Presenting at Women in Word poetry film screening, Hypatia Trust, Penzance
Thrilled to be presenting at Women in Word festival as part of Hypatia Trust in Penzance this Friday, where a really strong and vital selection of poetry films will be screened. The whole weekend promises to be really memorable and is already nearly sold out, so try and get to the sun!
https://hypatia-trust.org.uk
AFTER WORDS
This event was really well attended (no seats left, in fact additional seats needed) and the introduction which included a mention of The Poetics of Poetry Film, had everyone buzzing. The next day a very special poetry reading and fascinating discussion with Penelope Shuttle and Karen Smith (what inspired, complementary programming). And in the evening a chance to dance in a 18th-century ballroom at the back of a pub/hotel. Perfect way to celebrate Women In Words! Thank you Linda Cleary for all your hard work. Memorable.
Ana Segovia painting inspiration for Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow, Fotogenia, & Link for Entry forms
The ‘Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow’ II prize (£200) is judged by an independent panel of leading poetry filmmakers, and awarded by myself for ekphrastic poetry films based on paintings or other types of art. The deadline is 30 September 2023 and all rules and regulations can be found in the entry forms (English and Spanish) below. Artists can submit (up to three) films from their own choice of artwork or this year, as we are in FOTOGENIA festival, Mexico City, (23/11/23–2/12/23) we also are proud to showcase an important and timely painting by leading contemporary Mexican painter Ana Segovia entitled Huapango Torero (2019) from the Karen Huber Gallery. [huapango means ‘a fast and complicated Mexican dance four couples that is usually performed on a wooden platform to accentuate the rhythmic beating of heels and toes’.]
When I selected this work, I felt it conveyed, through both the painting and the narrative suggested, a catalyst to inspire other breakthrough imaginations. Whilst with obvious connotations reflecting harmony with animals, it is also meant to be interpreted widely, or with broader understanding of symbolism. It may be helpful to learn more about Ana’s background (click here) and approach to patriarchal culture as subject matter, and also the fascinating and extraordinary story behind the painting (click here) (and the La Faena project) which is itself a re-imagining of another traditional painting relating to bullfighting hanging in Mexico City. Furthermore, I discovered that Ana’s work inspired poet Bruno Enciso to write a poem that accompanied the painting.
Artist Ana Segovia (b: 1991) lives and works in Mexico City and has been defined as one of the leading artists of their generation. Through their bold and brilliant figurative paintings, they exude an extraordinary confidence with colour, using it to confront patriarchal culture or ‘archetypes of Mexicanness [mexicanidad]’ head on. They have recently finished showing in the long-running ‘Who Tells a Tale adds a Tail’ group exhibition at Denver Art Museum where they were ‘interrogating mass culture’s creation of prevailing ideas about “Mexicanness” and masculinity’. See here for link.
I was drawn to their work for two reasons: in my own figurative and semi-abstract painting from the 1980s and 1990s (particularly of horses) I always worked with large canvases, and expressed form and a political and subjective eye through colour and expressive brushstrokes. But importantly, they centre on the unspoken (or historically culturally accepted) ideological drama of a scenario, creating through joyous hues a detournement of a binary gendered narrative that could be described as even anachronistic today. Whether examining cowboy culture, football or movie frames from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema it is as if a light has been shed on one moment in time. They seem to ask the viewer to reconsider, ‘propose a different way of looking at history’ to rethink every situation, every constructed cultural understanding of normativity.
There is also a fantastic poem in English and Spanish version based on the painting by leading American poets Lois P. Jones, and ekphrastic poet Elena K. Byrne which you also can use with the painting or create your own poem. Here is the poem in English.
Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca
after the painting Huapango Torero by Ana Segovia
Can I measure this distance between barbed wire and stone
wall bearing all the red delirium of spring,
between dawn and hunger and who has the upper hand…
How is it that something as small as a pistol or a knife can do away
with a man who is a bull? Or
a woman crowned by the farewell party of free speech?
There’s just this rose in my fist, and in the other, a pale sheet,
not of surrender but the torn petticoat from Lorca’s white
wedding. It was enough to hollow my mind. Enough to enter
this field the way I enter a sky full of bedroom windows.
One, witness to a bystander’s silence,
one is my child self, and another, the face of the bull.
You can’t see them, but women are singing across
the sugarcane, the sorghum, avocados,
and the wild Blue Agave. Their song carries me into the evening.
To know, like night, I begin again, entering these selves as
I climb through, step over each threshold
of who I am to test this outlawed animal mettle of our
youth, because I want to know who you are under this half-
blanched moon at the side of the hour’s
road and its unending fields that I now claim as my own.
SEND TO: liberatedwordspoetryfilms@gmail.com
Queries to Sarah Tremlett, sftremlett@gmail.com
Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia – 19/20 – and bumper bilingual magazine
This week the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia 2023 (see poetryfilmtage.de) will take place in Weimar on May 19th and 20th. There will also be a chance to see the festival online through the Media Library from May 19th– 31st.
Dance is the theme for this year with some vibrant new works on show, alongside selections of German poetry films, Bauhaus poetry shorts (University of Weimar), the World Mirror of Poetry (an overview from around the world) and of course the official selection for the grand prize. 578 short films from 60 countries submitted films for the 8th Weimar Poetry Film prize, and the shortlist can be found here.
The bilingual magazine this year is a weighty 112 pages! and includes writings by Tom Konyves (his manifesto and definition of videopoetry); myself (the thorny complexities of classification) and a German translation of my chapter Dance and Movement from The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect, 2021); festival director and magazine editor Guido Naschert on Poetry Film and Videopoetry, and festival director Christian O. Pacheco Cámara on FOTOGENIA festival. I feel in very good company!
INNOVATIVE BOOK DESIGN Rosemary Norman and Stuart Pound – the book of the film
As mentioned previously I am beginning a series on Poem & Image and related publications and so I was very happy to recently receive a really interesting book from leading poetry filmmakers Rosemary Norman and Stuart Pound. I have to say that I couldn’t take a photo of the cover as if you try to it sends you directly to the Vimeo page. A really clever idea. It includes Rosemary’s poetry with stills of the films at the back. Nicely done R and S.
It makes a good introduction as well, to the art of self publishing (under the imprint of Aspect Ratio). This has a different slant for poetry film poets I feel, (as opposed to the solely page poet variety) as poets who have written for poetry films don’t necessarily have their work in published form. In this case the book is in some ways an accompaniment or addition to the film; a vehicle to further expand the journey of the film rather than the other way around.
Apparently it came about almost by accident. Rosemary volunteers in a local library and as she narrates ‘it all started mid-February, when I talked to the person who organises events about programming Stuart and me for National Poetry Day (the library has a rather nice projector and screen bought immediately before COVID and not yet much used). She’s keen to go ahead, but I realised none of the poems in my recent Shoestring collection is in a film, and I’d like to sell books for library funds. So I thought of a self-published film poem book.
Looking at the introduction to the book, ‘How We Work’, I expect you’ll see that I used what we wrote for you for The Poetics of Poetry Film as a starting point. The poems are what’s on my Vimeo page. We were going to put a still with every poem but because the poems are different shapes and sizes it probably wouldn’t have worked visually. Then in the library I found a board book of nursery rhymes with a QR code for the tunes. We’d gone to Shoestring’s regular typesetter and he said he could generate one for us. After that we had the idea of making it the main element in the cover design. And it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have stills for all the poems. A few would be fine.
We don’t have any more publishing plans at the moment, we thought of this as a one-off. But we have made another poetry film since!’
Congratulations Stuart and Rosemary!
FilmArte Festival MADRID Saturday 6 May – Charles Olsen’s The Exhibition
‘The FilmArte Festival returns to Madrid for an evening filled with some of the best films about art(ist)s in our Spring 2023 edition! In addition to watching the films at the amazing Artistic Metropol, you’ll also get to ask your questions to the film teams participating in our Q&A!’
Very proud to say that The Exhibition by Charles Olsen is included in the screening. He commissioned myself (Sarah Tremlett) alongside a group of highly talented artists to make short responses to his playfully ‘irreverent’ docu-journo-video essay on the art world. My work for him was about my rabbit Duchess and the importance of the environment to me (even in my small backyard) over the importance (or lifelessness) of the museum. It reflected on the way art cannot achieve the same beauty as nature itself. When Duchess died, the silent film I gave to Charles eventually became its own short poetry film – I Cannot be Human – where I added text that attempted to share my grief at the dying planet and Duchess’ death. As an autistic artist I also feel very close to animals and birds and the vital role they play in my happiness.
FilmArte Festival – Madrid
6 May at 20:00h
cinema Artistic Metropol
Calle de las Cigarreras, 6, 28005 Madrid
(Metro: Embajadores)
See event details in FilmArte Facebook and the program below.
PROGRAM MAY 6
In the Land of Brightness by Cristina Hortigüela Diez
Spain 2022
Feature Documentary
The documentary, filmed over the last two years, shows the creative process and execution of several projects developed by world renowned artist Daniel Canogar. The film includes the production of smaller pieces, such as “Fulgurations” and “Latencies”, as well as other public artworks, including “Oculus”, “Dynamo” and “Storming Times Square”, among others. Structured around an intimate interview with Daniel Canogar, the artist examines his career with perspective, from the turning point of participating as a guest artist at Expo Dubai 2020 with the artwork “Dynamo”.
Mary Magdalene by Ramon Sanmartin Solé
Spain 2022
Short Documentary
Barcelona photographer José Mercado decides to reinterpret Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” through photography, turning it into a protest against religion and patriarchy.
The Exhibition by Charles Olsen
Spain 2021
Short Experimental
‘An irreverent take on the art world. A poetic hybrid combining essay, documentary, journalism, and video art.’ A collaborative poetry film taking as its starting point a poem by filmmaker and poet Charles Olsen presented as a news report in front of the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, and including specially created pieces by Eduardo Yagüe and Sarah Tremlett, alongside interviews with artist and philosopher Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, professor of art aesthetics and theory Ilia Galán, videos from Instagram artists Jan Erichsen and Ángel Rivas, artwork by the Olive brothers, movement in a museum by Mia Gill, and the Argentinian actor Ignacio Kowalski. The idea of play and a child’s approach to art runs through this piece.
Double Act by Lotte Thomas
Spain 2022
Short Experimental
Behind the scenes of a circus, a clown puts on her makeup in a dressing room, waiting for her turn on stage. When the clown leaves the dressing room to step out in front of the audience, her reflection stays behind. ‘Double Act’ sheds light on the internal and external sides of a personality: we are all performers, presenting a curated, polished fragment of our real selves while the rest remains in the shadows.
Kaschmir by Tom Blankenberg
Germany 2021
Music Video
Kaschmir is a music video… a performance clip, almost a dance choreography… with a mechanical musician only.
Black Hole by Romain Claris
France 2022
Short Experimental
“Black hole” is a short film written and directed by Romain Claris made for “On the rocks” the Nicolas Claris & Romain Claris photography and video exhibition.
Elements of a Journey: Antoni Tàpies by James Scott
USA 2023
Feature Documentary
Elements of a Journey: Antoni Tàpies is an experimental documentary focusing on the legacy of Antoni Tàpies, the 20th-century Catalan painter and sculptor. The film, which follows the artist as he grows up during the Franco dictatorship, is strongly relevant to the divisive politics of today. Its goal is to engage viewers through together, Tapies’ story and his art. It explores how artists navigate complex journeys; spiritual, political, and that of the everyday. Tàpies stood out in his lifetime, not only as a major painter, but also as the voice of freedom and hope for an generation at the time of a dark and painful era in Spain. This film began principal photography in 1974, and was put on hold, due to lack of funding. The original negatives were stored at the National Film Archive in London. Now, almost 50 years later, with the support of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Elephant Trust, the film has been finally completed to become a part of the centenary celebrations of the birth of Tàpies in 2023.
Charles Olsen’s blinding new collection La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun) in the footsteps of Antonio Machado
To introduce a new section on publications containing Poetry with Images I am so proud and pleased to present the latest collection by Charles Olsen La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun) published in Spain by Olifante Ediciones de Poesía. As an artist, poet and filmmaker, who was born in New Zealand, moved to the UK in 1981 (where he attended art school in London), and has lived in Spain since 2003, he naturally transcends cultural and creative borders and boundaries.
Equally, his poetry film work experiments across all forms, and is often interdisciplinary, working happily with workshop groups around the world (e.g. Colombia), and with creative partnerships in music, the theatre, dance and film, often alongside his partner and collaborator Lilian Pallares. An example of his wide-ranging and versatile approach can be found in his valued contribution to The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect, 2021), where he not only contributed a chapter on Spanish and Portuguese video poets, interviewing them about their working processes, but also let us into his working processes with: ‘sound’, ‘two poets and a camera’, and ‘poets on the stage with video’.
In-keeping with this theme, La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun) also offers different contexts and voices in conjunction with his own poetry. In 2018 Charles was awarded the III Antonio Machado Poetry Fellowship of Segovia and Soria where spending a month in each province he followed in Machado’s footsteps, both geographically and, lyrically, too. This also provided the opportunity for school and community workshops and talks; meeting villagers and breathing in the air and spirit of place so evocatively rendered by one of Spain’s leading modern lyric poets. As part of Charles’ Given Words project the book includes poems by other writers from New Zealand and Spain, and includes paintings, sketches and photographs: it is as if he is reaching deep into every aspect of his experience.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Spanish poetry, Antonio Machado (1875–1939) was born in Seville and completed his first collection of lyric verse (in Spanish only) in 1903 entitled Soledades: Poesias, (Solitudes: Poetry). Influenced by Symbolism and modernism, and with a strongly contemplative quality to his writing, he creates dream-like, temporal scenarios, a poet of memory and the soul. The landscape becomes for him a meditative point of focus and he writes what he sees, whether: poplars, hawthorn, doves, swallows, green pines, the river, the Guadalquivir, or workers who live within the remits of their daily existence. Within ‘canvases of memory’ melancholic or not, a common metaphor for him is the ‘path’ or ‘the journey’ and as such provides a fitting mentor for an artist re-treading his steps.
I go dreaming down the roads
of the afternoon. The golden
hills, the green pines,
the dusty oaks!…
Where can this road go?
(XI, The Traveller, Soledades: Poesias, (Solitudes: Poetry)
Charles’ own poetry is open and airy, concise and superbly crafted, often employing short line lengths which echo Machado’s approach to form and structure. Richly imagistic, his artist’s eye captures and documents every nuance of every situation. Inevitably, in visiting Castile he encounters the same landscape as the master, and must then work with his own vocabulary in relation to identical subjects. In ‘La Granja de San Idelfonso’ he describes the night-time city scene (including a quiet nod to Machado’s ubiquitous pine), and through the anachronistic word ‘lamps’ situates us as if we were back in 1903, and the great poet himself were present.
Lamps give the scene form:
an orange cast on the soft stone façade
a window, white rectangle,
curtains and blinds, tenuous lines,
and a streetlamp draws shadows
behind the pines.
A light goes out.
He continues with the sound of plates rattling, his wife calling and insects alighting on the page. Colours change in this brief window on a life captured: orange, white, indigo … and we are living the moment with him, yet also aware of the very timelessness of everyday experiences. Looking at this verse once again, I can even imagine that the lamp mentioned at the beginning of this evocative scenario represents a metaphor for Machado himself. That all the other lines that follow are in some way due to this original light ‘that gives the scene form’ especially the shadows behind the pines, and then, he is gone. Charles must have had him in mind at many points on his own journey, and here for me, it feels as if he is definitely present.
Short offerings of narrative prose in the present tense can illuminate a scene in a vivid light and also remind the reader of the visual impact of being somewhere different. One of my favourites in this vein is ‘Sonata for Reading Room’ in three ‘Movements’ from Soria Public Library. Here, the characters in this unfolding ‘play’ appear like an orchestra in which he says ‘I have a front row seat, and I lose myself in rustles and silence.’
First movement
Like music stands, shelves display magazines and newspapers.
Windows line the other side. Slowly exhaled breath. Egg-
blue formica-topped tables with bentwood legs. A page shakes.
Matching square blue and yellow leather armchairs. Performers
arrive, browse the stands and select their score: Marca, ABC, El
País, El Mundo. Hat on table. Forehead on hand. A crescendo of
turning pages. A chair legs’ scrape. The shush of arms entering
the jacket. Exit right. A glasses case lies open awaiting the final
snap shut.
The poet’s artistic attention to detail is repeated in the exquisitely produced volume by Olifante, where the softly textured matt pea- green cover folds to make a place mark, and the reader finds a beautiful watercolour postcard inside (repeated as a full image). With such a diverse selection of writing, the book is helpfully divided into three sections (and translated in Spanish and English): ‘Where the Echo Sleeps’ (Charles’ poems responding to Castile and the fellowship), ‘Given Words’ (including poems by other Spanish and New Zealand authors from Machado-related workshops) and ‘Blue Skies’ about childhood. Apparently, this was inspired by what must have been the last line written by the great poet, (found in his pocket after his death) ‘These blue days and this sun of childhood’, where the pathos is overwhelming. It is in this section that we are introduced to glimpses of Charles’ earlier years, such as what he was doing during the 1983 and 1992 bomb blasts in London.
La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun) has well and truly established the author in his field. This is already a treasured work – not only as a beautifully made object, but also as a light-filled document of a poet’s journey, their lyric path, their ‘dreaming down the roads of the afternoon’ and all they encounter on the way. As such, I feel that Antonio Machado would be looking down kindly on him.
Charles presented the collection on Thursday, 20 April in the gallery O_LUMEN, Calle Claudio Coello 141, Madrid, Spain, with the poet Diego Valverde Villena, followed by ‘Readers Opinions’ from Dayana Jiménez, Master in Anthropology and PhD in Social Communication, and Rick Armstrong, New Zealand potter, scientist and teacher.
There was also a projection of Poema del camino. Made with Paladio Arte (a theatre company and social inclusion project working with people with learning difficulties and disabilities in Segovia) it documents a ‘poetry walk’, and the words inspired by the walk and views became ‘Walk Poem’. You can watch it here: vimeo.com/antenablue/paseo.
‘Rebellious Sun burns with curiosity and restless energy, a wandering journey of travel, culture and thought.’
Review by Erica Stretton in Kete Books
Charles Olsen book launch; photo by Liliane Pallares
More information about Rebellious Sun here.
Information about the presentation on 20 April 2023 in O_LUMEN, Madrid, here.
