To view more videopoems by various artists, visit Visible Verse on Facebook
Visible Verse
See The Voice:
Visible Verse 2008 Call For Entries
Pacific Cinémathèque and curator Heather Haley are seeking videopoem submissions from around the world for the annual Visible Verse screening and performance poetry celebration.
Official guidelines:
- Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world, however.
- Pieces will be judged on true literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please, do not send documentaries, as they are outside the featured genre.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
- Submission deadline is 1 September, 2008.
Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to:
VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque
200--1131 Howe Street
Vancouver, BC
V6Z 2L7 Canada
Selected artists will be notified by 1 October, 2008 and receive a screening fee.
Vancouver's Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique, a not-for-profit society dedicated to the understanding of film and moving images. www.cinematheque.bc.ca
About Visible Verse
I am of the first generation to be raised with television, for whom it was prosaic. I cherish a photograph of my sister and I parked in front of a 21" screen watching The Jetsons. My world has always been inundated with moving images and I possess a "cinematic eye." Small wonder then that I am drawn to visual media, even as a poet and writer- a page baby with what I know, interpret my work through videopoems-ideally a wedding of word and image. -for it is what I know, intimately, and that is what we are counseled to do. "Write what you know." I try to write with what I know as well.
Poetry, a hard sell as a literary genre, is becoming visual and therefore, accessible, through film, video and the Web. Oral incantations-pre-historic and primal are transferred to video, the voice seen as well as heard. Poetry is ideally suited to film or video adaptation wherein image is metaphor. Long an ephemeral form, poetry will not only be preserved through visual media, but advanced by it.
I am drawn to video in particular because it lends itself to hybridization, its history of experimentation a fundamental aspect of the medium. Its populist nature appeals to me and of course, its accessibility and affordability are important considerations as well. Sans the cynicism and uber-commercialism of a rock video, a videopoem is employed to enhance the word and stars the poem, not the poet.
As a strong proponent of, and advocate for poetry and new media expression, I am grateful for the opportunity to see my vision executed with the help of the assembled artists-our goal has been nothing less than a symbiosis of word and image.
"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."
- Kurt Heintz, Director of Chicago's Guild Complex Poetry Film festival