Frame to Frames Ekphrasis interview with Patricia Killelea for Moving Poems
It was a real pleasure to be interviewed on ekphrasis and adaptation by leading poetry filmmaker Patricia Killelea (Associate Professor at Northern Michigan University) for Moving Poems.
I had just been to the We Need to Talk about Art : Ekphrasis Now conference at Leeds (on the tour venues for the book) and had a good sense of what I wanted to say. She came up with some really insightful and detailed questions and it was a real pleasure to give thought to the answers. There is also a link to the documentary on ekphrastic poetry films made for REELpoetry and the screening in its entirety for FOTOGENIA. There was more of a focus on films based on Huapango Torero, but all the films have been mentioned.
Looking forward to the next presentation of the book at Bristol Literary Film Festival on the 27th October.
Sarah
Joint forces: collaborating in poetry film by Janet Lees
My Instagram tag is ‘everything is poetry’. Writing this piece, I’ve been thinking of changing it to ‘everything is collaboration’. I love what the poet Matthew Rohrer says about poetry: ‘I’ve come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration’. He talks about collage poetry, ekphrasis and ‘collaborations with the voices that I heard on the brink of dreaming’. He asserts, ‘There is no creation out of nothing on this Earth. There’s only making new things in collaboration with other things.’
I’ve sometimes said that I stumbled into making poetry films and then stumbled into collaboration. Recently I’ve come to realise that this is not true (top fact: the Estonian word for making poetry is lluletama, which also means to lie). As a child I drew, painted and wrote poetry and stories as a matter of course. From the moment I was given my first camera, my beloved Grandad’s box Brownie, at the age of 11, I took a lot of photographs too. I listened to music endlessly as a teenager – not all of it great, but most enduringly Kate Bush, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and other similarly poetic songwriters. So there was some early cross-fertilisation going on between the three key elements of a poetry film: words, visuals and sound/music.
My undergraduate degree was split equally between visual arts and writing. Ultimately my focus was photography and poetry, and key to the course was integration of the arts. My thesis was on the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, with whom I corresponded for several years. He collaborated with a wide range of artists – his famous gardens and temple at Little Sparta are in part a homage to collaboration. So the principles of integration and collaboration became formally embedded into my creative DNA.
After graduating I lived in a creative wilderness for many years due to depression and addiction. I didn’t write poetry, I didn’t make visual art and except when I was out of my head I didn’t listen to music – it was just too painful. In the spring of 2011, a few years into recovery, I spontaneously began noting down words and phrases from ads on the London Underground. Suddenly, the words bewitched me: their music, their dark comedy, the other things they were saying – the way they compelled me with great urgency to rearrange them into skewed, oddly lucid pieces. I didn’t know then that there was a term for what I was doing and that poetically speaking it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do: found poetry.
An accidental (or intuitive) collaboration
I showed these strange broken little poems to a photographer/videographer I worked with, Rooney, and he combined them with his footage to make strange broken little films. Again, we had no idea that what we were doing was part of an established and rapidly burgeoning genre within the art world: poetry film.
Sarah Tremlett says that poetry films “link and fuse previously separate art forms as well as both intuitive and measured decision-making, and are often made as collaborations between poets and filmmakers.” Rooney and I were certainly fusing separate art forms, we were obviously collaborating, and we were most definitely making both intuitive and measured decisions. Our process was at first entirely intuitive, from my noting down of words from adverts to Rooney’s initial decision to put the text with video footage. The measured decisions included my rearranging the found text into new poems, and Rooney choosing specific clips from his large portfolio of footage to pair these with.
high voltage acts of kindness
This was the beginning of my return to poetry: reading it, writing it, falling back in love with it. I enrolled on a Masters’ degree in Creative Writing, driven by the need to better express the latent poems of my own that were storming through me, and demanded to be written. It was also the beginning of a series of collaborative poetry film partnerships.
Rooney has been a huge influence on me; we have worked together for many years and his creative and philosophical vision is there in some form in all of my poetry film work. The hours of darkness, one of the first films I created independently, shows his direct influence – for example in the single take, fixed viewpoint and, crucially, the dissonance between the text and the visual.
This is something we’ve both always felt strongly about: that what you see on screen should not generally be a literal illustration of what you hear, or read. It doesn’t have to be an outright dissonance, sometimes more of a slant approach, in which the visual echoes, or converses with, or helps to unpack a certain aspect of the poem. And when there is dissonance, it can have consonance at its heart – perhaps there is an energy, or atmosphere, or emotion in the poem that is mirrored in the visuals, even though they do not literally illustrate the words.
I like what Tom Konyves says about the poetry in a videopoem, “My view is that ‘poetry’ is the result of the judicious, poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound; the poetry in a videopoem thus ceases to be simply the text element…Instead, an entirely new form of poetic experience can be produced.” As he says, this new poetic experience is “more than a narrative told in visual terms.” It’s in the judicious poetic juxtaposing of text, visuals and sound, through a series of intuitive and measured decisions, that the magic happens.
The hours of darkness
Collaborating with composers and musicians
Of all the art forms, for me music is the purest vehicle of emotion; it speaks directly to my soul. A few years ago I was lucky enough to see Suzanne Vega live. I wept through the entire show, transported back to a time in my early twenties when I was bereft after a break-up and would spend night after night curled up on the floor listening to her, the epitome of a ‘small blue thing’. Sound, too, is incredibly evocative – wind chimes, the old-fashioned telephone pips, a cricket match being played, the soundscape of a beach in summertime – and lends you the same ability to travel in time.
Over the past few years I’ve collaborated with several different musicians. My most recent collaboration is with the composer Mablanig, aka Bruno Cavellec, who is also a well-known painter. Bruno’s paintings have always touched me deeply, and it’s the same with his music. There’s something he does, an interweaving of darkness and light, sorrow and bliss, whether in paint or musical notes, that completely resonates with me – and his voice is quietly devastating.
Bruno says, “Ever since I first saw Janet’s videopoems, I’ve been an admirer of her very distinctive style and powerful narrative. With her work, it’s almost as if I discovered a brand-new language, so unique and expressive, which I find deeply moving and inspiring. There is such beauty and a great sense of aesthetic in what Janet creates. This collaboration is a dream come true, a soul-to-soul project. The resulting film is a deeply introspective piece in which past and present share the space to pay tribute to those who left a mark on us.”
This was an ambitious project and a true multidisciplinary collaboration from the start. We set out to make a triptych entitled Nine moons, incorporating Bruno’s music and painting, my poetry and film/photography, and both our voices. Using Zoom, as we are in different countries, we had several sessions in which we talked generally, and then more specifically about the project. We already knew we had a lot in common, and through these sessions we discovered many more commonalities.
Through this process we realised we wanted to bring more of ourselves to the work. This manifested in the form of personal photographs of people close to us, which Bruno, a Photoshop expert, edited into some of my photographs of abandoned and derelict places. This sequence forms the third part of the triptych, in which the music, visuals and text come together in way that to me feels seamless and transcending – and which for both of us is a deeply emotional experience.
On its first screening in June 2024, Nine moons won Best International Poetry Short at the Bloomsday Film Festival in Dublin.
Nine moons
The first musician I collaborated with was George Simpson, whose awe-inspiring music I came across via Instagram. I was blown away by his album Still Points in the Turning World, notably the tracks Sextacodareprise and Artemis. So I got in touch and asked him if he would allow me to use his music. Thankfully he said yes, and the results were the films A boat for sorrow and Huntress. The former was a collaborative work in more ways than one; I made the poem using randomly (intuitively) selected words and lines from a pocket edition of selected poems by W.B. Yeats.
I sent George early drafts of each piece to check he was happy with the pairing of the music and visuals which in both films were abstracted and animated stills. In the case of Huntress I changed the title of the poem to more closely tie in with the music, Artemis being the Greek goddess of hunting (and I’d never come up with a title I was happy with before). The notion of being a huntress in the context of bearing witness to the inescapable realities of the Anthropocene worked with the poem and also felt empowering; better to feel yourself to be a huntress than a helpless observer.
Huntress
The composer Richard Quirk and I collaborated on a project which became the poetry film Still here, and we’re currently in the contemplation phase of our next collaboration. He had shared some of his music with me and I was particularly struck by the haunting, bleakly beautiful track Dream Thieves. Richard also writes poetry and in his music I think there is a particular poetic sensibility.
All the elements of this collaboration just fell into place. I’d been to visit Dungeness, a place that is deeply embedded in me even though I only spent a snatched few hours there. I knew I had to make a film that somehow conveyed the essence of this irredeemably bleak yet somehow comforting place, which seemed to tell a momentous, universal story of what it is to live in the Anthropocene and simultaneously evoke an intensely personal, profoundly felt response that transcends this life.
Dream Thieves was just so exactly right, tuning directly in to this story and this response. I had taken quite a bit of footage while at Dungeness, but made the (measured) decision to populate the film only with stills, apart from the moving footage at the beginning and at the end – these are akin to a curtain rising and falling, bookending a contemplative experience which happens in its own ‘beyond’ space. Also while at Dungeness, a poem that I’d written some time ago kept coming into my mind. It was made on a Poetry School course, a found text piece incorporating words and lines from a beautiful short prose piece by Majella Kelly about the last man on an otherwise abandoned island.
Of the effortlessness that marked this collaboration, Richard says, “Collaboration at its best takes no struggle with combining ideas. It provides the inspiration that shows the creative goal. It may not show you how to get to that destination, but you know with certainty that there is something you are working towards and the creative energy is primed and waiting to be utilised. It will provoke new methods, a sudden and fresh way of thinking without any conscious request for different resources. When it works it is highly enjoyable and rewarding. When it isn’t working, your gut will know very quickly and in my experience the project should be abandoned immediately.”
A composer and musician I’ve collaborated with on several projects is Tromlhie, aka Martyn Cain. As well as being an outstanding creator in his own right, Martyn is part of Post War Stories, a dark, dynamic three-piece band with the sound of something much greater. I’d worked with Post War Stories on the videopoem The worst thing by far, and Martyn shared some of his own music with me. One track in particular resonated deeply. The result was the poetry film Nowhere to go but on, which again has a collaborative poem at its heart; in this case a Cento, a traditional form dating back centuries, in which the poet borrows lines from published poems to create a new poem.
This film is a mix of footage and animated stills. I typically use apps to create animated stills, most notably Motionleap. I’m no animator – although this is a skill I would love to learn, given the time (which there is never enough of) – so find this kind of off-the-shelf app really useful for bringing subtle motion and effects to photographs.
Nowhere to go but on
Martyn and I also collaborated on the film What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, based on a poem by Katerina Gogou, which won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition in 2021.
I was invited to make this film by filmpoetry.org, the excellent videopoetry platform of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, who commissioned 10 poetry filmmakers from around the world to celebrate the work of 10 Greek poets. Katerina Gogou died as the result of an overdose in 1993 so I was unable to work with her, but I researched her life exhaustively which brought me closer to her and her poetry. She was a blazing spirit, Greece’s greatest modern anarchist poetess. Born into the Nazi occupation of Greece, she lived through the years of far right military junta oppression and the country’s resurgent anarchist movement in the 1980s. An activist herself, she became a prophet of the movement and her poems anthems for it.
So, turning one of Katerina’s poems into a poetry film was a huge responsibility. I felt it was important to have a piece of music specially created to do justice to her legacy, so commissioned Martin to compose a piece for the film. Again, this film is made up of animated stills; I sent Martyn several of these, along with the poem. The soundtrack he created was, as I’d hoped it would be, perfect: a brooding elegy to defiance, fear and incipient despair. Fire and smoke are twin visual motifs running through the film; the fire broadly representing social unrest and Katerina’s burning desire for social justice, the smoke a sense of being burned out by life. Both these recurring motifs worked so well with Martyn’s simmering, off-kilter soundtrack.
What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’
I’ve learned through experience that collaboration only works when the partners are on the same wavelength. This is most definitely the case with Martyn, who says, “Janet and I have similar creative visions, which makes the process of producing the films an enjoyable one. Our mutual stylistic approach leaves me open to really explore the themes without worry that something will be suitable or not. This makes the final film a true collaboration despite us being in different rooms or countries when creating our pieces.
As a self-taught musician, when we were commissioned to create What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, the subject instantly resonated with me. I knew there was a need to break some of the music theory rules so decided to offset the timing of the violin. This not only played with the classical convention of keeping strictly to a theory, but also helped to give a sense of disorientation that Gogou felt as a poet. The constant low distorted crackles are samples of the Greek shipping forecast, another reference to being lost and found.”
Collaborating with poets and artists
The poet, artist and composer Paul atten Ash and I embarked on a collaboration during the first coronavirus lockdown, and while we didn’t exactly make a poetry film together, I’ve realised that the video I created in response to his brilliant track Stasi probably counts as one (text can be spoken or sung in a poetry film).
Also, this was a truly all-encompassing collaboration which helped to keep us creatively absorbed and sane during difficult times. It started out as a linear ekphrastic conversation; we agreed to respond to each other’s poems and images. It rapidly escalated into a multi-layered storm cloud of interrelated creativity – images, poetry, film, music – one of the results of which is a multimedia book featuring Paul’s prose poetry and my art photography, alongside a series of poetry films, currently in progress.
Stasi
My next-to-most-recent collaboration was with the poet Jane Lovell, on her poem ‘Blame the Fox’, which won the 2022 Rialto Nature & Place competition. I love Jane’s poetry and we share a longstanding concern for nature and the environment. Jane had seen some of my poetry films and had liked what she’d seen, so all this was a good start – we clearly had quite a bit in common. Nevertheless, it’s a huge deal to take the precious thing that is someone else’s poem and turn it into a poetry film. Even when you like each other’s work, there’s no guarantee the poet will like what you do with their poem.
I spent a lot of time with this incredible poem, feeling my way into it, letting it inhabit me, thinking about scenarios that could work – particularly what kind of visuals might complement the poem in a slanted way, without telling it literally. One day I went out with my camera on the North Yorkshire coast and there was a haar, a dense sea mist which didn’t lift all day. As soon as I started filming I knew it was right. There is such a strong sense in the poem of being disconnected and deluded, of being blind – the line Blame us. Born blind. was tolling in my heart all day. The mist felt like the perfect metaphor for this blindness and disconnection.
I told Jane about the footage and images, and she liked the approach. We listened to some potential music tracks and there was one we both liked. To my immense relief, Jane was happy with the final result: “I was blown away by how closely Janet’s film matched my own imagined landscapes of the poem, perfectly capturing the atmosphere and mood.”
A note on the music here, which was licensed via www.artlist.io. I have an annual subscription with Artlist which allows me to use any track from their vast library. In the instances where I’m not collaborating with a musician, I prefer to use licensed music because the range and quality are outstanding, there won’t be any rights issues (which can be a risk when you download music for free from the Internet) and, crucially, the artists get paid each time their music is used.
Blame the Fox
Collaborating with poetry filmmakers
I wasn’t quite sure where to place this in the essay, because my collaborators in this case are both creative polymaths. As giants of the poetry film scene, Marc Neys and Dave Bonta are both long-time poetry filmmakers who need no introduction. But Marc is also a visual artist and prolific creator of phenomenal experimental music, while Dave is a poet whose profoundly transformative poems made while walking I sincerely hope will be published as a collection soon.
In 2020 Marc and I collaborated on his album The Secret Language of Light, a transcendent mix of field recordings, strange sounds and hauntingly beautiful ambient music, complemented by my meditative abstract videos made from animated stills.
Reflecting on our work together, Marc says, “It has been an inspiring journey. Each time, I composed music for Janet’s short videos or edited photographs, finding the process akin to drifting with a current. Her images are so evocative and atmospheric that the music seems to create itself. The synergy between her visual vignettes and my compositions feels effortless and profoundly satisfying.”
In 2023, in a completely unplanned way, Marc, Dave Bonta and I collaborated on what I guess you could call a trilateral ekphrastic video poem. It started when I threw a pebble in the river. When I shared a mirrored version of the clip on Instagram, Dave responded with a stunning poem, Psalm 2. Then Marc responded to the video and the poem with several different pieces of music. We chose one of these and he put all three elements together to make a video poem. It was a magically effortless experience, and I’m sure this was at least in part due to us all being poetry filmmakers.
Marc went on to make a series of videos with different loops of the footage, pairing each one with original music to create a whole range of moods and interwoven, flowing stories in one cohesive, mesmerisingsymphony-like piece. This features on his Bandcamp as a mini-album entitled we meet ourselves, while the whole audio-visual piece can be heard and viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
Internal collaborations, interpersonal connections
Something that has come into focus for me while writing this essay is the process of collaborating with one’s own pain. We all carry pain, it’s the inevitable price of being human. But we don’t like pain, so our learned response is to push it down, to look the other way. This can lead to much deeper trouble. My descent into addiction, for example, was the direct result of trying to avoid pain. Living this way was an often nightmarish experience, caught in a relentlessly self-punishing compulsion and severed from my own creativity. The fallout of addiction is layer upon layer of pain and shame – way more than you started out with before becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs, or whatever your poison is.
If you’re an artist, you’re sensitive. If you’re sensitive, you feel pain acutely – I think this is particularly true in these times of terrible wars and ecological breakdown, with the numberless losses that are happening every hour of every day. Many of my films have entailed honouring pain, feeling it fully, working closely with it – whether it’s a specific personal sorrow, as with It is said or pain for the world, as with Huntress and Nowhere to go but on. Making each one has been a deeply cathartic and transcendent experience that for me is an integral part of the poetic experience itself.
It is said
As well as being a creatively potent release, working with pain can be powerfully connecting. I have been profoundly affected by poetry films that focus on subjects ranging from personal grief to planetary devastation and as a result have felt an instant connection with the poet/filmmaker – felt them as a kindred spirit. People have told me how deeply they’ve been touched by a poetry film, and how it mirrored or echoed their own emotional experience. Someone once said, “You have shown me your soul and it spoke to mine.” The viewer, of course, completes the meaning of the work; the deeply meaningful, ultimate collaboration.
References:
https://lithub.com/all-poetry-is-collaboration/
https://www.sarahtremlett.com/about.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261724253_Address_to_E-poetry_Conference
Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow – tour: LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY, 6 JULY
Really pleased to be presenting Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen at
We Need to Write About Art: Ekphrasis Now, Leeds Trinity University on Saturday, 6th July.
For those of you who don’t know, Frame to Frames is a unique bilingual publication with poems on artworks and a QR link to the 17-film poetry film screening based on the poems, first held at FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, winter 2023. The festival painting I selected as a potential prompt was Huapango Torero by Mexican non-binary artist Ana Segovia, and the theme was taking a stand against animal cruelty and machismo. Other artists followed their own equally inspiring artworks and paths.
The Frame to Frames project celebrates three creative forms: art inspiring art, translation and intermedia. So often in watching poetry films the poem passes you by, but the book allows you to press pause, really take in the poem on the page then return to the film. Here, it is possible to see how words and meaning can be transformed through the filmmaker’s process.
BILINGUAL DOCUMENTARY MADE FOR REELPOETRY, HOUSTON, WITH A SELECTION OF THE FILMMAKERS
See https://vimeo.com/929116208 for a bilingual documentary on the making of the project from five of the poetry filmmakers.
CURRENT TOUR DATES
The Frame to Frames project has screenings at: FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, December, 2023; REELpoetry, Houston, April, 2024; The International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia, Germany, May, 2024; ‘We Need to Talk about Ekphrasis Now’ Leeds Trinity University, July, 2024; Bristol Literary Film Festival, October, 2024; Maldito Festival de Videopoesía, Albacete, Spain, November, 2024.
Artists: Patricia Killelea, US; Tova Beck Friedman, US; Alejandro Thornton, AR; Colm Scully, IRL; Janet Lees, UK (Lois P Jones and Elena K Byrne, US); Martin Sercombe, (Thom Conroy) NZ; Pamela Falkenberg & Jack Cochran, US; Csilla Toldy, HU, IRL; Finn Harvor, CA; Javier Robledo, AR; Beate Gordes, DE; lan Gibbins, (Judy Morris); Carlos Ramirez Kobra, MX; Penny Florence, UK; Meriel Lland, UK; Ana Pantic, RS; Sarah Tremlett (UK).
COPIES AVAILABLE FROM
Click on the link top right of the LIBERATED WORDS Home Screen to order copies or go to
liberated words.com/store
LEEDS TRINITY SYMPOSIUM
https://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/events/events/we-need-to-talk-about-art-ekphrasis-now.php
Organised by Oz Hardwick, Leeds Trinity University and Cassandra Atherton, Deakin University, Australia, the symposium focuses on ‘current thinking devoted to ekphrastic responses to artworks in diverse media’.
As they state: ‘While James A. W. Heffernan’s monograph, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1991), remains one of the most influential works on ekphrasis, his definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” is becoming increasingly inadequate.’
A central focus of the event is Oz and Cassandra’s book launch – Dancing about Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (mad hat–press.com) which includes poems responding to a variety of types of visual media, including: TV, photography, dance, architecture, film etc. A real must-buy.
Papers that interrogate ekphrasis in relation to these subjects and many others are included in the symposium with sections as follows: ‘Moving Words’; ‘Learning Encounters’; ‘Ekphrastic Lives’; ‘Ekphrastic Identities’; ‘Ekphrastic Collaborations’; ‘Looking at Gender’; ‘Testing Boundaries’ and ‘Other Angles’.
I am really pleased that Janée J. Baugher – one of the judges of Frame to Frames and author of The Ekphrastic Writer : Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), will also be there from America. She will be presenting on ‘Science Ekphrasis: Teaching and Learning Applications’. Baugher explores the extraordinary breadth of this subject with a powerful abstract, which may give you a clue to the promising day ahead:
‘—there’s a myriad of opportunities for cross-disciplinary engagement. In the classroom for instance, art-viewing can lead to a deeper understanding of technology, engineering, mathematics, and the human body. Examples include photomicrography, an art form that unites digital time-lapse stills of specimens seen through light microscopes; the kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder, which can be studied for their relationships with the ancient art of origami; the digital art of Hamid Naderi Yeganeh whose mathematical formula drawings of birds in flight are as beautiful as they are instructional, and the Körperwelten Exhibition, the long-running traveling art display of plastinated human bodies. In a world in which we can often feel divided, viewing art as a means of teaching and learning can help us to feel evermore connected.’
I think that says it all.
EVENT LOCATION:
Village Hotel Leeds North, 186 Otley Road, Headingley, Leeds LS16 5PR
Drumshanbo final call for poetry films
I am really pleased to put in a final call for poetry films for what promises to be a really memorable event in this beautiful, watery lakeland town (with extraordinary floating boardwalk across Acres lake) in County Leitrim 22nd to the 25th August.
As they say on the website: the festival ‘brings together some of Irelands finest writers and poets to celebrate the written word. As part of this we host an annual Poetry Film competition open to filmmakers and poets from everywhere. Each year we have an evening where we screen the shortlisted films as part of the festivals opening ceremony.’ They have a substantial First Prize of €500. Please apply via Filmfreeway at the following link – FilmFreeway
You can see the scenery, culture and friendliness alone are worth the visit, so why not organise a trip?
Rules & Terms
Please apply via Filmfreeway by Sunday 30th June 2024
The Poetry Film should be no longer than 6 minutes, and have been made since Jan 2023.
Max two films per competitor.
Poetry films in all languages are accepted but, if not in English or Irish, subtitles or captions in English should be provided.
Responsibility for copyright and third party authorisations lies with the creator.
Curator: Colm Scully
JIM ANDREWS: Sea of Po – animisms and a ‘different sort of poetry & magazine’
How to introduce legendary Canadian Jim Andrews – a leading figure in the world of visual poetics / interactive literature / kinetic text and founder of Vispo https://vispo.com. On eliterature.org the Vancouver-based polymath is described as ‘attempting to create writing that is a synthesis of various arts and media: words, code, sound, images and interactivity’. He also describes himself as: poet-programmer, visual and audio artist, theorist, front end developer, tech writer and mathematician.
In the words of Tom Konyves’ Poets with a Video Camera exhibition catalogue – New Art Emerging : Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry (2022), he has created ‘some of the most well-regarded interactive poems of the last 25 years. He is one of a few Director/Lingo artists of the late 90s and 00s to make the transition from Flash/Director multimedia to HTML5 work that’s even more multimedial and strongly interactive. His recent piece Enigma n2022 https://enigman.vispo.com is a wildly innovative work of interactive granular synthesis, colour, music and digital poetry.’ Jim studied literature, maths and computer science at university, and subsequently produced a literary radio show called Fine Lines before finding a true home on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
JA: ‘I started vispo.com in 1995 or 1996. At the very beginning, it was a publicity site for the weekly reading series I organized and hosted from 1993 to 1997 in Victoria called Mocambopo. I also used it to attract writers to read at Mocambopo. But, even so, it seemed like the perfect medium for me, as an artist. All sorts of international interesting stuff was happening. Charles Bernstein, one of the forces in so-called language poetry, had a fascinating project going on with Loss Glazier called the Electronic Poetry Center, which was drawing poets from all over the English-speaking world. New publications were starting up all over the web, and all sorts of attempts at new types of work. I’d print out interesting essays and whatnot from the web and leave them in Mocambo Coffee.
During my radio days (84–90), I’d been in touch with Helen Thorington, who produced New American Radio in the 80s and early 90s. She commissioned radio art. But she’d moved to the web, producing turbulence.org, starting around 96 or 97, which was commissioning net art. Eventually, she commissioned Nio, a big interactive music/poetry work of mine, in 2000. She wasn’t the only one moving from electronic to digital media. That was around the time I got in touch with Ted Warnell, who’s been publishing his site warnell.com as long or longer than I’ve been publishing mine. There were several terrific listservs going on. Such as the poetics list from Bernstein’s project, plus rhizome, and empyre, which I co-moderated for a while. I started one called webartery. Listservs were the main ‘social media’ of the early web. Heather Haley’s Edgewise ElectroLit Centre in Vancouver was another interesting node, and TrAce in the UK… The browser was interesting to me in that not only was it a world-wide, international thing, but a multi-media thing. Text, image, video, sound, telephony – and interactivity. I’d studied literature, math and computer science at university. And, subsequently, produced a literary radio show. The web looked like a medium where I could combine all my interests in art, programming, literature, the international avant garde, sound art, etc. Also, as a poet, I was dissatisfied with the little magazines. The web seemed to pose a whole new way to publish a whole new type of poetry. My life, since then, has mainly focused on exploring those possibilities.’
Jim publishes new thinking on ‘experimental visual poetry, literary programming, and essays on new media’ and the term vispo also cohabits with the term Langu(im)age to illustrate the fusing and fluxing of language verbal and visual and the constant questions that arise in this debate. This extraordinary website has continued to survive and grow and replenish since it was first launched – how many independently run, creative online sites are coming up for their 30-year anniversary?
Some Context
Between 2005 and around 2014 I attended quite a few digital media / electronic literature conferences presenting theoretical research investigations with text-on-screen through minimal, looping, often koan-like, paradoxical videopoems. I related my experiments with repetitive motion to traditional poetic page-based verse rhythms – metronomic and cyclical – but as visual prosody. This was unlike everyone else I met, who were vastly geeky, inhabiting code worlds and glad to be free of the page and traditional, verse-based poetic structures. In the first decade of the millennium, poetry seemed to divide into groups with different working methods and goals. The media, net, interactive, live installation, electronic literature and digital poets (before we even move on to commercial applications such as VR, gaming and immersive reality), seemed to be at the forefront of experimental poetry. They were like magicians showing others what could be done with new ideas literally by creating new esoteric systems for making or defining ‘writing’ and ‘language’ via code or developer software like Flash. At the same time the rise of the subjective lyric poet, still using pen on paper as ‘technique’ but also collaborating through digital poetry film (and linear narrative form) was also in the air.
When I wrote The Poetics of Poetry Film (which took over five years and began around 2012) I listed the main types of short film related to poetry film and the traditional differences between them. I knew then that I had to include a rider that stated how the differences were fast disappearing (particularly between media poetry and poetry film). This was particularly evident in the hands of motion graphics designers working with poetry or poets.
I was very lucky to meet Jim at Tom Konyves’ seminal exhibition Poets with a Video Camera : 1980–2020 at Surrey Art Gallery (Vancouver), November 2022 where I was key speaker and we were both exhibitors. Later, Jim brought up the topic of media poetry in my book, and noted that I had said, traditionally ‘the media poem is technically high achieving, intellectually rich and emotionally dry, and valued for its unique coding, expanding transhuman connections. The author is dead and system is king, often exploiting random found material or recombinatorial spectacle.’ Jim was keen to point out that whilst he agreed with what I said for some practitioners, he hoped his own work which he described as animisms [the term meaning where objects are believed or perceived to have agency or a soul / spirit] wouldn’t be defined in the same way.
Tom had selected Jim’s first programmed poem Seattle Drift (1997) for the exhibition, and by coincidence it is also an example of Jim’s animism series. As someone who has researched text-on-screen (particularly in relation to women artists and the theoretical concept of dissolving or dematerializing text) I was really bowled over to see this work in the flesh, see https://vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDriftEnglish.html. It clearly plays an important position in relation to the history of kinetic text and media poetry. Its simplicity and playfulness reminded me of, but moves on from bpNichol’s First Screening (1984) series (with delightful sections such as ‘hoe’) where Nichol was one of the first poets to create computer animated poems. And also the later Kinetic Writings (1989) – minimal Amiga computer poems (character generated and recorded onto video) – of prolific American writer, poet and media poet Richard Kostelanetz.
Seattle Drift
I’m a bad text.
I used to be a poem
but drifted from the scene.
Do me.
I just want you to do me.
In the interactive Seattle Drift the viewer begins with a neatly laid out, ironically penned poem on the left-hand side of the screen where the viewer is told to ‘Do the text’ ‘Stop the text’ or ‘Discipline the text’. As you Do the text the words unravel across the screen and you can freeze them at any point, choosing your own preferred layout / visual image; or ‘Discipline the text’ by returning it to neat, short lines.
This work establishes the concept of an ‘original poem’ a thought, from which an event happens. The artist himself includes playful humour in his directions, and reflexively eradicates any sense of the ‘inspired mind of the poet’, to focus on the voice of the poem itself. We are here as consumers receiving utilitarian instructions from a no-nonsense, absent controller – like a recorded message.
Jim told Nigerian poet Yohanna Joseph Waliya in https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Animisms.pdf ‘The motion is a drifting of words off the page. Which is also a drifting from the scene of poetry. There’s also a sexual element of dissolution in the poem losing itself.’ For me, I feel that there is a sense of liberation by the individual; and liberation from a final, single work of art, created by an artist. The viewer pauses where they feel an exciting group of words might appear. Go on, it is yours to create.
Coming back to Jim’s thinking behind his animisms, you can see that whilst Seattle Drift is an example of kinetic text, a subjectivity is being voiced, whether concerned with the human issues of dissolution or liberation. Like a lyric page poem, Seattle Drift operates like a stand-in for the author, (even if it appears to be the poem itself who is speaking) where the ‘I’ of the poem blurs with the human authorial ‘I’. And, after all, the title does suggest a reflection on a personal journey. This makes it different from many other types of historical e-literature etc. which abjured authorship at all. Equally, as it suggests two psychological states, an unravelling and playful creation, it also presents two poetic states: composed verse in classic form and programmed, interactive, animated poem.
Jim is fascinated by the random in art; in https://vispo.com/writings/essays/RandomInArt.pdf he says, from cut-ups to his current work that ‘We have arrived at a position where we view chance/the random more or less as a literary device, like metaphor and simile are literary devices.’ And in relation to animism in digital poetry (see previous animism link) and emotion, he notes that whilst maths and programming produce motion, that ‘The motion can contribute to the production of emotion, if the meaning of the words can be made to work with motion… It isn’t motion that produces emotion. It’s human sympathy.’ Here a successful work combines affecting words (indicating a state of mind and state of place) with an appropriate type of motion, producing visual metaphor; the poet programmer produces moving metaphor.
He told me: ‘the term ‘animisms’ is apt for the sort of animated work I create. Animisms as kinetic poetry with soul. Kinetic poetry as poetry that moves. Moves with a kind of life, or at least with the liveliness of art.’ Today, an interactive kinetic poetry animism project that is both comparable to and extends Seattle Drift is Jim’s latest brainchild – Sea of Po – and I can’t overstate how lucky I was to be invited to be part of it, alongside 51 other poets, all from a variety of technical and lyric backgrounds.
Touching in the Wake of the Virus, Adeena Karasick and Jim Andrews
Sea of Po
Jim introducing poets to the multimedia project
JA: ‘Sea of Po https://seaofpo.vispo.com is a one-issue online app-mag that features the work of 52 poets in a generative, visual, kinetic, interactive, never-exactly-the-same-twice app of multiple languages. It’s a new sort of experience of poetry and a poetry magazine. It will display your texts too. Unicode is what makes the multi-language dimension possible in Sea of Po as well as special characters not usually associated with language. It is also in pdf form https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf as a type of Manifesto/Manual/Magazine and at some point, may also be published as a book, with another pdf but the same URL.’
Being invited to take part in this project meant diving deep into endless possibilities. It always felt open, experimental, friendly, inviting. I could do anything. For me, that meant I was able to be completely creative in response to a visually exciting screen, one I couldn’t create on my own. I feel certain a lot of the participants felt the same.
ST: What inspired you to make Sea of Po?
JA: Sea of Po started out as Sea of 9 ( https://taper.badquar.to/9/sea_of_9.html ). This was for issue 9 of Taper mag from MIT, which only publishes ‘computational poetry’ that’s 2kb or smaller. The theme of issue 9 was the number 9. When Adeena Karasick saw it, she felt it would be a good way to show a poem of hers called ‘Touching in the Wake of the Virus’ (see previous image). Rather than display just ‘9’, it would display her poem word by word or line by line. So, I expanded the piece and the code so it could do that. But I felt there was still a lot of unexplored territory in the idea. Hence Sea of Po.
I could also say that what inspired Sea of Po was to create a different sort of poetry magazine. One that is an app as well as a mag. And a tool as well – you can create and save your own texts/poems. It’s a different experience of poetry and a poetry magazine. The experience of poetry involves the black window and the animation window. You experience poetry in a cubistic, multi-perspective way. Much of my work is an attempt to explore the app possibilities of poetry, the digital possibilities of poetry.’
Windows that Like to Be Read Together
The Sea of Po project extends Seattle Drift in that both the lyric, ‘still’ poem in conventional linear verse format, and the animated visual poem are visible at one and the same time, with two windows to view this process. This clearly shows how Jim has created an inclusive space for originally two separate forms, confirming his own definition of his animisms in his work. Here, the lyric and generative processes (creative coding or writing programmes – giving instructions – to generate an artwork) co-exist.
I think you can get a very good idea of his thinking through the way he has phrased the following points. I would also suggest that you open the Sea of Po link https://seaofpo.vispo.com to follow his description.
JA: ‘Reading Sea of Po as a poetry publication, as a mag-app, is an interesting new way of reading – but is it really new? We are getting used to reading different windows more or less at once… Two windows, the Black Window and Animation Window, are joined at the hip and present the textuality of poetry in two constantly-present texts: a familiar, traditional look, in the Black Window, and an animation of rotating words, phrases, and lines of poetry in the Animation Window. Each kinetic text is, in fact, following a circular path. It’s all about words touching at many points, being scrambled and recombined at the level of the word, the phrase, and the line – or the ideogram, in the case of Japanese. Meaning is recombinant and visually both flowing and disjunctive. Even while unreadable, it’s nonetheless visually engaging as a swirling Sea of Po, and made to be clicked till funk is firing on all cylinders… Another dimension of the project is a poet may use Sea of Po as a performance instrument. They can play it themselves, while reading their poem, or they can have someone else play it. Like a musician can sing and play a guitar–or have someone else play the guitar while they sing. Or just sing. Or just play the guitar.’
Here is Jim’s description of his own poems at Sea of Po taken from the pdf magazine.
Go to to this link https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=ja. and click on the poem on the left-hand side and scroll down for the symbol of your choice. A very pleasing, if not sublime extension of climate change-related moving concrete poetry awaits. The image below is the beautiful Punctuation.
Another interesting aspect of this project was discovering who else was taking part, which happened gradually, so it was good to keep checking back and catching up, and often finding extraordinarily elevated company: Kedrick James, Charles Bernstein, Alan Bigelow, Chris Joseph to name but a few … alongside names I know more personally such as Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas, Natasha Boškić and leading Canadian poet Penn Kemp.
Some of the poets handed over their poems and let Jim design the visual aspect himself, but as I am a visual artist as well, I wanted to be able to try it myself. I had questions regarding what was possible, or how much you could write to a predictable (repeating or programmed) visual aspect. Here is a question I asked:
ST: ‘I would really like to see the lines of poetry first before they break up and the words intermingle. I have short lines of max 5 words. I also wondered if it could go line by line. So, you see a line as it is, then it breaks up, then say 10 seconds later you see the next one and so on. Or maybe better, you see a whole stanza and then it breaks up and then maybe goes back to its original form after 15 seconds or thereabouts. I just really like the idea of the breaking away from something you have seen in a conventional line.’
JA: ‘Use the ^ word concatenator described at the bottom of the black window. The ^ concatenator is how you get multiple words to display on one line. For instance, if your text is “Poetry^is^the^sun”, then the animation will animate the line “Poetry is the sun” as one line. Whereas if your text is “Poetry is the sun” then the text will be animated as four independent words, all of which move in circles. If your text is “Poetry^is the sun” then “Poetry is” will be animated on one line together, and the other words will be animated separately in their own circles of motion.’
Whilst you can predetermine font size and speed of rotation, ultimately, the central point about Sea of Po is that the animated part continuously changes and is of course, random. For example, I couldn’t determine colour placing: to have pink and turquoise in one area as a one-off or repeatable effect, as a way of supporting linguistic meaning, but this was part of the joy of the programme. You become mesmerised by the constantly changing visual, temporal letters, where sometimes colours are blazingly seductive or by chance muted or dark.
Style and Subject Matter
The poets have arrived at many approaches to producing their original ‘poems’: some centre on postmodernist computer languages whether abstract or generative poems (from a limited database of words), others solely rely on human ‘felt’ language and the lyric self, and a few a combination of the two. It also seems as if some are code poems, where ‘regular’ text is combined with code that has to be deciphered and translated (like any language).
As mentioned previously, Jim himself has created his own Unicode symbolic works for the project, whilst Charles Bernstein (see featured image) has taken words used five times from his ironic, multiple context and mood, philosophical and yet pertinently political poetry book Girly Man (2006). Many have used symbols, or ‘stanzas’ with symbols and language (see Chris Joseph above), jumbled strings of language, or moving concrete poems focusing on single letters. Don Duchene has written short prose as a letter to Jim, whilst Fred Wah has set out two texts side by side in is a door. Some are translated such as Angela Chang’s, written in both English and Cantonese, whilst Reham Hosny’s is in Arabic and English.
Subjects range from bacterial infection and touch – Roberto Ncar and Adeena Karasick Touching in the Wake of the Virus (also a video with Jim Andrews) to curse – Natash Boškić, to money and financial facts – David Williams’ (bilingual, Portuguese and English) poem centering on Christiano Ronaldo and David Beckham’s salaries. Some of my favourites have fairly strong visually metaphoric links to the text. In Vacuum Cleaner Poem by Canadian Kedrick James, the text rotates quickly, shifting randomly from sense (individual words catching the eye) to letters piled together, as if clouds of ‘dust bunnies’ or accumulated dust rising in the air. Canadian Bonnie Nish’s Under Water (about drowning) works so well in its animated form with arching (wave-breaking-like) words in black and white, with a slow, strong sense of memorial about it. The animation, in its speed and delivery consummately respects and expands on the subject matter. This poem is beautifully enhanced by being visualised through Sea of Po.
Quite a few reflect on time, being and death. These include works by legendary Canadian poet Penn Kemp (a deeply moving work about her husband’s passing, and much shared on Jim’s Facebook page) and leading poets and videopoets Valerie Le Blanc and Daniel H. Dugas (see on).
Penn Kemp http://pennkemp.weebly.com/
Canadian Poet, performer, playwright and activist Penn Kemp is a poetry phenomenon. As her website proclaims she has been writing and publishing for more than 50 years with over 30 books of poetry, prose and drama; seven plays and ten CDs as well as award-winning videopoems. Alongside this incomparable career, she tirelessly gives readings and workshops, spreading the word in the community and worldwide.
Lethologica, Penn Kemp
‘Jim Andrews from Vancouver included my poem “Lethologica” in his wondrous See of Po series: https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=pk. And on Andrews’s manifesto, manual, and magazine, https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf: p. 61.
For Sea of Po, I wanted to write a language poem that would lend itself to animation, to movement, to be read in swirls, side to side, and yet form couplets. Hence, Lethologica, so that the word is not lost in Lethe’s forgetful current, but is re-imagined as image, as colour. I am delighted that Lethologica is ensconced among so many lovely contributions by old friends like Lionel Kearns and new, like Sarah Tremlett.
The poem itself is an indirect lament for my husband, Gavin Stairs, who died two years ago. What is the role of language in such a confrontation with death? The piece is an uncertain contemplation on mortality, on what is lost and what can be conjured by diving between the worlds. It is an exploration of what can still be gained through poetry and the medium of animation. The blues express the spaciousness between dimensions in the Bardo. The visuals present that amorphous thinning of veils very well: a sea change of heart, when the tongue is tied in knots and nots of regret when words fail to express the overwhelm of loss, the enormity of lines of thought crisscrossing. What remains in memory after a life is completed? What can be said, and how? What can a name summon? Had we better not call a spirit back, even if we could?’
Penn’s poem given a secondary adaptation by Jim, as a still with both versions showing.
Valerie LeBlanc https://val.basicbruegel.com/
I have known Canadians Valerie LeBlanc and her collaborator and partner Daniel H. Dugas for some years now and been privileged to write in more detail about their pioneering, extensive videopoetry series both in The Poetics of Poetry Film and Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie (bilingual overview of their work from 1980 to 2018). As her website says: Valerie’s creations travel between poetry, performance, visual and written theory. Working separately and in collaboration with Daniel, the subject of time features in both their work. Valerie LeBlanc’sBecoming Time (see below) draws the reader to the present moment and her spare use of language holds you there, as the title sublimely suggests. Daniel H. Dugas’Daniel: https://dan.basicbruegel.com/ arresting poem in French and English centres on the brevity of life; of having one hour, and repeating different choices you might make, to treasure in one hour.
One Hour, Une Heure, Daniel H. Dugas
Valerie LeBlanc
‘Basically, I wrote Becoming Time in 2013 when I was starting my Doctorate at the Sydney College of Arts, University of Sydney. I wrote several pieces at that time with a plan to use them with my larger project: The Raft. The project revolved around a raft as a small island and with the idea of what would be the essentials to carry along as part of the head space.’
Becoming Time
Now is a noun.
Moving forward from it,
is inevitable,
if there is a desire to keep moving at all.
Looking back is often,
not a decision,
but a happening,
an event,
relived.
The pop of a flash bulb,
on a now outdated camera,
a connection in the neuron net,
that insists.
The orchestration,
of being
once again
in that moment,
and
that set of circumstances,
has led you
to whom,
you are becoming,
now.
It is,
wrapped,
in all time.
Sarah Tremlett https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=st
Stimming Spell to Ward Off Neurotypical Banter
This poem is about autism and ‘stimming’, (where, if anxious, you continuously twine hair through your fingers) and also find the feel of an animal’s fur or hair (especially horses) reassuring. I had wanted to write a poem on this subject for some time and the capabilities of Sea of Po meant I had the opportunity to create a perfect visual metaphor from the visual cyclical strand-like ‘trails’, in relation to the stimming motion. I divided the poem into stanzas which each had a repeating, chant-like pattern, with single word first lines as declarative or command-like utterances. If spoken, they would be emphasised. These provided interesting, enforcing patterns when floating on the screen.
As mentioned in relation to Penn Kemp, Jim has also been inspired to work further with a number of the poems and develop them in different ways. He took mine and made a ‘still version’ where the original poem overlays a sample of the animated text (see below). He also has some really interesting things to say about the process.
JA: ‘I enjoyed reading your poem “Stimming Spell to Ward off Neurotypical Banter” in a way I hadn’t before. I find that I read nothing more deeply than work that I publish – eventually. Creating this version allowed me to read the poem line by line and really soak it up. It’s quite mad. In a good way. You claim it’s a “stimming spell”, a witchy stimulant to awaken the deep feathered mind from the (unconscious?) trance. And so it is! Quite successfully, I would add.
The image I’ve created of the poem includes the poem’s text in white. The background of each white line is a different screenshot from Sea of Po of the animation associated with that particular line. So, for instance, if you look at the line “Drum!”, you see lots of blue and green texts of the sentence “Drum!” in the same horizontal space as the white word “Drum!”. Same with the line that says “Awaken”; the word “Awaken” is repeated horizontally there. Every line of the poem has its own background screenshot.
The idea being that this kind of amplifies each line, turns each line into a thing we not only read but examine as a visual that we also read. But there’s also the gestalt of the whole thing, a single image of the whole thing. Also, I think it participates in the madness of the poem in its colour like the centaur’s kite tails etc. Sea of Po is itself a kind of wake-me-up, or so I fantasize. Your work contributes really poetically to this poetry project–thank you very much.’
Dual Viewing Mode
It is fascinating to see how different approaches to the original poems become transformed through animation in this way. On the one hand, the interactive viewer can pick and choose poet and poem, and also might also make decisions based on play value. The experimental fusing with the entertaining is really what is happening here. And something very do-able on mobile screens. What I really like about this dual viewing mode, is you actually have the chance to stop the animation and compare to the original verse. This also happens in the book Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow (Poem Film Editions) which I recently published with Poem Film Editions co-director Csilla Toldy. It’s an ekphrastic and bilingual poetry book, with a QR link to poetry films from the poems. But of course, here in Sea of Po the poems crucially share the same space. It is like seeing someone as they were and as they are at one and the same time. The viewer intervenes, but the original will always remain the same, watching its own reformation and revisioning through colour, form and motion.
How Has Visual Poetry Changed
Since there is clearly a convergence of poetry film, video poetry, kinetic text and visual text or visual poetry today, I asked Jim how he felt that visual poetry had changed since the 90s.
JA: ‘The first book about the history of digital poetry (Chris Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry) looks at work from 1959 to 1995–so, basically, pre-web stuff. Digital possibilities, especially those posed by the web, have probably had the strongest influence on visual poetry since the 1990s. Tools like Flash and Director–now obsolete–and then HTML5 have opened up the possibility of creating interesting interactive, multimedia works for international, internet audiences. Such work is a synthesis of different arts and media. And the development of broadband has allowed the development of youtube, so that the videopoem has become much more widely seen. Also, publication of visual poetry has thrived on the web in domains dedicated to it, or blogs. There’s still lots of print publications, but it has expanded into the digital in a big way.’
In The Poetics of Poetry Film I quoted Christopher Funkhouser who noted in 2008 that the videopoem alongside computerized poetry, and interactive sound poetry despite their differences are all ultimately forms of digital poetry. I commented that whilst this might be true in its broadest sense, the particular aims, outputs and practitioner groupings (and ways of viewing) are often very different. Looking at Sea of Po it is clear that it represents not only a cross-section of poetry and poets – but also a dual viewing experience that, though still pushed by an interactive finger, conjoins once widely separate genres. Divisions between the poetry scenes are fast narrowing, and one central pioneer in this field, through his innovative, experimental and yet also entertaining animism project Sea of Po, is Jim Andrews.
Note: When the app is in the stores, it will be available for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and the web version will work unrestrictedly on Linux.
Weimar: Lit-collage, Aline Helmcke, Frame to Frames book tour, judging – Poetryfilmtage
I am very excited and honoured to be part of Weimar Poetry Film Award / Poetryfilmtage – (Friday 31st May and Saturday 1st June) this year. I will be judging and also presenting the newly published Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Seguen bilingual, ekphrastic poetry anthology, with QR link to poetry films (Saturday at 11 am).
It is my first time at this well-established festival, https://poetryfilmtage.de/ and I would like to thank director Guido Naschert for inviting me to be a juror, and I am really looking forward to meeting the other two esteemed judges – Rike Bolte and Pierre Guiho https://poetryfilmtage.de/jury-2024/. It will also be exciting to meet some of the finalists in person, whilst also taking in events that include short documentaries from around the world, young poetry filmmakers and German-language poetry films.
See Flyer_Poetry_Film_2024-web
This year there were 479 films from 51 countries submitted, and so the directors have been busy selecting finalists! The three festival directors are: Guido Naschert, Ana Maria Vallejo and Catalina Geraldo Vélez. Guido has a background in philosophy and literary studies and is a curator of the competition and international programme, and manages the Literary Society of Thuringia. Together with animator Aline Helmcke he founded the Poetry film Magazine (first published 2015) and the Weimar Poetry Film Award (originating in 2016) http://guidonaschert.de https://www.literarische-gesellschaft.de/
Ana Maria Vallejo http://anavallejo.de/ is also a curator, animator and filmmaker. She loves papercuts, collage and experimental films. She’s co-founder of the Weimar Animation Club and co-curates the competition with Guido. Catalina Giraldo Vélez https://gatomonodesign.com/ is a Professor and Head of Visual Design at Bauhaus University. She is also an animator and co-founder of the Weimar Animation Club.
It is easy to see that animation is a leading subject here. Looking at the background to the festival, they say: ‘Since 2014, professionals and students at the Bauhaus University have explored the connection between moving images and poetry and produced a large number of poetic animations.’ If you would like to combine the art of animation with a contemporary student appreciation of Weimar as a place to live and learn see: https://www.luciaschmidt.org/das-leben-in-weimar-2019/. However, reflecting on the marriage of art and craft (across the visual, verbal and sound design) in poetry film animation, it is equally important to situate the festival against its heritage, where philosophy, politics, literature, aesthetics, design and craftsmanship seem to have moved hand in hand.
The highly acclaimed German polymath, poet, playwright, novelist, theatre director, metaphysician, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was invited to the ducal court at Weimar in 1775, and became associated with the city for the rest of his life. Whilst leading German poet and classical playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) spent his final years in Weimar, exchanging philosophical talks with Goethe, his friend and collaborator. Apparently, it was here that they replaced their espousal of the earlier Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement that extolled the individual, emotional expression and nature over the cult of Rationalism, with a new humanism or Weimar Classicism (Weimarer Klassik) (1772–1805). It has been said that this new humanism sought to resolve or bridge the binary differences between, for example in poetry the emotional or subjective approach and the objective clarity of the intellect and Age of Enlightenment.
In 1919, a new approach to arts education in post-WWI Germany heralded the combining of the fine arts with industrial craftsmanship, and the merging of the School of Fine Art with the craft-based School of Arts and Crafts into the Bauhaus Art School. It was led by director architect Walter Gropius following his Bauhaus manifesto. It aimed to unite art, craft and technology to create functional design for the people. He brought artists to teach such as Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy (whose work crossed all media, painting, sculpture, metalworking, photography and photomontage).
In visiting the festival then, these historical factors – the aesthetics of art, politics and philosophy are inevitably embedded all around you; but are also reflected in much of the subject matter in the poetry film screening programme. Philosophy, art, craft, design are all present in the animations and films being shown, and once outside in the street, reflected back to the viewer through time. As Anna Maria Vallejo said in an interview with Magpies Magazine ‘At my masters I discovered animation as a place where both fields – moving images and fine art – find each other’.
Love, Hannah Hoch, 1931
Lit-collage
Echoing the emphasis on animation the main theme of the festival this year is ‘Lit-collage’ or photomontage, which is really exciting to me. Though I am not known for collage in my own poetry films, my dissertation (some years ago now) on Women Artists and Text (across all media) began with the German Dada collagist Hannah Höch (1889–1978), and it is not difficult to see how the central exhibition at the festival on this subjectDrehmoment by German visual artist and filmmaker Aline Helmcke (co-founder of the festival) bears a strong comparison to Höch’s work. Aline is a visual artist and director specialising in drawing, collage and animated moving image, and her drawings are particularly sensitive and experimental. Helmcke manages to create psychological tensions in her animations, something I don’t often see, for one example go to: junger janssen https://ahelmcke.com/portfolio/animation-junger-janssen/
She studied Fine Art at the Berlin University of the Arts and Animation at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been shown at film festivals and exhibitions and is also active as a film curator and university lecturer, currently at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee and the Hochschule für Kunst und Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle. https://ahelmcke.com/
I feel really lucky to actually be able to see this exhibition. The very title, which translates as ‘Torque’ in English (or pulling power in relation to an engine, or in terms of physics, the measurement of a rotational force). With Dadaist overtones, it conjures up concepts that relate to the visual tensions that occur from the cut-up process, the collisions or recombinations that tell new or fragmented narratives. And, of course, these factors take you beyond the visual to political positioning, and socially constructed understandings of gender. The festival programme beautifully illustrates her fractured, Dadaist photomontage style, or see Helmcke’s Brace Brace (2019) with flailing, disembodied legs https://ahelmcke.com/portfolio/cut-out-brace-brace/ or her animated collage loop https://ahelmcke.com/portfolio/animation-animated-collage-loop01/
animated collage loop, Aline Helmcke, 2016
One of my favourite stop motion animations by Catalina Giraldo Vélez is from the poem The Picture in the Picture in the Picture by German author and musician Marlen Pelny. Here, the poem (spoken by Pelny) narrates the nostalgia of, and problems with, searching for memories, with the intangibility of looking back; whilst the drawers of a filing cabinet, (or pages of a notebook and a paperback) uncertainly open and close. https://www.movingpoems.com/filmmaker/catalina-giraldo-velez/
Unfortunately, some wonderful workshops in stop-motion, text collage and sound collage have already taken place in April, when the festival began. However, on Friday evening the Lit Collage theme continues, with the workshop instructors Bas Böttcher, Kay Kalytta and Franka Sachse,‘taking the stage for a multimedia jam session; where spoken word meets sound and video art.’ And later, Aline will present a programme featuring collage animations of note, so I am really looking forward to an exciting Friday evening experience. As a poetry filmmaker with an art-school background myself, I am fascinated by the moving canvas of the animator’s eye. The way that animated shapes and colours can provide a playful often humorous or tragic world, accompanied by appropriate, carefully placed sound effects creates a constantly mesmerising screen. And one that really shows the artist’s free imagination at work, where anything is possible, perhaps the best medium for depicted storytelling. As Anna Maria Vallejo said: ‘My main interest lies in films in which narration can work differently… or where I feel curious because they show a weirdness or mysterious beauty.’
Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros Tus Ojos Seguen
I am thrilled to be driving to Weimar with copies of Frame to Frames in my hot little hands. I am also really looking forward to being interviewed by Guido and discussing a bilingual book-film linked project especially with ekphrastic poetry films, and sharing films and artist’s thoughts on the experience. I will be announcing this separately so for the moment leave you with a brief description of the Press details and all the forthcoming tour dates. I hope to see you at Weimar on Saturday morning if you are interested in bilingual (English and Spanish), ekphrastic poetry film. Congratulations to all the filmmakers who took part.
Described as an innovative and unique project – Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen is a bilingual (English and Spanish) ekphrastic poetry book with a QR link to a 17-film screening of poetry films made from the poems. The concept of a book-film arose from Sarah Tremlett’s Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow ekphrastic poetry film prize, where poetry filmmakers respond to works of art. The 2023 edition II of the prize was screened at FOTOGENIA Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives Film Festival, Mexico City in December 2023. The accompanying colour publication of the poems, synopses and stills from the QR-linked films alongside artists’ biographies, was also launched at the same time, under the imprint Poem Film Editions (co-founded by Sarah Tremlett and Hungarian poetry filmmaker and translator Csilla Toldy), with a print date of April/May, 2024. The festival painting Huapango Torero (see book cover) by non-binary Mexican artist Ana Segovia was selected by Sarah Tremlett as a prompt, and was chosen by many of the artists. This painting (a revision of an original work), where a boy holds a flower up to a bull, is a call to end animal cruelty, machismo and bullfighting.
The Frame to Frames project celebrates three creative forms: art inspiring art, translation and transmedia. So often in watching poetry films the poem passes you by, but the book allows you to press pause, really take in the poem on the page then return to the film. Here, it is possible to see how words and meaning can be transformed through the filmmaker’s process.
See https://vimeo.com/929116208 for a bilingual documentary on the making of the project from five of the poetry filmmakers.
TheFrame to Frames project has screenings at: FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, December, 2023; REELpoetry, Houston, April, 2024; The International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia, Germany, May, 2024; ‘We Need to Talk about Ekphrasis Now’ Leeds Trinity University, July, 2024; Bristol Literary Film Festival, August, 2024; Maldito Festival de Videopoesía, Albacete, Spain, November, 2024.
Sarah Tremlett, UK and the following artists are available for your festival screening and book presentation: Patricia Killelea, US; Tova Beck Friedman, US; Alejandro Thornton, AR; Colm Scully, IRL; Janet Lees, UK (Lois P Jones and Elena K Byrne, US); Martin Sercombe, (Thom Conroy) NZ; Pamela Falkenberg & Jack Cochran, US; Csilla Toldy, HU, IRL; Finn Harvor, CA; Javier Robledo, AR; Beate Gordes, DE; lan Gibbins, (Judy Morris); Carlos Ramirez Kobra, MX; Penny Florence, UK; Meriel Lland, UK; Ana Pantic, RS;
Refs:
https://magpiesmagazine.com/2022/03/17/interview-with-filmmaker-ana-maria-vallejo/
