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Address to e-poetryJune 18, 2013, Kingston University, London,
UK
"Innovative Poetry in the Age of the Image: Where is the
Avant-Garde in Videopoetry?"
In the past decade, I have witnessed a veritable explosion in
the creation and dissemination of short videos
purporting to be poetry. An ever-widening support structure of
festivals (Zebra in Berlin, Videobardo inBuenos Aires, Visible
Verse in Vancouver, Saddho in New Delhi, Instants Video in
Marseille), conferences
(MIXin Bath, UK, WORD/IMAGE/IMAGE/WORD in New York), specialty
channels on YouTube, Vimeo,
movingpoems.com and other web-based video archives have
transformed what was essentially an
experimental genre of visual poetry into a welcoming medium for
personal expression; in other words, it has
become popular.
With the increase in popularity, it has presented itself as an
open form for traditional verse, often
illustrative of its texts, even accompanied by soundtracks drawn
from current pop music charts. Considering
the computer-assisted advancements in image and sound
manipulation, how has poetry fared in the leap
from page to screen?
For some time now, I have been promulgating a possible change in
the nature of poetry when it is expressed
in the form of a short video; my view is that poetry is the
resultof the judicious, poetic juxtaposition of
text, image and sound; thepoetryin a videopoem thus ceases to be
simply the text element in what I
perceive as a true orpure videopoem (pure in the sense ofcinma
pur). Instead, an entirely new form of
poetic experience can be produced; this new experience,
altogether an aesthetic experience, depends on
the artists intuitive skill in recognizing the collaborative
potential of the three elements as well as the
audiences skill of recognition that the convergence of these
three expressive media can, in fact, result in
more than a narrative told in visual terms. Assisted by selected
works, the following presentation will
explore the genre of videopoetry as it attempts to evolve into
the art form of a future generation of poets
poets who are also filmmakers.
***
On Sept. 6, 2011, I went out on a limb and drew a line in the
sand. I published an essay on videopoetry that I
called a manifesto. I went out on a limb because I was not
satisfied with how this encounter of the verbal
and the visual, this interdisciplinary practice of integrating
text, image and sound to produce a new genre of
poetry, was being described; essentially, that film or video was
becoming another platform for publishing
written poetry. The proof is in the hundreds of so-called
videopoems that, for the past ten years at least,
have been arriving with regularity at the major poetry film
festivals as well as by the thousands on the web.
(Depending on how you spell it, Google lists 29000 or 290000
results for videos tagged with the term
videopoem.) The vast majority ofexhibited works at these
festivals are voiced, prioritizing the words of
the text, usually as pre-existing, published poems. The question
is, will we always associate the words we
hear with those specific images? Of course, one person's blur is
another's soft gaze.
In 1927, speaking for what is called French Impressionist
Cinema, the avant-garde filmmakers who described
the purest form of film as a film poem, Germaine Dulac
questioned the relationship, by stating that "If
cinema is merely an animated reflection of literature it is not
an art. The new aesthetic is to divest
cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true
essence in movement and visual rhythms. Its true
essence was in fact medium specificity. Thus, text, whether as
intertitles, superimposed or voiced except
when scratched into the emulsion disappeared from experimental,
pure film.
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What is specific to a hybrid form like videopoetry is not what
is specific to its elements. One has to trust that
a poetic experience will emerge from the juxtaposition of its
elements. Text, image and sound tend to arrive
complete-in-themselves, self-sufficient, if you will. For the
hybrid form, the specificity, I would suggest, is in
the collaborative properties (a more accurate term may be
synergistic properties) of the individual
elements. In other words, not all texts (a good example would be
most previously published poems), not all
images (obviously) or soundtracks embody collaborative or
synergistic potential.
This collaborative property, I would suggest, implies an
incompleteness, the presence of accommodating
spaces in each of the elements. Once the accommodating spaces
appear in the succession of images, they
can be completed by the text and the soundtrack.
Videopoetry could also be seen as the Duchampian assisted
readymade. Consider the recorded image as
the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover
whether there exists something significant, yet
still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface
of the present moment.
I would now like to present 12 30-second excerpts of videopoems
I have found particularly interesting.
Beginning with a tribute to concrete poetry, here are two
videopoem interpretations of Eugene Gomringers
Wind and Silencio
David (Jhave) JohnstonWind(2010)
Lenora de BarrosSilencio (2006)
Two German films.
For the voiced text of Gerhard Ruhms poem, Unequal Brothers
(2007), Hubert Sielecki discovered a
collaborative property in the manipulation of approaching and
receding ocean waves.
In 2002, Ralf Schmerberg produced Poem, the first feature film
to present a series of 19 unrelated poemson the mainstream cinema
circuit. Of the 19 films, 3 exhibit unusual juxtapositions of image
and text. One
of these proposes a postmodern treatment of a love poem.
The next excerpts present 3 videopoets interpretation of beauty
as the chance encounter of a readymade
image and visual text - on an editing table.
Tom KonyvesQuebecause (1982)
Harlene WeijsOde to Dad (2002)
Sarah TremlettSome Everybodies (2009)
In the next 3 excerpts, the artists explore the premise that a
poem can emerge from appropriating,
manipulating and ultimately recontextualizing archival film
footage.
W. Mark Sutherland In Memory of Jack Donovan Foley (2008)
Natalia Fedorova/Machine Libertine Snow Queen (2010) based on
the 1957 film and William Blakes
The Poison Tree, and
Brandon Downing homophonic translation of the song Zindagi Ke
Sefer Mein (2009) juxtaposed with the
1979 film Magic.
