VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL

VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL at Pacific Cinémathèque

Nov. 4 & 5, 2011

It was a blast! "The best program yet!" I was told repeatedly. We were thrilled and honoured to host poets from disparate places: Kath MacLean from Edmonton, Rich Ferguson from Los Angeles, Alexander Jorgensen from Pittsburgh, Britt Hobart from Santa Barbara while our own Tom Konyves delivered an excellent talk on his newly minted VIDEOPOETRY: A Manifesto. Links to documentary videos and artists' websites are provided below.

 ARTIST TALK with pioneering videopoet Tom Konyves

In 1978, Tom Konyves coined the term “videopoetry”, a genre he pioneered as a member of the Montreal avant-garde group, the Vehicule Poets. His first videopoem was Sympathies of War, using slides, live performance and typed text on the screen. His most recent videopoem is All The Day Is Good For, a collaboration with his son, Alexander. Videopoems 1978-2004, is available on DVD (AM Productions, 2004). He initiated public poetry projects, such as Poesie En Mouvement (Poetry on the Buses 1979) and The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Expo 86), curated Montreal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980) and gave numerous poetry performances, including In A Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound (1979) and Marie the Poem (1981). He wrote and performed Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light (1979) a collaboration with most of the Vehicule Poets. He left Montreal for Vancouver, in 1983. He started up a video production facility, wrote and produced numerous TV programs, including the widely-broadcast documentary, To Return: The John Walkus Story (Global Totem Pictures, 2000). He now teaches Screenwriting 111 and Word and Image 165, a creative visual writing course at UCFV in Abbotsford, BC.

VISITING POETS READING- ALEXANDER JORGENSEN

His visual work and writings have appeared in such publications as VLAK, Moria, Drunken Boat, Noon: Journal of the Short Poem, Shampoo, The Return of Kral Majales: Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, and others. "Letters to a Younger Poet," correspondences with the late Robert Creeley, appears in Jacket #31. His visual poetry has been exhibited in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kolkata, Prague, Moscow, Toronto, and most recently at the 2011 Text Festival in Bury, UK. He has lived in such disparate places as the US, China, India, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Oman, and the Galapagos Archipelago.

From California, RICH FERGUSON

Rich Ferguson has performed across the United States and has shared the stage with Patti Smith, Exene Cervenka, T.C. Boyle, Loudon Wainwright, Bob Holman, and many other esteemed poets and musicians. He has performed on The Tonight Show, at the Redcat Theater in Disney Hall, the New York City International Fringe Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, the South by Southwest Music Festival, the DocMiami International Film Festival, the Topanga Film Festival, and Stephen Elliott's “Rumpus.” He is also a featured performer in the film, What About Me? (the sequel to the double Grammy-nominated film 1 Giant Leap), featuring Michael Stipe, Michael Franti, k.d. lang, Krishna Das, and others. He has been published in the LA TIMES, spotlighted on PBS (Egg: The Art Show), and was a winner in Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match, LA. He is a regular contributor and poetry editor to the online literary journal, The Nervous Breakdown.

 

SCREENINGS:

One Art                 Elizabeth Bishop/John D. Scott    2011    Ithaca, NY
NDNSpam Song             Cheryl L’Hirondelle            2010    Toronto, ON
Doo-Da-Doo-Da            Kath MacLean                2011    Edmonton, AB
Kavandi Bearer            Jill Battson                1994    Toronto, ON
GRAF                    Zion/Eklipze                2010    Toronto, ON
Emily Melting                Alastair Cook                2010    Edinburgh, Scotland
Lingual Ladies                Adeena Karasick            2008    New York, NY
dollhouse                Shabnam Piryaei            2010    New York, NY
Ache In My Name            Vivek Shraya                2011    Toronto, ON
On Edward Hopper’s Automat        H.K. Hummel/Swoon Bildos        2011    Mechelen, Belgium
Commands                Diana Heise                2010    North Hero, VT
We Voice Sing                Rich Ferguson/Bo Blount/Bo Blount/Luca Dipierro 2010    Los Angeles, CA
Poetry In Motion            Brandon Wint/Craig Allen Conoley    2011    Ottawa, ON
I My Bike                 Ken Paul Rosenthal            2002    San Francisco, CA
./still                    Machi Miyahara            2011    Tokyo, Japan
The Next War                Robert Priest/Allen Booth        2008    Toronto, ON
barefeet                Sonali Gulati                2002    Richmond, VA


INTERMISSION

Sandpiper                 Elizabeth Bishop/John D. Scott    2011    Ithaca, NY
Penitentiary                 Doctor Mongo/Michael Rouse        2010    Los Angeles, CA
Stop the War on the Poor        Robert Priest/Allen Booth        1999    Toronto, ON
Teacups & Mink            Leanne Averbach            2008    Vancouver, BC
The Self as Both Object and Subject    Myna Wallin/Henry Mak        2011    Toronto, ON
Blue Covers                Indira Allegra                 2008    Oakland, CA
Amicable Depictions            Britt Hobart                2011    Santa Barbara, CA
Anticipated Results            Dennis E. Bolen/Susan Cormier    2011    Vancouver, BC
What do animals dream?        Yahia Lababidi/Swoon Bildos        2011    Mechelen, Belgium
Highway Coda                Matt Mullins                2011    Muncie, IN
Incident on College Street        Jill Battson                1994    Toronto, ON
Just Watch                Janet Marie Rogers            2011    Victoria, BC
Prodigal                Alastair Cook                2011    Edinburgh, Scotland
On the Other Hand of Time        Penn Kemp/Brenda McMorrow/DennisSiren 2011    London, ON
Black Iris                Sheila Packa/Kathy McTavish        2011     Duluth, MN
Stockholm Syndrome            Howie Good/Swoon Bildos        2011    Mechelen, Belgium
Human Condition            Rich Ferguson/Mark Wilkinson.    2010    Los Angeles, CA
Sleepdancing (Giddoo)        Yahia Lababidi/Swoon Bildos        2011    Mechelen, Belgium
Gargoyle Weather             Joe Boyce Burgess            2011    Vancouver, BC

 

In 2010 we celebrated 10 YEARS OF VIDEOPOETRY at Pacific Cinémathèque!

In 1999 the Vancouver Videopoem Festival—the first of its kind in Canada—began as an effort of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre, a non-profit literary arts organization dedicated to expanding the reach of poetry through new media with programs such as Telepoetics Vancouver and the Edgewise Café electronic magazine. The Vancouver Vdieopoem Festival became critically regarded owing to its progressive regard for spoken word in cinema, presenting poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could explore the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in these two forms, stage and screen, sparking new dialogue as to the essential nature of poetry. The Vancouver Videopoem Festival then built upon that foundation, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. They presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from their own country.

Pacific Cinémathèque has been the VVF’s partner since 2000 and throughout the dissolution of the Edgewise. Founder Heather Haley continues to provide a sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry as host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse. And owing to Vancouver's strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both.

For more information contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com

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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: