled. This species produces a potent neurotoxin, brevetoxin, that can cause paralysis in a wide range of creatures. Brevetoxin also has well-described non-neural effects on respiratory function when it is inhaled via marine aerosols. Several other species of toxic dinoflagellates have been detected to varying degrees in the bloom, creating an even more complex situation.
As the bloom has progressed, various citizen science groups, independent researchers, university laboratories and government departments have been working to monitor and understand the genesis, progression, and effects of the toxic algal bloom. Other than the fact that they existed, I knew almost nothing about dinoflagellates until I experienced some of their toxic effects after windsurfing at an ocean beach south of Adelaide on the weekend of the bloom’s first significant appearance. But, due to my background in zoology, comparative anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, and both cellular and systems neuroscience, it turned out that I am one of the few people in South Australia who has the broad background knowledge to explain how various algal toxins affect different cell types and organ systems is a wide range of marine creatures. Consequently, I have contributed directly to citizen science projects and have spoken about the toxins at several public forums. Along the way, I have learned a huge amount from independent scientists and other experts who have been willing to share their time and knowledge.
Based on the talks I have given at public forums together with discussions with key citizen scientists, I have put together a comprehensive web-based overview of how the different toxins in the current bloom cause their effects on various organisms, including fish, marine invertebrates and people. A key part of this project is an extensive list of relevant scientific publications that support the various interpretations of the observations on the nature and effects of the bloom. The website has had thousands of visitors since it went live in August 2025.
I have always been a seaside and ocean person. I began surfing as a teenager along the rugged coastline of Victoria. Now, I am a wave-sailing windsurfer, a past-time I pursue whenever the conditions cooperate to produce strong winds and big waves. I also used to scuba dive until my ears would no longer adjust to the pressure differentials, but I still go snorkelling around the local reefs when the summer seas are still, clear and warm.
In each of these activities, it is a given that you can never fight, let alone defeat, the ocean. All my ocean-going activities require the utmost respect for the power of water and its mutability in the face of changing winds, tides, and wave conditions. Not just your enjoyment but ultimately your life depends on reading, understanding, and reacting appropriately to the conditions.
Alongside these physical pursuits, very early on, I developed a deep interest in the life that exists around, between, and below the tidelines. I was an avid shell collector and after leaving school, I was a volunteer in the marine invertebrate section of the Museum of Victoria, where I helped to sort and classify their collections. When I started university, I intended to become a marine biologist, but for various reasons, that did not happen.
Nevertheless, as my research and teaching career morphed into neuroscience, microscopic anatomy and more, I maintained my interest in marine biology, not least by way of life-long collaborations with fish physiologists in Sweden. Since my retirement in 2014, I have been rebuilding my knowledge of natural history, including that of our local coastlines here in South Australia.
The harmful algal bloom in South Australia has been massively destructive on many levels. Most obvious, and most distressing, have been the almost unbelievable numbers of dead and dying animals that have washed up along the beaches. Prominent amongst them have been juvenile leatherjacket fish that have died in their hundreds of thousands for months on end. Underwater surveys have revealed that whole populations of different types of shellfish, sponges, and other creatures living on reefs, pier pylons and old wrecks have completely gone. In some locations, there have been equally devastating mortalities of creatures that are normally rarely if ever seen, such as sea cucumbers and sipunculid worms, living in sand beneath stones below low tide level.
Much of the Adelaide metropolitan coast supports large beds of seagrass that in turn support complex ecosystems of invertebrates as well as many kinds of fish. This seagrass was already under threat from warming sea temperatures, pollution from urban run-off, and dredging activities. Now some areas of seagrass have been severely impacted by the algal bloom. Following stronger than usual winter storms in 2025, masses of dead seagrass have washed up along many beaches, in some cases forming piles up to 2m high and stretching for hundreds of metres along the high tide line. And within these masses are uncounted numbers of small invertebrates and fish that either died along with the seagrass or were caught up in it during the storms.
The effects of the bloom on people have been substantial too. Contact with bloom-affected water can produce sore and irritated eyes, nose and throat. Simply breathing the air along or near affected beaches can produce similar effects. In addition, susceptible people may experience respiratory symptoms comparable to an asthma attack. In general, the symptoms subside relatively quickly but they can last several days in some individuals. One of the unsolved mysteries associated with the bloom is the exact nature of the agent causing these symptoms.
In addition to the physical effects, there have been emotional and mental health consequences for very many people. It is distressing to see so many dead creatures day after day after day on the beach. It is deeply disturbing and disempowering to consider that while we are all ultimately responsible for the climate events that have triggered the bloom, there is little if anything we can do to mitigate it in the short term. For those who regularly visit the beach for recreation or recuperative activities, the bloom has presented major challenges: these places of rest and recovery have transformed into sites of death and devastation and potential risk to one’s health.There also have been major economic consequences of the bloom. Commercial fishing has been suspended in one of the State’s most productive fisheries: the fish have gone, either killed by the bloom or migrated elsewhere to avoid its effects. Several shellfish farms have been closed due to high levels of algal toxins. Tourism has been adversely affected as families shun beaches and boating tours have nothing to show visitors. In response, the State Government has instigated various schemes to financially support these industries with some success. The State marine research facilities also have had a large injection of funds to support better monitoring and characterisation of the bloom and its effects.
Citizen science projects have played a major role in documenting the extent of the bloom and its effects on marine organisms. iNaturalist is an enormous non-profit on-line international photographic database for citizen scientists, professional scientists and others, designed to record, identify, map and otherwise document biodiversity around the world. Soon after the harmful algal bloom began in South Australia, a dedicated iNaturalist project was established to record and map the marine mortalities. To date, around 1300 observers have added over 105,000 observations to the databases, representing more than 750 species of dead organisms.
For several months during the winter of 2025, I made regular surveys along a selection of beaches, adding over 2000 observations to the iNaturalist database, representing vastly more organisms than that. As a photographic database, recent model smartphones are ideal ways to document observations for iNaturalist. Once uploaded, the database can use the geolocation data on the images to plot the observations on global distribution maps. The database also has powerful image recognition algorithms that help to identify the organisms in the photos, which must be verified by at least two people, many of whom are experts in the relevant groups of animals or plants.
Another critically important citizen science project assembled a group of people to microscopically identify the various organisms in samples of water taken from different locations affected by the bloom. Mentored by independent experts in the field of marine plankton, the members of this group purchased their own microscopes with digital recording systems and established standardised processing and reporting protocols. These observations have provided crucial information additional to that obtained by official Government surveys, mostly via access to locations and conditions that are outside the range of the official surveys. An off-shoot of this project led to the development of an invaluable web-based monitor of the distribution of bloom organisms that combines citizen science and government data.
.During my beach surveys, I accumulated thousands of images of dead fish, worms, molluscs, and other organisms, as well as many sequences documenting the states of the beaches themselves, especially after their battering by intense winter storms. In order to better assess the effects of algal toxins on the marine life, I not only took images with my phone but also with my digital camera, fitted with a sophisticated macro-lens system. This system let me obtain high resolution, close-up records of the eyes, gills and skin of fish in particular, all of which are directly exposed to the toxins.
In general, fish have excellent vision. The basic structure of their eyes is the same as ours. However, they lack eyelids, since there is no need to wash the surface of the eye (the cornea) of dust and grime when they are always in the water. Overlaying the common plan of the eyes, the details vary dramatically between different species of fish, in accord with the immense diversity of body shapes and life styles. As my surveys continued over several months, I began taking photos specifically to record the details of the eyes of the dead fish, some fresh and still shining, others clouded with dehydration, yet others missing altogether leaving only a bony socket filled with sand.
Sometime during this process, the idea for giving a voice to the fish emerged. What had they seen? How would they react to the disaster engulfing them? Who would they blame? If they had the words, what would they tell us? And so my video, DEADEYE, evolved quickly, using text based on these questions, a sequence of slowly evolving still images of the eyes of dead fish, and a soundscape built up from underwater audio recordings I had made during the summer preceding the bloom.
I started this article saying that all art is political. The politics around the bloom have been bitter and divisive. People want both blame and answers. Government wants to lead but escape responsibility. As a consequence, public forums in social media and the press have been clouded by conspiracy theories, spin, and straight-out fabrication or misrepresentation.
But the biology of the bloom is complicated, spanning all levels from the various ecosystems down to the molecular interactions of algal toxins and their cellular targets. There are many unknowns and there are few easy answers. My website is the only publicly available resource that pulls together what is known about the algal toxins and how they interact with different organisms including humans. Other citizen science sites provide the most complete reports of the effects of the bloom on different aspects of the ecosystems. That these sites are needed speaks to the failure of political process to provide the public with the information that they seek.
Art presents an alternative way of dealing with this ecological crisis and its social ramifications that complements the detailed science describing the bloom. Most importantly, artists can produce work that can say “This is what it feels like”. Critically, “what it feels like” is different for every artist and every person who views any artwork. This interaction between the artist and the viewer, as mediated by the work, is necessarily influenced by the life experiences of everyone involved. Those life experiences, and how they are valued, are unavoidably embedded in the political frameworks within which they have transpired.
Art and science cooperate to share our knowledge of the world and to communicate our reactions to it. In both art and science, it is always impossible to know in advance how effective our work will be and how far its influence might spread. But if just one person realises “Oh, I didn’t know that…” or admits “I’ve never looked at that way…” or tells a friend “That’s exactly how I felt…”, then that is success. We have strengthened our community by that little bit. And all those little bits add up. In time, with more inputs, more communication, with more work, ideas and attitudes will change, hopefully in a direction that will lead to better outcomes for the environment and everything that lives within it.
I am an optimist by nature but I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the world as we know it. But we can only do what we can. That is the primary driver behind most of my recent video art. DEADEYE will not fix a single thing about the dreadful algal bloom. But it might change a few minds, it might nudge someone into action, it might make an impression on a decision maker, and who knows where those small steps may lead.
DEADEYE, HD video, stereo, 07:10 (2025)
This is the entry link on my website to information about the toxins in the algal bloom. There you can also find links to the various Government and citizen science sites dealing with the bloom:
https://www.iangibbins.com.au/science/citizen-science/south-australian-harmful-algal-bloom-2025/
One Thousand Voices: landscape, memory and immersive storytelling by Martin Sercombe
Introduction by Sarah Tremlett
Immersive storytelling can be many things, but in terms of poetry film it provides a great opportunity to extend into the world of theatre and performance in a unique way, doubling the reach of the film’s capabilities and audience, and expanding how creatives work together. For example, I read a family history-based poem in front of its associated poetry film (adapted to run without text) on just a small screen in Vancouver and also San Francisco. A poem can be born again in many iterations. As such I am really pleased to discover the New Zealand-based Wordcore Wayfinders Project which I sincerely wish were closer to home! Leading poetry filmmaker Martin Sercombe, who has been featured in Liberated Words before, shares with us both his experience of making a poetry film for an immersive presentation, and the making of the poetry film itself.
Working on my family history poetry film project TREE, I have ventured across many diverse landscapes in search of places to call home. One Thousand Voices with poem and voiceover by New Zealand poet Paris Whitehead, film by Martin, immersive soundscape by Paul McLaney and location sound by Britta Pollmuller, is a consummate exercise in melding the elusive relationship between family memories and landscape. The veracity of the poet’s voice, its cadences combined with a flowing, almost unpremeditated use of language, is one of the most successful I have heard in conveying a sense of reaching out to nature to try to reclaim paternal loss. Martin’s evocative use of the camera, often shifts between sublime, understated perspectives and patterned close-ups (e.g. ferns) to enhance the narrative. The addition of sounds captured on location provide exquisite, diamond-like moments, set against the moving, melancholy music, such as running steps at the end and something thrown into the unseen water.
The description on YouTube could not be bettered so I will repeat it here:
‘One Thousand Voices is a film poem, a fractured elegy shaped by memory, dislocation, and a yearning for belonging. Through Paris Whitehead’s layered and intimate spoken text, the protagonist moves through landscapes that offer both solace and sorrow. Nature becomes a charged terrain where absence echoes and memory takes root. The spoken text finds its visual counterpart in Martin Sercombe’s cinematography, which traces the South Island’s elemental geography: the limestone headlands of Te Hapu, the shadowed fern bush of Hokitika and tidal mud flats at dawn. Each location becomes an emotional cartography, mapping internal states through the language of wind, water, rock, and light. This three-way dialogue is completed by Paul McLaney’s immersive soundscape, composed from field recordings and live instrumentation. His score flows organically with the imagery and voice, blending breath, birdsong, and echoic tones into a sonic weave that holds the work’s emotional resonance in tension and release. In essence, the film is a meditation on loss, ancestry and the fragile threads that bind memory to landscape. Through Paris Whitehead’s layered and intimate spoken text, the protagonist moves through landscapes that offer both solace and sorrow.’
Martin has kindly given us an insight into how the film and the project as a whole came about.
The Wordcore Wayfinders Project: A Personal Journey by Martin Sercombe
Wordcore Wayfinders Aotearoa was founded in 2024 by Christian Jensen and Shane Hollands to explore immersive storytelling through the fusion of art, moving image, words and music. In December of that year, work began on a major group show that would embody this vision: Illuminated Horizons.
Christian brought together a network of poets, musicians and artists, grouping them into trios to foster collaboration across disciplines. I was invited to join one of these trios, alongside poet Paris Whitehead and composer Paul McLaney. For me, this invitation marked both an exciting challenge and an opportunity to push my own creative practice into new territory — one where my moving-image work would no longer stand alone but exist in dialogue with live music and the spoken word.
Our process began with a series of informal meetings to find common ground and devise our approach. We decided that I would start by creating a visual travelogue: a portrait of South Island landscapes, filmed in ways that might suggest not only geography but also rhythm and tone. These landscapes were chosen less for their iconic beauty than for the moods they carried: the play of mist across tidal flats, the weight of limestone cliffs, the density of fern forests. My partner, Britta Pollmuller, captured the sound textures of these environments with a field recorder and shotgun mic.
Returning to Auckland, I assembled a first edit of the footage. Rather than impose a single narrative, I shaped it into a series of episodes, each reflecting the atmosphere of a particular location. This assembly became my offering to the collaboration: a framework of images and sounds waiting for other voices.
Paul then took the material and responded musically, weaving ambient soundscapes out of reprocessed natural recordings and live instrumentation. His compositions didn’t just accompany the images; they seemed to breathe with them, amplifying their inner pulse. Paris, in turn, brought in a poetic voice that threaded through both image and sound. She chose to write from the perspective of a protagonist moving through the landscapes, evoking personal memories that carried both solace and sorrow. Her writing transformed the visual journey into something more than geography: a cartography of emotions, both light and dark.
Together, we named the work One Thousand Voices, a title that captured the sense of polyphony: poet, filmmaker, composer, landscape: speaking in unison. Two versions of the film were cut: one designed for theatre screenings with Paris’ recorded narration, and another stripped of narration, so the imagery could serve as a living backdrop to her live performance.
The Illuminated Horizons Show
When Illuminated Horizons premiered in August 2025 at Te Puna Cultural Hub, I experienced our work within the larger constellation of five other trios. The evening was held together with warmth by MC Allana Goldsmith, whose humour, waiata, and audience engagement framed the event as both performance and community gathering.
The opening act, Still Thinking — the duo of Lucie Blaze and Mitchell Vickery — set the tone with Shadowland, a work that felt simultaneously theatrical, cinematic and musical. Projected shadows of the performers moved across twin screens, merging with live guitar, poetry and a central sculptural installation of blinking eyes. The work occupied a cross media space: not quite a band, not quite theatre, but a haunting hybrid that asked us to reflect on the masks we wear and the selves we conceal.
Then came our trio’s One Thousand Voices. Paris stood beside the projection, delivering her poem live. In the final sequence, she drew fragments of text from a black bag, reading each one before letting it fall like a leaf into the dark. Behind her, the landscapes I had filmed shifted and transformed, merging with Paul’s score and the spoken words. Watching it unfold in front of an audience, the work felt very much like a shared act of storytelling that lived between us and those watching.
The second trio, Blank and Empty Boxes, took a playful turn. Lex Shoemark, Noah Brown, and Luani Nansen explored Polynesian and Māori identity through rap, storytelling and improvisation. Their performance balanced humour and poignancy, breaking the fourth wall while reflecting on family histories, present struggles, and future hopes.
The second half opened with Mono Watt. James Littlewood’s spoken and sung texts, layered against Ross Cunningham’s driving guitar noise and John Pain’s electronic textures, created a raw and expansive soundscape. Their work felt like standing at the fault line between intimacy and chaos: songs about relationships and social power delivered with both delicacy and force.
Collaboration remained a central theme in Worldbuilders, where Jade Lewis and Hon Manawangphiphat joined Sally Legg in a lively cross-disciplinary exchange. Blending stop-motion visuals, indie-pop energy, and narrative invention, the piece embodied its title, presenting not just a performance but a process of co-creation involving a huge collection of domestic bric-a-brac, rugs and detritus.
The evening closed with Tangaroa’s Realm, a tour-de-force by David Eggleton with Richard Wallis and Ronald Andreassend. Eggleton’s rapid-fire delivery — at once surreal, satirical, and musical — drew on decades of poetic tradition while remaining strikingly contemporary. Wallis’ guitar and Andreassend’s hanging sculptures expanded the performance into a cabaret of cultural and political critique. At one point a painted umbrella acted as a cue for Eggleton’s hilarious and dynamic play on the word itself and the object’s uses. It was a fitting climax: Aotearoa refracted through myth, satire and sound.
Future Plans
The team has established funding for a series of production workshops, which will lead up to Illuminated Horizons II, on National Poetry Day 2026. It now has a permanent office space at Te Puna Creative Hub, where it will plan the annual show, alongside a range of spinoff projects. Examples include collage poetry workshops and a pop up activation for Auckland Live Summer in The Square.
VIDEOBARDO, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 2025: visual and verbal experiment at its best
VideoBardo, with Director Javier Robledo, is a firm favourite of mine, since it was the first videopoetry festival I submitted to, way back in 2008 (and even 2006) and is one of the most experimental (with visual and verbal poetry). After showing there twice I was invited to give a talk in November 2012 at Por La Tierra (For the earth) (see earlier post – sarah-tremlett-invited-to-videobardo-symposium-for-the-earth-buenos-aires). This year there were 5 locations, one being Instants Festival in Marseille on the 19th of October, and on the 25th of October, and the 3rd and the 7th of November events took place at different locations in Argentina. Coming up on the 17th at the National Library of Buenos Aires is the videopoetry section. https://videobardo1.wixsite.com/my-site-1/copia-de-inicio
Alongside other poetic presentations and the launch of the publication Imágenes del Bardo by Javier Robledo himself, there are just two videopoetry sections: Argentinian Videopoetry (11 artists) and International videopoets (19). I think this focused concentration of films works very well for the audience and the festival and the artists involved. I am also honoured to say that among a fine selection of talented artists, my film Nocturne for a Lighterman / Nocturno para un launchero, is being shown, too. I wish I could be there. Being invited to present at VideoBardo in 2012 remains one of my most significant videopoetry memories.
One of the Argentinian videopoems: Alegria (Joy) by Julieta Tetelbaum, is a performative piece that has garnered many awards worldwide. Expressing a wide emotional landscape, this film is described as ‘a journey through the mind of a 65-year-old autistic lesbian who’s addicted to sugar and can’t stop thinking about her ex-girlfriend from youth.’ Being hooked and needing love and affection as well as joy are centre stage in this wonderful work.
Although most of the festival has passed, fortunately for us, the 3rd November event is also on YouTube. Here, Javier Robledo introduces himself, actor Gabriel Espinosa and journalist José María Martinez reciting poetry from a small boat in the Paraná Delta, Argentina. This is a perfect, relaxing invitation to enjoy Argentinian poetry, and also practice Spanish at the same time. See this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ERR1TatUq8
Gabriel Espinosa, actor
Horse-Woman at Poetry Film Club, John Sebastian Lightship, Bristol
I don’t normally promote poetry readings, but I am shamelessly advertising the upcoming event in Bristol, courtesy of Poetry Film Club and Satellite of Love. It is on Tuesday, 16th September on John Sebastian Lightship, Bristol docks 7.30 to 10.00. I will be reading (after the interval) from Horse-Woman (my new poetic prose memoir with paintings, about fashion modelling and being an artist and writer, living in a bohemian bedsit in London).
This promises to be a really interesting evening concerning women and the body, since the wonderful Rebecca Rezakhani-Hilton and Chaucer Cameron will be reading and showing films first. Here are a few details.
‘Poetry Film Club returns to Bristol on 16th September. Sarah Tremlett will be reading from her latest publication ’Horse-Woman’, and screening ‘Flight’, the poetry film from the prologue to the book. Plus poems from Rebecca Rezakhani-Hilton and Chaucer Cameron. It‘ll be a great evening with lots of discussion in a relaxed venue.’
Satellite of Love says:
September’s Poetry Film Club will feature Sarah Tremlett (FRSA, leading, British, prize-winning poetry filmmaker, poet, artist and theorist, and editor of Liberated Words online) reading from and talking about her latest publication, and screening Flight the poetry film from the prologue to the book. Horse-Woman (Basic Bruegel Editions, Canada, April, 2025) is a mythical ‘otherkin’ poetic memoir with paintings from the past. It relates to a traumatic period in her early life when she was working as a fashion model whilst painting and writing in a bohemian London bedsit, and in this account, resurrects a childhood horse companion for protection.
Paintings from the book and selected modelling images
Rebecca Rezakhani-Hilton will be reading short poems. Rebecca is a poet, filmmaker, DJ and multidisciplinary artist whose work an ongoing exploration of dreams, empathy, angels, temporality, return, hope, impossibility and an exploration into her Iranian heritage. At the heart of her practice lies a deep interest in the relationship between the body and the contexts we inhabit socially, historically and spiritually. Her work has been exhibited both in the UK and internationally, including in Bath, Newcastle, London, Belgium and Berlin. Rebecca will present a poetry film and read short poems.
Chaucer Cameron is the author of In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered. The poetry film adaptation of the book has screened at the CCA in Covent Garden, Reel Poetry Festival in Houston, Aberystwyth Poetry Festival, Worcester, Exeter, Bristol, Glastonbury and Yorkshire. Chaucer will share four variations of one poetry film ‘Hooked’, from a poem in In an Ideal World.
https://solpoetry.org.uk/satellite-of-love-hosts-poetry-film-club-4
It would be very nice to see you there. :))
For more about the book see: sarahtremlett.com
TICKETS
Headfirst
either
https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/whats-on/john-sebastian-lightship/tue-16-sep-satellite-of-love-host-poetry-film-club-136816#e136816
or
