VISIBLE VERSE

North America's sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant poetry video and film.

SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse 09 was fabulous, even if I do say so myself! It was a stellar programme, received with much enthusiasm by a very appreciative crowd including Fiona Lam, Joe Boyce Burgess, Katrin Bowen and two pioneers of the genre, our own Tom Konyves and Kurt Heintz, visiting from Chicago. Tom was a member of the seminal Vehicule poets in Montreal, teaches videopoetry at the Fraser Valley university and received a grant recently to research poetry video and film; a good guy to have in our corner and he was impressed. e-poets director Kurt Heintz was one of the founders of Chicago's Poetry Guild Poetry Festival and has produced and directed many of his own outstanding and innovative videopoems.

I'm always winging it in my mind, when programming, imagining what a selection will look and sound like on the big screen so it's very exciting to see it all come together so well. Gabrielle Everall knocked 'em dead with her performance and Pacific Cinémathèque staff were helpful and friendly. Thanks to all the artists for their contributions!

 

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: