Frame to Frames update: Lois P. Jones & Elena K. Byrne – powerful ekphrastic competition poem
Leading American poets Lois P. Jones and Elena K. Byrne have teamed up to compose an arresting ekphrastic poem on the festival painting Huapango Torero by Ana Segovia, for Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow ekphrastic poetry film competition this year. The event will be screened as part of FOTOGENIA festival in Mexico City 23 November–2nd December. I cannot think of two poets more experienced in this field and I am truly humbled that they have responded to the painting in such an inspiring way. SEE BELOW FOR THE POEM.
Alongside collaborator Australian filmmaker Jutta Prior, Lois was the first winner of Frame to Frames with her poem ‘Reflections on La Scapigliata (the girl with disheveled hair)’ based on the painting by Leonardo da Vinci. I would urge you to read her collection Night Ladder (winner of the 2017 Best Books Award) by Glass Lyre Press for a truly exceptional lesson in crafting poetry; of an interweaving across time, through the metaphysical, the spiritual, and with a highly attuned imagination and curiosity – see ‘Picasso’s Garden’ for Dora Maar, or ‘Rilke’s Maid, Leni at the Little Castle of Schloss Berg’. I was lucky enough to catch Lois and Elena at Cheltenham Poetry Festival 2022, discussing their work and comparisons between English and American poetry. Lois introduced a new series of poems on Rilke, visiting where he lived for the last years of his life. She noted how poetry arose for her from the viewpoint of Rilke’s housekeeper. It felt as if she were walking beside her protagonist, and present at the time.
If you need one book on ekphrastic poetry If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing) by Elena Karina Byrne is in a class all of its own. Comprising a remarkable 66 poems that interweave artworks with the author’s life experiences, we are taken on a journey where painting and viewer seem to inhabit the same space. Divided into three sections Rock, Paper and Scissors we shift from Francis Bacon to Cindy Sherman, Hieronymus Bosch to Joseph Cornell with such ease and joy, that it is as if you are in a private gallery of the author’s making; reinterpreting far more than is visible to the naked eye. Every line, riddled with a consistently visible intelligence and driving instinct, seems to speak volumes, for example the title ‘Turner, Strapped to the Mast, – 1969’, and we shift so easily from the concept to her father teaching her how to draw, to the Romans and coloured glass. On the opposite page ‘Awol Erizku’s Rescued High Cactus’ shifts into a much darker sphere, relating the horrific experience of her cousin Mark’s body found in a desert. Every page, as a different ‘exhibit as poem painting’ if you like, forces you to stop and assess every encounter very much on its own terms. But you are standing with the author whispering in your ear.
Both these poets (whose biographies show you how endlessly hard working and talented they are across many areas) seem as happy radiating themselves as verbs as much as nouns; disappearing into the paintings, people and places they are taken by, and surfacing with so much treasure to discover. How the visual image inspires the word is a constantly fascinating area, and in Lois and Elena we have two textbook examples to follow. But going one stage further than that, I cannot help but ask how do two poets collaborate on one poem? This is not a script, or maybe somehow a poem can be something like a script, but how can two highly individual authors reach a decision on the right word, that they may have just arrived at through instinct. I understand it was the first time for them, which is truly unbelievable, and that they would like to collaborate again (very believable).
Lois and Elena respond:
Because poetry is already a form of collaboration between one’s mind and the world, between one’s emotional geography and the physical place in which we find ourselves on a timeline, our collaboration to write this ekphrastic poem felt natural – the process revealed an epistolary-like exchange. Once we decided on a stanzaic structure, we were able to take turns with the ideas. A call-and-response dance, a poem of one mind. Influenced by the images from the painting and what those inspired, the music of language filled the room of the poem. We realized that a persona poem might best reflect the beautiful strength of conviction that was apparent in this artist’s oeuvre.
However it was achieved here is the poem that was inspired by Ana Segovia’s memorable painting Huapango Torero (courtesy the Karen Huber Gallery).
Here are the entry details again including the poem ‘Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca’.
Submissions are requested for video poems under 10 minutes based on paintings or other works of art. All entries in English must have Spanish subtitles, and Spanish entries subtitles in English. Other languages subtitles in English. Entries can also be inspired by the important Festival Painting Huapango Torero (courtesy Karen Huber Gallery) by leading Mexican artist Ana Segovia. Deadline: 30 September 2023. [huapango means ‘a fast and complicated dance for a couple, performed on a wooden platform to accentuate the rhythmic beating of heels and toes’. The painting is based on a traditional painting where boys would go into bulls’ fields at night to practice bull fighting.] The festival poem by leading American poets Elena Karina Byrne and Lois P. Jones is inspired by the painting to also use or write your own!
CALL in English with Poem and Painting
More Information in Spanish & Spanish and English entry forms: https://liberatedwords.com/2023/05/16/
Send ENTRY FORMS to Sarah Tremlett at liberatedwordspoetryfilms@gmail.com
Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca
after the painting Huapango Torero by Ana Segovia
Can I measure this distance between barbed wire and stone
wall bearing all the red delirium of spring,
between dawn and hunger and who has the upper hand…
How is it that something as small as a pistol or a knife can do away
with a man who is a bull? Or
a woman crowned by the farewell party of free speech?
There’s just this rose in my fist, and in the other, a pale sheet,
not of surrender but the torn petticoat from Lorca’s white
wedding. It was enough to hollow my mind. Enough to enter
this field the way I enter a sky full of bedroom windows.
One, witness to a bystander’s silence,
one is my child self, and another, the face of the bull.
You can’t see them, but women are singing across
the sugarcane, the sorghum, avocados,
and the wild Blue Agave. Their song carries me into the evening.
To know, like night, I begin again, entering these selves as
I climb through, step over each threshold
of who I am to test this outlawed animal mettle of our
youth, because I want to know who you are under this half-
blanched moon at the side of the hour’s
road and its unending fields that I now claim as my own.
———-
The poem in Spanish can be found here
https://www.elenakarinabyrne.com
Narratives of Climate Crisis – The British Library and MIX, Janet Lees, Csilla Toldy and Sarah Tremlett
[Notes by Sarah Tremlett on climate crisis and the aesthetics of climate change, including participant presentations from Csilla Toldy and Janet Lees (unable to attend), at MIX conference, The British Library, July 7th, 2023. Also featuring an in-depth conversation with climate activist, poet and extractive scientist John Bolland adding some vital context to the discussion. Additional important related articles by leading poetry film activists Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran will be published later in the year.]
Sarah’s Presentation
Looking back, we now know the terrible environmental facts centre on a ‘devastating 69% drop in wildlife populations since 1970’. By the 1990s philosophers and writers were voicing how we might expand our horizons culturally beyond the androcentric viewpoint. Today 50% of teenagers believe the world is doomed, frustrated by inaction on climate change, the continued use of fossil fuels and deforestation. I am a Fellow of the RSA where the director Andy Haldane asks how can we be Good Ancestors? I would ask, will we be ancestors at all unless we build for a new energy age? As creatives how is it possible to articulate our fragile position today? Different artists take different approaches. The artists included here have all been featured at Liberated Words: Meriel Lland, Mary McDonald, Ian Gibbins, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, but this is the first time that I have interviewed John Bolland and brought his viewpoint into the equation.
‘connective aesthetics’ with ‘the more-than-human world’ (Abram, 1996)
Small Journeys Skyward, Meriel Land
Meriel Lland
Featured in The Poetics of Poetry Film (Tremlett, Intellect, 2021) ecopoet Meriel Lland’s eco philosophy is inspired by Suzi Gablik’s term ‘connective aesthetics’ (art after individualism) (1992). Lland states: ‘My poetry explores aspects of biophilia – defined by biologist Edward Wilson as “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life”.’ As a wildlife photographer and writer Meriel’s work, such as Small Journeys Skyward centres on ‘an instinctive bond with other species’ layers empathic, environmental spaces from her own footage of the more than human, with drawing, language and hypnotic soundscapes.
Mary McDonald
The screen is both a canvas and graphic space for many poetry filmmakers whilst also hosting the cinematic flow of narrative. All its elements tell a visual story – both at and through the surface at the same time. For Canadian Mary McDonald working with the poem Utility Pole by Vancouver Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam, we have images of great redwood trees from Vancouver island, alongside a binaural soundscape of the forest. The trees become split into repetitive elements as they march in ever increasing units that they have been cut into as utility poles or as we call them telegraph poles. The very nature of the theme defines the formal aspects.
Another of Mary’s films –Wishing Well is a contemplative, meditative Augmented Reality interpretation of Penn Kemp’s poem, with a mandala-like central form, alongside a fully immersive soundscape (taken from the forest and ambient noises such as traffic or planes).
Sarah Tremlett : Ecopoetry Film and Performance
In my film I Cannot be Human I perform my own subjective experience of the importance of animals in my life as in the lives of millions of other people, whether as pets or as birds that we share our environments with on a daily basis. My own rabbit is central to the story, and the poem written after she died. Mary McDonald stated that this film centres on grieving, on the grief we all share, both on a personal and political level. She says ‘It carries the viewer through the state of anger and also eco-grief, then processing through it and able to move forward again’. It has been included by Janet on the Deep Adaptation Forum site which is an online organization aiming to share the views of people in crisis about the planet. It also reflects on the importance of animals for neurodivergent humans.
Film, Activism, Time – the Aesthetics of Disaster
Poetry films often deal with what I term Pervious Time, a blending of the subjective and objective, fusing many time frames – the absolute and relative on the screen at once and often expressing the author filmmaker’s state of mind. By altering our relation to time, we can in some ways both grieve for, or anticipate disaster.
Colony Collapse, Ian Gibbins
Leading Australian video artist and poet Ian Gibbins painstakingly creates composited scenarios of future disasters: the flooding of landscapes, ‘the Incoming’ as he refers to it; referencing overbuilding, fires within buildings, etc. – the apocalypse that we are heading towards.
In Colony Collapse for example, a type of catastrophe ecopoem, the refrain repeats ‘We Should not Be Here’. Mary McDonald, Ian and myself are all featured in conversation in a documentary (click on the following) ECOPOETRY FILMS AND SUBJECTIVITY first shown at REELpoetry, Houston, 2023, and with Spanish subtitles to be included in MALDITO Festival de Videopoesia VII Edición 2023 (31 October to November 5th 2023).
We’ve Been Bamboozled Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran
Americans Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg of Outlier Moving Pictures make long trips to record industrial, nightmare landscapes, oil refineries, etc. In Bamboozled they have used an erasure strategy to create a poem from original official reports from the fossil fuel industries. This visually parallels the cover up that the reports actually represent.
Bamboozled, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran
They say:
‘Since at least 1959, sponsored scientific research about the potential consequences of burning fossil fuels concluded that the impact would be “dramatic” and “urgent.” Instead of sharing this information and seeking alternatives, the fossil fuels industries embarked on a longstanding campaign of disinformation and obfuscation – resulting in resulted in lawsuits expected to take years.’
I would urge you to find out more about working on the film and the impetus for making Bamboozled click here.
John Bolland – eco warrior and extractive scientist
John Bolland is now a poet, artist and performer and an activist with Extinction Rebellion. His main career however was in the oil and gas industries and he writes on extractivism and colonialism. His geopoetry film Blur Times was created as part of his spoken-word project – Pibroch – combining scientific data with a series of ecological geocouplets reflecting on the nature of time, where afterwards the audience are invited to discuss Climate Justice.
He explores parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 where oil workers were trapped on a burning platform. He says ‘We are all, currently, trapped on this burning platform – and we are continuing to pump hydrocarbons into the flames.’
time geocouplet, Blur Times, John Bolland
With his knowledge John observes: ‘that the current systems of governance are not fit for purpose; that the current expectations of the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised, Rich & Democratic) are not sustainable; but that change will come and change has occurred before.’
For a fascinating interview with John and his response on climate change, poetry and activism click here.
JANET LEES: extracts from her presentation ‘Blame the Fox’
JANET: Like so many of us, I’ve felt overwhelmed by the climate and ecological crises. These problems are so huge we can end up wilfully blinding ourselves to them: climate chaos, unimaginable suffering – wholesale species extinction – including the threat of our own.
albatross chick, photo copyright: Chris Jordan.
Many years ago I came across the work of the deep ecologist Joanna Macy. She believes that we cannot hope to solve the huge, intertwined problems we face before we first immerse ourselves in our pain for the world.
Her ‘Work that reconnects’ provides a way to move from despair into authentic hope. It’s a four-step process which involves feeling gratitude, honouring your pain, seeing with new eyes, and then finding a way to help heal the world. For some, this might be direct activism. For others, it might be using creativity to connect with people. Joanna’s process is woven into my practice.
Poetry is fundamentally extra sensory and alchemical; a distillation and elevation of human experience – an immersive experience in itself, perhaps. But when I was working with poetry and photography as separate art forms, words didn’t feel enough, images didn’t feel enough, in terms of the Anthropocene. With its potent mix of different art forms, poetry film can hold intensity and immensity: a multi-sensory and even transcending experience.
Blame the Fox, Janet Lees, poem by Jane Lovell
The ecopoet Jane Lovell recently asked me to make a film based on her award-winning poem Blame the Fox. The poem is about mass extinctions in bird species and how, though we look everywhere for something other to blame, the blame lies with us, first world humans. click here for the film.
Janet’s PRESENTATION can be found here
CSILLA TOLDY: Ec(h)o (extract from presentation)
CSILLA: In 2021, during the lockdown, I created a 12’ long film poem, Axis Mundi. In “Axis Mundi” I “travelled” around the Earth through the time zones, giving a voice to indigenous people, and using languages as a guide to reflect on diversity and environmental issues. This was a 360-degree journey on the surface of the earth represented by different languages, and translations of the same poem about the Earth.
My head is the earth, my skin the air
dusk is my hair.
I am the earth –
I open myself and make love
with the sky.
On my horizon we touch
and eternity cascades on me with the night/light.
“My Head is the Earth” is a personification of the earth, duality arising from the light source, night and day. I wrote it originally in Hungarian when I was twenty and found it by chance in a publication on the internet. I translated the poem into English and sent it to nineteen translators asking them to translate it as well as record themselves reciting the poem in their language. Reflecting on duality, I changed the last line depending on the gender of the translator. A male had to say: light, a female had to say: night.
From the unit of my home, I reached out into the world.
I found my translators through friends and colleagues – the sound came from all over the world: New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, China, etc. I had: apart from
English and the major European languages of Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian, I had Maori, Algonquin, Irish, Danish, Japanese, Mandarine, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Zulu, Polish, Hungarian and Hiligaynon. It was completely up to the translators how to translate the poem, I had no control.
Some translators asked questions –
Some translators sent me 5-6 versions of the recital
Some only one – I had to ask for a repeat if they were not good enough quality, or too fast, for instance.
I made the film entirely during lockdown. I collected the footage for probably over a year.
The Axis Mundi- the pivot of the footage and – my world – was a meadow in Rostrevor, County Down, where I live. During lockdown nature and the said field gave me immense solace during the long months of isolation. Connection with the planet, the birds, and the peace of the meadow helped me to preserve my peace of mind.
Apart from the collected footage, which served as cutaways –
On this field, on an exact point, we set up a video camera on Spring Equinox Day in 2021, and turned the camera 360 degrees every hour of the day from sunrise to sunset. On the Northern Hemisphere, day and night is supposed to be the same length on this day. There were 12 rotations.
I am fascinated by the round shape, the 360-degree circle and have used it in many of my films as a visual metaphor,
The repeated shots during the hours of the day, the change of light and humidity in the air, gave completely different textures to the shots, yet we were on the same meadow, on the same day, in the same spot, on the same planet.
Gazing at this footage, and listening to the sound of the different languages immerses the viewer in a sense of meditation.
For Csilla’s presentation click here
————–
If you would like to find out more about any organisations in relation to this subject see below:
Sarah Tremlett www.sarahtremlett.com
Janet Lees https://janetlees.weebly.com/
Csilla Toldy https://www.csillatoldy.co.uk/
Meriel Lland www.meriellland.co.uk
Mary McDonald https://marymcdonald.ca/ https://fionalam.net/ http://pennkemp.weebly.com/
Ian Gibbins www.iangibbins.com.au
Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran, www.outliermovingpictures.com
John Bolland https://aviewfromthelonggrass.com/
The Poetics of Poetry Film https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-poetics-of-poetry-film
Gablik, Suzi, “Connective Aesthetics.” American Art, vol. 6, no. 2, 1992, pp. 2-7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109088.
Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage, 2010.
https://grist.org/beacon/2022–the–year–the–solar–age–truly–began/
https://www.deepadaptation.org
https://extinctionrebellion.uk/
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/
https://www.friendsoftheearth.uk
https://climateinitiativesplatform.org/index.php/Welcome
Videopoetry Vidéopoésie pdf available here from Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas
Canadians Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas have kindly allowed me to promote the bilingual pdf of their extraordinary work Videopoetry Vidéopoésie which was published by Small Walker Press in 2020. With the advent of COVID turning our world upside down I think this powerful overview of their work (at over 400 pages) bears a second look. It celebrates and chronicles the careers of two pioneers of videopoetry collections (working since the 1980s) and for those new to the field shares the background to writing poetry with video, as well as including stills to accompany the poems often in relation to major ecological projects.
Apart from anything else the design is faultless. Each element, whether poetic text, image, short prose, or related quotations, inhabits a great sense of space, and indicates the time and commitment they gave to producing such a beautiful object. The reader not only reads but enjoys the visual surface and the breaks that are afforded between engaging in thoughtful consideration.
Lucy English and I also contributed to the book, and I am looking forward to seeing more of their work which I hope will continue for many many years to come. 🙂
Presenting in MIX: STORYTELLING IN IMMERSIVE MEDIA, The British Library
MIX conference is back, and this time at The British Library in London, on the 7th of July. Co-hosted this year by Bath Spa University and The British Library, the programme centres on leading practitioners in AR, VR, game design, interactivity, etc. It also includes established poetry filmmakers such Jane Glennie discussing digital reimaging and the archive, and myself, Janet Lees and Csilla Toldy presenting on ‘Narratives of Climate Crisis: Voicing Loss Resistance and Hope Through Poetry Film’.
There will also be a chance to see the Digital Storytelling exhibition currently showing at The British Library, along with a guided tour and tea!
The Keynote Speaker is the multi-talented Adrian Hon ‘the co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of gamelike stories and story-like games including the world’s best selling smartphone fitness game, “Zombies, Run!” with ten million players, the exhibition of which will be a highlight of Digital Storytelling.
He’s author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All and A History of the Future in 100 Objects, a columnist at EDGE magazine, and has spoken at the flagship TED conference, the Long Now Foundation, GoogleX, and Disney Imagineering. Before becoming a game designer, Adrian was a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford.’
At the end of the day there will be a performance of An Island of Sound by Jules Rawlinson and JR Carpenter. A must see.
Bookable time slots for the VR works will be available during conference registration at The British Library on 7th July.
Podcast on Poetry Film with Sophie Kazan
REALLY THRILLED to be invited to take part in an interview for a Spotify podcast by SOPHIE KAZAN (art historian and great podcaster) about POETRY FILM. A really interesting set of questions. Already I am getting great feedback from listeners. Really rewarding. Thank you SOPHIE xx. And check out all her Art Minute podcasts. It is a real talent!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/39R6JLvZdPYCnexHstw4bs..
CUERPO TRANSPARENTE / TRANSPARENT BODY Buenos Aires online screening 23 June
INVITATION TO CUERPO TRANSPARENTE
I was sent details today (Midsummer’s Day, 21 June) by my good friend Sol Bellusci (you may know through VideoBardo) about an event that has really taken off in Argentina and its second event is now happening live and online.
Here are the details, and please take time out to watch and immerse yourself in this ‘projected body’ intervention / experience.
With much enthusiasm we announce the second edition of CUERPO TRANSPARENTE. We want to invite you to participate in the collective experience formed by 22 works of video dance, video art, animation and experimental video, which will be built in real time on June 23rd at 5 PM (Bs. As) at the Faculty of Arts Criticism, National University of Arts, Buenos Aires City.
It will also be transmitted simultaneously through the following youtube channel,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC58Hl-ZHSsj3iKCk7_tob4A
we invite you to subscribe here! Admission for both modalities is free.
Then there will be a discussion coordinated by Susana Temperley, specialist in Criticism and Dissemination of the Arts and Analysis of Choreographic Production with the members of the Curatorial team + guest Argentine Artists Muriel Sago, Maria Papi y Nilda Rosemberg.
TRANSPARENT BODY is a performative video intervention that reflects on the real / virtual / diverse post-pandemic body.
Mandatory social distancing moved the body to new digital spaces, enabling and restricting various forms of socialization. What are the possible effects of the presence/absence of the body?
What role did the interfaces, media and technologies play in the representations of the corporeal?
The collective experience CUERPO TRANSPARENTE will be built in real time from videodance, videoperformance, experimental cinema and videoart works by 22 artists selected in an international open call. The work will be activated by a performer and projected using the videomapping technique, followed by a discussion coordinated by Susana Temperley.
CUERPO TRANSPARENTE has the support of Prodanza “Impulso Cultural” Scholarship (2022); National Theater Institute; Study and Experimentation Group on Audiovisual and Digital Curatorship IIEAC; Research and Production Program of Culture, Art and Gender of the Dept. of Visual Arts UNA; Association of Experimental Audiovisual Producers AREA; The ParaVirtual Virtual Cultural Center.
Curatorial Team: Samara Pascual Migale, Marina Julieta Amestoy, Marisol Bellusci // Criticism : Marina Julieta Amestoy // Performance and Audiovisual Design : Marisol Bellusci // RRSS y Gráfic Design : Zina Stepanczuk // Direction and Production: Marisol Bellusci
Artists and work
Stuart Pound, Boogie Stomp Pink (UK) // Luis Carlos Rodríguez, Collage 26 (España) // Muriel Sagi Autorretrato (Argentina) // VestAndPage Amor and psyche (Alemania/Italia) // Erika Kassnel – Henneberg Conditio Humana I (Alemania) // Tina Willgren, Mute (Suiza)// Dança sem fronteiras, Cidade – Reflexões Poéticas (Brasil) // Natasha Cantwell, Leave your body (Nueva Zelanda / Australia) // Pierre St-Jacques, A short study of Envelopes (Canada) // Eden Mitsenmacher, How long has it been (Países Bajos) // Anderson Matthew, Everybody Dies (USA) // Teodora Ezhovska – Hristina Trajkoska, Body of water body of land (Macedonia del Norte) // María Papi, Piel Digital (Argentina) // Sveta Maximova and Vlada Zasedateleva, Lighting Tropes (Russia) // Yolanda Y. Liou, Illusión (Taiwan / UK) // Colectivo Dinamikas, Pará(r)lisis (Perú) // Jafri Faiyaz, Are You OK? (USA) // Maria Korporal, The First After-Corona Kiss (Alemania) // Conversación como conjuro, Gualicho (Argentina) // Carla Novak, Cabeza de Balde II (Chile) // Shon Kim,Bookanima Dance (Sur Corea)
We are waiting for you!
Thank you for being part of it,
Marisol Bellusci, Samara Pascual Migale y Marina Julieta Amestoy
