HAPPY NEW BEGINNINGS, HAPPY NEW IDEAS, HAPPY EASTER xxx
Interview and reviews of POETRY FILM presentations at LYRA
Lucy English has just sent me a really comprehensive review of Helen Dewbery’s and my own poetry film presentations at LYRA last Sunday. It is a really interesting piece of writing – we were interviewed after the event and I was wondering how it would turn out. So here it is!
Thank you to Sebastian Lewis for taking the time to find out more about poetry film.
Sarah 🙂
La Scapigliata wins the first Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow prize at LYRA 2022
So pleased to announce that the La Scapigliata : the Woman with the Dishevelled Hair has won the first Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow ekphrastic poetry film prize at LYRA poetry festival, Bristol. It was based on the painting La Scapigiliata by Leonardo da Vinci (1506–1508) with poem by LA poet Lois P. Jones, film by Australian Jutta Pryor, soundscape by Belgian sound artist Peter Verwimp, performance by Rebecca Page and including a voiceover by Katia Viscogliosi. The film was originally produced by the New York-based Visible Poetry Project.
There was a great turnout for the screening, which was very gratifying since I have spent two years curating via Zoom. Firstly, we watched Helen Dewbery’s incisive and relevant curation on the festival theme of Breaking Boundaries : New Worlds, including As Cherries a motion graphic film by Ukrainian artist Dariia Kuzmych based on a poem by Olena Huseynova (translated by Sasha Andrusyk). Then we watched the finalists for the prize.
As Cherries, Dariia Kuzmych & Olena Huseynova.
I would like to thank Lucy English and Danny Pandolfi for their very well produced festival. Each film had signing and subtitles and the event was wholly inclusive. Bravo to you for that.
I was also really pleased to meet Margaret Creedon who came from Cork especially for the event. These kind of connections make the poetry film world so rich and exciting, far beyond the films themselves. Her artistic reconstruction of Klimt’s The Kiss is fascinating in itself. Finding the actors to play the famous parts, drawing the images, composing and writing the poem in a beautiful script, and the music, too! All these adding their textures to the whole, and filmed by fellow Irish filmmaker and poet Colm Scully. It also included a really personal background story, opening up more areas for discussion in this particular genre.
The judges – poet and Cheltenham Festival director Anna Saunders, Mary McDonald poetry filmmaker, and Charles Olsen, poet, poetry filmmaker and curator had a difficult time making the decision, In fact, actually asked for more time to really consider the ins and outs of an ekphrastic poetry film. They commented generally:
‘These are five extraordinary films. all are testimony to the power and magic of poetry cinema. Every film is a unique and imaginative response to the fine poems that have inspired them. There were times that I was as thrilled and gripped as when watching a good thriller, as awestruck as I feel when standing in front of a piece of art. And the poems were very strong, each one used a rich and inventive vocabulary and each had something important to say.’
‘With an audiovisual medium I think the ‘vivid description of a work of art’ can be opened up to a more explorative experience. Whereas a poem or writing can conjure a visual experience, a poetry film has the potential to go beyond both the words and the visual representation of the painting to bring it alive in new ways. I hope the competition inspires more creative explorations of paintings through film.’
The winning film was thought to have a poem with a ‘candid, clear, and pure voice beautifully echoed by the film and its use of dance, monochromatic images, the repetition of a single note and the haunting, choral voice. “this face, a house of stars before the fall” is a breathtaking start to a transcendent poem and the iridescent, and airborne nature of the film gels with it beautifully. This is a work of the soul, profound and out of time… The layers of sound blend and meld and slide together, creating a voluptuous sensation of being suspended in sound. The layers of visuals blend and meld together and apart so that we seem to be held and we sway within the light and images.’ They felt it was: “It was the strongest poetry film due to the way the verse and the cinematography mirror each other and fuse yet, each bring something new to the cinema. This film really emphasized the haunting beauty of the work that inspired it.”
ACCEPTANCE SPEECHES
‘In the genre of film poetry, it is certainly true that the whole is greater than its parts. I believe the strong thread which wove these parts together relied on our individual sense of the spirit world. There is a mastery in filmmaker Jutta Pryor’s ability to push the boundaries of liminal space and make them visible. Sound designer Peter Verwimp’s deep shamanistic perspective allowed him to channel the necessary soundscape for each segment of the film. For me, the film represents a sense of our innate elan. I believe if everyone knew, with certainty, that life did not end at physical death, the world would be a different place. So thank you with all my heart to the judges and festival curators who valued this film. Thank you to Jutta Pryor for her profound vision and to Peter Verwimp for his infusion of spirit, mystery and grace. My thanks also to model and dancer Rebecca Page and to Katia Viscogliosi for her added vocal contributions in this film. Thank you.’ LOIS P. JONES
‘Greetings, I am delighted that La Scapigliata – the woman with the dishevelled hair after the painting by Leonardo da Vinci has been recognized at the inaugural Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow award at the LYRA Bristol poetry festival, 2002. I send my greatest thanks to Sarah Tremlett for including and sharing our international online collaboration amongst the works of the other contributors all of whom I hold in the highest regard. The Visible Poetry Project connected myself as a filmmaker with poet Lois P. Jones and knowing that it would be a challenging work on many levels La Scapigliata was the poem of my choice.
The closer I connected with la Scapigliata the more complex the vision. I invited Peter Verwimp, a sound designer musician in Brussels for his creative contribution as this work in four stages required sound specific to the narrative. Rebecca Page contributed her graceful movements, and Katia Viscogliosi her sultry spoken word. My heartfelt thank you to all who continue to develop and support poetry, film and sound arts. Good Morning from Melbourne, Australia, I wish I could enjoy the evening with you. JUTTA PRYOR also available at https://soundcloud.com/or-dio/jutta-pryor-acceptance-speech-frame-to-frames-your-eyes-follow-ekphrastic-poetry-film-prize?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Wonderful Review of The Poetics of Poetry Film in JULIET art magazine by Enzo Minarelli
A great article on The Poetics of Poetry Film by leading experimental Italian poet Enzo Minarelli in longstanding, contemporary art magazine – JULIET. I received a copy of the magazine the other day and it looks beautifully printed in the flesh, with some really interesting observations by Enzo.
The article is in Italian, so for those of you who are able to read it in the original language, it is available in print and here at MINARELLI_j206_prime bozze bis Otherwise the original images and text (slightly out of alignment and with a rough translation in English) are available here at MINARELLI_j206_primebozzebis-en
Incidentally Enzo has an amazing exhibition at the moment, in the Piedmont region of Italy N.E. of Turin – The Enzo Minarelli ‘Triptych of the Sublime’ exhibition, curated by Carlotta Cernigliaro, is part of the program of celebrations for the 60th birthday of the Fluxus movement. Guido Molinari writes:
How to enclose the intensity
The Triptych of the Sublime is made up of separate chapters united by a common thread: an immersion in the flow of life, whether evoked through writing, objects or graphic traces. Enzo Minarelli uses merchandise products invested with traces of experience. He inserts typographical characters and texts, or draws attention to the artist’s sign, whose slight graphic vibration leads back to the exquisite act of man’s manual skills …Overall, the sense of a walk emerges, it presents itself as an ideal path, of growth and development of the person … The statement «Life is a long walking poem», pointed out by a white and red chromatic highlight, is made with the characters found, for example, on wooden crates for heavy transport, to underline a raw and direct impact of the lettering that clashes with the intense and engaging charm of the sentence.
schematic order which, however, does not renounce the slight vibration of the hand in the act of drawing the sign. To be removed is the standard impersonality of the movable typeface in favour of manual intervention, which favours an emotional transport. The poet therefore forges, like a medieval decorator, an organic and complex system in which the visual arts meet language.
The third instalment of the trilogy, Yahoo Gulliver’s travels leads us to the freedom and joy of childhood. An arrangement of small used toys, spaced apart, creates a kind of fun, motley and colourful parade. Behind them a used and black painted car roof rack forms the grid on which to line up and display all the objects. Once installed, the work rises above the viewer, hung high, placed to animate the space like medieval wooden crucifixes suspended near the altar. The fact that these are used games suggests that they are not exhibited by the artist as mere examples of products of the industry but that they were chosen because they were previously used by children, who, most likely, enjoyed using them. The discarded, abandoned object, the object trouvé, once isolated and proposed as a work of art, sometimes brings with it an intense evocation of the context to which it belonged. It is no longer a question of considering only a consumer product as such but of perceiving it as a testimony of the context of which it was part and from which it was subsequently subtracted, specifically a portion of the infantile imagination. In this case, the delicacy of the sample stands out a playful spirit that must be given back to the adult man. The work manages to bring out from the dimension of memory an evocation of pleasure and fantasy that all of us, once we become mature, tend to forget, or are forced to remove for utilitarian purposes, subject to social rules and work obligations that divide and they limit our originally extremely broad and unsegmented psychic life. On the other hand, artists, from the historical avant-gardes onwards, have dedicated themselves to seek and explore these free instinctual sources, whether they are to be found in dreams, in primitivism, in art brut or as happens in this seductive composition by Minarelli, in the imaginific area of the playful spirit. The works of the Triptych of the Sublime affirm on the whole the complete freedom of invention on the part of the author, ready to avoid homologating choices of alignment with the dominant trends. The sense of craftsmanship in the workmanship, expressed with direct expressive force and without mediations, constitutes the value that distinguishes the works, rich in references to writing, to that literature and poetry that can ignite the soul.
Enzo Minarelli (b: 1951) is an Italian poet, performer, researcher in the field of sound poetry, electronics and video poetry.
Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow – finalists, PROGRAMME and judges for the poetry film prize in LYRA 2022
LYRA 2022 is fast approaching and the theme this year is Breaking Boundaries: New Worlds. On 3rd April at the historical location of the SS Great Britain (in a theatre not the ship itself!) Helen Dewbery of Elephant’s Footprint will be curating a selection of poetry films on the festival theme. Her artists are: Carolyn Guinzio, Diek Grobler, Dariia Kuzmych, Tom Stockley, Eduardo Yague and Shirley Camia. I will be showing the selected films for the Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize ‘Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow’. Please see POETRY FILM PROGRAMME HERE.
The finalists for Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow are:
Marc Neys & H.K. Hummel, Marc Zegans and Peg Simone, Colm Scully & Margaret Creedon, Jutta Pryor & Lois P. Jones, and Eve Kalugin, with an additional film by myself (not in the contest!). The winner will be announced at the live screening.
I would like to take this opportunity to announce the fantastic judges for the ekphrastic poetry film prize. I am so pleased that they have taken on this onerous but rewarding task. A heartfelt thanks to all of you.
ANNA SAUNDERS
Gloucestershire poet, Anna Saunders. Picture by Clint Randall www.pixelprphotography.co.uk
Anna Saunders has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North, ‘a modern mythmaker’ by Paul Stephenson, and Tears in the Fence said of her ‘Anna Saunders’ poetry is reminiscent of Plath – with all its alpha achievement and radiance’.
She is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear(Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams), and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams). Anna’s new book is Feverfew (Indigo Dreams). The collection has been described as ‘rich with obsession, sensuousness and potency’ by Ben Ray, and as ‘a beautiful and necessary collection’ by Penny Shuttle. She is also the Executive Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and works as a creative writing tutor and mentor, communications specialist, journalist, broadcaster and copywriter/editor.
Anna is often inspired by painting in her poetry and Burne Jones and the Fox was made into a poetry film by Diana Taylor of Redcliffe Films.
CHARLES OLSEN
Charles Olsen (Aotearoa New Zealand, 1969) moved to Spain in 2003 drawn by his interest in Velasquez and to study flamenco guitar. His paintings have been exhibited in Madrid, Barcelona, Oporto, Paris, Wellington and the Saatchi Gallery, London. His short film The dance of the brushes won second prize in the I Flamenco Short Film Festival, Madrid, 2010, and he has published the poetry collections Sr Citizen (2011) and Antípodas (2018). His poems and translations are included in NZ Poetry Yearbook, Landfall, Cordite Poetry Review, Blackmail Press and Neke. Charles contributed two essays, Poetry Film in Portugal and Spain, and Poetic Sound to ‘The Poetics of Poetry Film’ (Intellect Books 2021) and his essay, Poetry and Film in Colombia, is included in The London Magazine, 2021.
In 2017 he was awarded the XIII distinction Poetas de Otros Mundos by the Fondo Poético Internacional and he received the III Antonio Machado Poetry Fellowship of Segovia and Soria in 2018. Together with poet Lilián Pallares, flamenco pianist Pablo Rubén Maldonado and flamenco dancer Selene Muñoz, he created the performance Agita Flamenco which was presented in the New Zealand pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Sala Manuel de Falla of the SGAE, Madrid, 2012. Charles and Lilián direct the audiovisual producer antenablue ‘the observed word’ and their poetry films have been included in international festivals and featured in Moving Poems, Poetry Film Live and Atticus Review. Their collaborative Māori language film Noho Mai, won Best Poetry Film in the 8th Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film Festival, Cork.
Charles Olsen in Segovia, 2018. Photo Lilian Pallares.
MARY MCDONALD
Mary McDonald is a Canadian writer and multimedia artist whose work explores word through sound, image, and movement. McDonald’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses text, photography, poetry film, music and immersive sound, interactive AR (augmented reality) installations, and community participatory arts projects. Her poetry films and AR installations have been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. McDonald’s poetry film and AR installation, On the Margin of History was awarded first prize in Digital and Performative Multimedia Art at Arts 2019, Surrey City Art Gallery, BC, Canada.
Mary McDonald
Mixing the Arts
The prize will be announced on the 3rd of April at the screening. This is an annual prize so submissions that have missed the deadline for this screening will be held over for next year. I am VERY EXCITED to find out who has won!
FREE admission with tickets available at https://www.lyrafest.com/#events/e72158
REELpoetry 2022 – 25–27 February ‘Better than ever before’
Congratulations to Fran Sanders and her team in Houston for organising this richly programmed hybrid (first day live, the rest mainly online) poetry film festival this year. From poetry film curations and open mic performances by the deaf and hard of hearing (Willy Conley, Sabina England, Meridith Gray) to individual artists’ curations from literally all around the world (Colm Scully, Ireland; Steve Smart, Scotland; Ian Gibbins, Australia; Helen Matte /ZumTrobaR, Canada; and Giovanni Singleton, USA), to commissioned films from Houston-based Aurora Picture Show to performance with video (Amir Safi, Write About Now), they have surpassed themselves.
I am fortunate to be on the judging panel for the competition entries, and even more fortunate to have my poetry film with poem by Heidi Seaborn ‘Selfie with Marilyn’ selected by Ian Gibbins for his curation distURBANce. The description states: ‘No idyllic pastorals here. Instead we have a program of urban stories, distorted by the power of advertising, social media, celebrity, with more than a hint of corruption, crime and miscellaneous bad behaviour.’
I am also really pleased to share details about the short film to be shown at REELpoetry that chronicles the extraordinary collaborative public poetry project Love Letters in Light (May 2021) curated in LA county by artist, writer and public arts champion Leila Hamidi. In response to the devastating fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Hamidi wanted to hear the voices of the people speak, to bring healing and hope through art as poetry as a homage to Los Angeles. She has a skill and vision that has developed such large-scale projects concerned with art and well-being before, with an aim to ‘reconcile histories and imagine new futures’.
Through the simple device of 10 LED screens placed outside (and in partnership with) 10 LA county libraries (also part of the We Rise project run out of LA County Department of Mental Health), we can read 15-word poems (bilingual in English and Spanish) that encapsulate the mindset of those who are dealing with the new world that has arisen as we still grieve in these difficult times.
With a small group of core poets: Jerry Quickley, Victoria Chang, Imani Tolliver, féi Hernandez and Yesika Salgado, around 300 poems from the Los Angeleno community were selected through an open call, with each poem appearing for 24 hours.
As project translator and poet Yesika comments: ‘this project allows people a stake in the community in a way they never had before … a quiet, revolutionary thing we did.’ This is echoed by LA County Library director Skye Patrick (Library Journal’s 2019 Librarian of the Year).
Victoria Chang comments how great it is that the LED itself has been appropriated ‘not for something you don’t need, for capitalism’, but reflecting the truth of society itself. It made me think how the LED, once bringing objective truisms to the street (late 1970s) by leading American artist Jenny Holzer, has now become a vehicle for collective subjectivity, for the unvoiced. From ‘Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise’ to ‘We have lived a moonless night. But morning comes.’
In parallel, across the decades our political world has shifted slowly in activating ‘othered’ voices: from women’s rights through to a diversity of communities and their perspectives. We need to reduce the dominating and pivotal power dynamics that have created many of the problems we face today and listen to all members of society. This project couldn’t have happened at a more important time.
As Victoria Chang states in the face of a grief that never dies: ‘Language can save you’; and simply but so profoundly féi Hernandez (trans, non-binary and Board President of Gender Justice, LA) observes: ‘Words are a way of documenting that we exist’. In a terrible sense we cannot take for granted this basic human right – of defining ourselves by ourselves.
The film is beautifully directed by Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic (Electric Park Films), produced by Leila Hamidi and edited by Misha Scott, and it will be shown alongside a very interesting discussion with Leila Hamidi, Yesika Salgado, Fran Sanders, Amir Safi, and myself at 4:30–5:30 P.M. Sunday February 27th CST (or 10:30–11:30 P.M. UK).
Leila Hamidi is currently curating a multi-media theatre piece with a group of interdisciplinary artists, writers and musicians which will go live in 2023.
