To view more videopoems by various artists, visit Visible Verse on Facebook
VISIBLE VERSE
North America's sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant poetry video and film.
SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse 2008 @ Pacific Cinémathèque Programme
Congratulations! I have selected these works from more submissions than I could screen in one night. Perhaps we'll have to bring back the Vancouver Videopoem Festival!
There is talk of an international conference for producers and presenters. I'll let you know when it moves past rumour stage. ;-)
Hope to see you Thursday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 PM. Susan Cormier is the featured performer.
EVERYTHING Michael Caines Toronto, ON
A FIREFLY Kelly Egan/Souvankham Thammavongsa Toronto, ON
MEMORY BLOCK Hari Alluri Vancouver, BC
MARY Donna Szoke Vancouver, BC
BEWARE OF DOG Tom Konyves White Rock, BC
LUCKY, SUBWAY David Poolman/Kathryn Mockler Toronto, ON
TURTLEHEART Susan Cormier Vancouver, BC
OLD DEBATE OF DON QUIOXTE AND SANCH PANZA Madi Piller Toronto, ON
AKAM (INSIDE) Geetha J. Kerala, India
WHAT'S MY MOTHER !#@$ NAME Amber Dawn Vancouver, BC
THE KNOTTING OF ROPE, THE MECHANICS OF PLASTIC, THE RIGHT TO REMAIN Francesco Levato, Chicago, IL
THE BOOK OF GREEN Gerard Wozek/Mary Russell Chicago, IL
INTERMISSION
SUSAN CORMIER In Performance
LOWELLE BLUES Henry Ferrinni Boston, MA
LUNGRAGE Gary Barwin Hamilton, ON
LINGER IN THE MOMENT Claudia Tomczyk Edmonton, AB
FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY Eric Gamalinda New York, NY
WOLF, OBSTRUCT J. P. Sipila Turku, Finland
THE HISTORY OF HIS BLUE TOWEL Nilofar Shidmehr Vancouver, BC
THE ECHO MAKER Deke Weaver Chicago, IL
UNLUCKY 13 Phillip Jagger Edmonton, AB
OILERS Victoria Stanton/Vince Tinguely Montreal, QC
EAT! Martha Ciander Mims Vallejo, CA
WRITING BEHAVIOUR Stuart Pound Vancouver, BC
About Visible Verse
Sometimes I use the term media poet to describe my work though poetry exists beyond media; always has, always will. I tend to push boundaries by creating across disciplines, genre and media as a poet, author, musician, performer and director. My work manifests online, on paper, on stage, on disc and onscreen.
I believe Jean Cocteau was the first poet to employ film. In 1930 he produced Blood of a Poet, usually categorized as surrealist art. Recently I read about “film poets” from the West Coast abstract school, James Broughton, Sidney Peterson and Hy Hirsh, the latter two collaborating with John Cage in 1947. In 1978 Tom Konyves of Montreal’s Vehicule Poets coined the term “videopoetry” to describe his multimedia work. Rather than get bogged down in semantics, I’d like to point out that I think in terms of moving images and don’t make a huge distinction between film and video. I have worked primarily in digital video as it is accessible and affordable, important considerations to a poet with a small budget and again, poetry exists beyond media.
Though most of us in the West are visually literate, it is brave—foolish some say—to adapt the oral tradition to a medium where image is metaphor. I’m drawn to it simply because it’s natural for me, having grown up with television and cinema. According to my mother, I sat with my mouth open through the entire 78 minutes of Jungle Book, my first movie theatre experience. It’s a powerful medium and I still can’t resist its lure.
In 1999, as one of the curators of the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, I defined videopoem for a journalist by describing it as “a wedding of word and image.” Achieving that level of integration is difficult and rare. In my experience the greatest challenge of this hybrid genre is fusing voice and vision, aligning ear with eye. Some poets like to see words on the screen. The effect can be exquisite but I find that film/video doesn’t accommodate text well. We are busy listening to the poem with our eyes, assimilating it through our ears. I prefer spoken word. Voice is the critical element, medium and venue secondary considerations. Unlike a music video—the inevitable and ubiquitous comparison—a videopoem stars the poem rather than the poet, the voice seen as well as heard. My friend and associate Kurt Heintz, of e-poets.net and director of award-winning videopoems, states it much more eloquently than I can:
"Our extension of poetry into video seems only to ratify a deeper understanding, as poets and performers, that poetry rests in a continuous spectrum of expanded genres, each genre an amalgam, offering aesthetic expressions that conjoin text with some other creation. Poetry music. Poetry performance. Poetry theatre. Poetry film and video. Whole literatures in the cybernetic realm where the computer enacts by proxy the author's will upon the text.
The breakdown of psychological barriers from literature on the page to literature on the stage was the public's prelude to realizing broader rewards in media poetry of all forms. Poetry video is the public's first step beyond. Even in its most essential form, it demolishes the old assumption that page and poem are one. We now know poetry is where you find it, in the expressions the world offers. We construct, save, and transmit these experiences for the future. Images and sounds now operate as words where we had no previous literature because the symbols of our poetry were confined to paper in the reader's hands. So we have not the end of a literacy, but the construction of a new one: visible, audible, temporal, conscious, tactile, bonding author and reader by their gaze."