Visible Poetry Project 2020
All the films are online now at The Visible Poetry Project www.visiblepoetryproject.com @VisiblePoetryProject. You can view a poem a day for April – National Poetry Month USA – from the New York-based organisation. I have really enjoyed the variety, especially during lockdown, and it is good to look back over previous years, too. If you are a selected filmmaker you can pick one of their chosen poems to develop. I was chosen for April 25th and I was lucky to be able to choose evocative, bittersweet poem ‘Selfie with Marilyn’ by US poet Heidi Seaborn www.heidiseabornpoet.com @HeidiSeaborn. Her writing encapsulates Marilyn’s imaginary thoughts / loss of innocence perfectly to me. Equally, I feel Hatti Rees www.hattirees.com @Hatti_Rees completely inhabits the roles of Marilyn and Norma Jeane. Many thanks VPP, Heidi and Hatti (and Georgi for the stills) for the opportunity. More details will be available here soon – Sarah 🙂
Newlyn PZ Film Festival 2020 Poetry Film Competition
Lucy and I had an enjoyable but difficult time judging the poetry films at Newlyn PZ Film Festival 2020 www.newlynfilmfestival.com (now rescheduled for next year). But well done to all who entered, the eleven finalists and the prize winners, who are justly deserved. All the films were selected before the full onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic; yet it has transpired that the finely crafted winning films all contain narratives that address (sometimes acutely personal and philosophical) responses to death amidst life.
A particular mention goes to: Dave Richardson for Sinkhole and Adrian B. Earle (ThinkWriteFly) for BoyShapedSpace, for joint first-place winners. Each of these films addresses different experiences of losing (readjusting to a father with Alzheimer’s) and loss (the death of a son and friend), in such moving and affecting ways. Please note the BBC currently hold the rights to BoyShapedSpace, and so we are unable to screen it at this moment in time.
The filmic interpretation of Canadian poet Doyali Islam’s thought-provoking poem ‘Water for Canaries’ won second prize with evocative and mesmerising hand-cut stencil animations (such delicate and beautiful birds) by director Suzie Hanna. It is a meditation on a photograph taken during a ceasefire after the bombing of the city Beit Hanoun in 2014, where the fragility of life remains poignant amidst the destruction. Hanna designed and animated the characters, and produced the storyboard and the compositing. She co-wrote the script with Jude Cowan Montague who also created the watercolour paintings and the soundtrack. I am told they worked on it 16 hours a day! Animation is a time-consuming shared labour of love; not for the faint-hearted.
In Fugitive Creatures, third prize winner Meriel Lland has expanded on her ethos of biophilia (embracing a connection with other species), linking the point of view of an elderly man, and the power of nature to sustain him through his journey in life. Lland quotes the spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh ‘Real change will only happen when we fall in love with our planet. We cannot “be” by ourselves but as “interbeings” with all that is.’ In short, to connect with and appreciate the natural world will change us, too.
Her words are so appropriate as I sit here in lockdown today, in a world that has been forcibly decelerated from the overpowering industrial and capitalist systems that have been out of control and oblivious to planetary destruction for so long. We have to take a biophilic stance or there will be no planet, and no life to treasure. We live alongside and with other species not despite them. If you can, in these dark days, take heart by listening to the birds without traffic noise and pollution. Hear them sing and feel it, and commit to memory for when the cogs start whirring again.
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE FINALISTS
Julia Giles Ark; Diego Bonilla Big Data; Ian Gibbins Future Perfect; Mary McDonald Wishing Well; Colm Scully Electrified; Matt Mullins Semi-Automatic Pantoum; Lucia Sellars From a Knife Wound; Simon Daniels The Three Me’s; Marc Niehus Shiver; Kathryn L. Darnell Colour: Another Haiku; Emily Joy Oomen The Girl with Red Shoes.
N.B. See recent post – LYRA Poetry Films for the Environment – for Lland’s enlightening essay – ‘How They Came Together: Biophilia and Practice in Rain Frog Promise’, alongside other vital essays by Lucy English, Caleb Parkin and Helen Moore on the importance of prioritizing a shared ecosystem today.
Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie
Wonderful news that the mammoth – over 400 pages – publication Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie by leading Canadian videopoets Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas is now out online https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/14790
Published by Brock University’s Small Walker Press it is a comprehensive survey of their collaboration over a thirty-year period. Catherine Parayre has written the French introduction, with Lucy English writing in English. It has also been my pleasure to contribute an essay on their extraordinary body of work. In my research it took me a long time to get to know (and relish) all their developments. I am particularly fond of their use of documenting first-hand experience as in ‘Slices of Life’ from the nineties for example; as well as their finely crafted and important ecopoetry films of more recent years. For my in-depth analysis on their filmic and poetic techniques please check out the book itself.
But I would just like to say that what adds to the poetry (that is always succinct, and of its time and place whilst setting us on a philosophical path), is the fact that it is bilingual. This can create comparisons (visual as well as verbal), as one language is typeset next to the other, but also reminds us of their Canadian roots, and all its associations and influences (geographic, artistic and political). The poetry and the videos emanate not just from the combining of two creative fields, and the collaboration and consequent creative marriage of two people, but two significant cultures. This ‘bilinguality’ extends our understanding of what it means to be not just poetically engaged and enlightened but politically aware in the 21st century. Go Read!!!!
Rebecca Hilton’s Beginner’s Guide to ZEBRA
In these isolating times when the world feels as if it is on hold, we are sharing an article by artist Rebecca Hilton, looking back to the festive warmth we all experienced at ZEBRA in December 2019. I hope you are all keeping safe and that you are, of course, using any extra time to create poetry and poetry films! 🙂
Poetry Films for the Environment / Biosphere at LYRA Bristol, 14 march 2020
Lucy English and I are pleased to have curated a selection of Poetry Films for the Environment for LYRA 2020, March 14 in Bristol, where the theme is part of the festival this year.
international screening
Mary McDonald, Penn Kemp; Ian Gibbins; Helen Dewbery, Suzannah Evans; Helen Moore, Howard Vause; Jutta Pryor, Lucy English; Janet Lees; Fiona Tin Wei Lam, Tisha Deb Pillai; Valerie LeBlanc, Daniel Dugas; Meriel Lland; Sarah Tremlett.
panel discussion
Here is the stimulating panel discussion with Lucy English poet, co-director of LYRA and Liberated Words, and ecopoets Helen Moore and Caleb Parkin. Sadly, Mark Smalley of Extinction Rebellion, ecopoet Dr Meriel Lland and myself could not be there. However, the discussion turned out to be very successful in our absence.
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This event happened to occur in the middle of March, at what we now know to be the advent of lockdown in the UK. As a result some of the invited speakers couldn’t attend, including myself. The films are all by leading poetry filmmakers trying to make sense of what is happening to the world in global warming.
Bristol came out in good numbers to support this event so we were very pleased.
There are follow up essays on the subject from: Lucy English – Books of Hours and Writing the Landscape Lucy English; a highly perceptive account of ‘Biophilia and Practice Dr Meriel Lland for Liberated Words‘ by Dr Meriel Lland; and by inclusive (Bristol City Poet) ‘Queering Ecopoetry Film‘ Caleb Parkin, where there, are strong links to a non-dualist philosophical view of our position in relation to the ‘More than Human’ and the biosphere (rather than androcentrically within an environment). All very very important work on the subject of artistic practice and a planet in crisis.
So many vital points raised, particularly in relation to artistic practice, and how a poem for a poetry film, rather than the page, may need a different structural approach – more space – to allow for the other elements of moving image and supportive soundscape. Ultimately, they agreed that ‘shifts in perception’ and/or empowering others, or simply gaining knowledge (as a maker or viewer) were all outcomes that they hoped might result from watching these films, which highlight a planet in crisis.
Poetry Films for the Environment
Arnolfini Art Gallery
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA, FREE EVENT Sat 14th March 1–2
https://www.lyrafest.com/#events/e61060
@lyrafest @liberatedwords @ArnolfiniArts
VideoBardo Presentation Overview
Here are the bilingual (English and Spanish) details of the presentation on 12 October at Bristol Poetry Institute organized by Sarah Tremlett of Liberated Words and Rebecca Kosick. I believe this was an important event, not only in videopoetry and its dissemination, but in the links between Argentina and the UK (post-Brexit!). Marisol and I are keen to keep the dialogue flowing, and for these events to continue, opening up discussion between communities around the world.
