Audience comments about the PoetryFilm Equinox event on 26 September 2014
Above: guest Dominic Stinton, Sign Language Interpreter Rebecca, Filmmaker Louise Stern, and guest.
Above: Filmmaker Joseph Giffard Tutt and guest. Click below for more photographs.
PoetryFilm will be at the Swindon Festival of Poetry on Friday 3 October at 6pm.
The venue for the PoetryFilm event is Swindon New College, New College Dr, SN3 1AH.
The festival website is: http://swindonfestivalofpoetry.co.uk/2014-programme/
Many thanks to Hilda Sheehan for the invitation.
Sep 29
Come and enjoy poetry, tea and cake on Sunday 5 October between 2pm-5pm at the October Gallery in Bloomsbury. I will be reciting a poem alongside Aidan Andrew Dun and other poets at this annual fundraising event set up by Nicholas Albery (editor of the Poem for the Day anthology). The event is all about learning a poem by heart and reciting it (not merely reading it out).
Many thanks to Josefine Speyer for inviting me to recite a poem.
The event took place on 26 September 2014.
Sep 28
Below is a clip of Dannie Abse reading from Speak, Old Parrot at the T.S. Eliot Prize Award Reading at the Royal Festival Hall in January 2014. Dannie Abse was on top form that evening.
Sep 24
Below are full programme details for PoetryFilm Equinox: Translation, Transcreation, Punctuation which took place in September 2014.
There was a live BSL interpreter at this event.
Experimental film and sound collage with a spoken poem about embodying a moth. Original Super8 footage with found sound and spoken text.
Typewriter text manuscript of the eponymous poetry film.
“Standard of Truth is a video about archives and innocence. Children do not have any archives; they are born free. They do not have to worry about all those boxes of papers stating this or that truth, they do not have to pay storage fees, or check the levels of relative humidity in the vaults. The past has not yet arrived. They have nothing else than life ahead of them. The meaning that flows in their veins is not saturated with antibodies; they are made of oxygen. Maybe that is why they have big smiles.” – Daniel Dugas
The text of Paul Celan’s poem Schliere (Floaters) is printed with a Braille writing machine onto black leader, translating it into Braille writing. The 16mm film is readable to a blind person through physical touch, though projected onto the screen the writing transforms into an unidentifiable code of bright spots.
A blind person can read the 16mm film through physical touch, though can’t see the film projected; a sighted person can see the film projected, though can’t read the visual Braille poem – a paradox particularly appropriate in relation to Celan’s key themes of language and trauma.
The poetry film Dart by Marc Tiley is an abridged version of Alice Oswald’s poem.
Sellotape Cinema are artists Stephen Snell and Steven Chamberlain. Sellotape Cinema creates film worked directly onto sticky tape and played through a specially adapted projector.
Holes in the Mountain is a poetry film by Kai Carlson-Wee, shot during a freight hopping trip from Oakland to Portland with his brother in the summer of 2014. Through video, photography, poetry, and music, the film creates an associative narrative structure that seeks to explore rural American landscapes, spiritual poverty, and the experience of traveling by freight. The poem has been published in The Missouri Review.
The film plays with the tension between images of shadows, a text describing shadows, and an audio independent from the images and text.
‘I am particularly interested in poetry in the broadest sense, that’s the key to my artistic work. Poetry for me is also a learning process and a search in the understanding of the other. Other objects, other persons.’
For a number of years Eduardo Romaguera considered giving his work another name: ‘Explorador would have been a good one. I believe “explorador” better reflects the work I’m doing.’
“I can think of nothing sadder than a goldfish in a bowl. Swimming in tight circles, such a lonely fishy soul…”
Timeless Time invokes a time outside of time where it is not possible to establish whether events have happened or are about to happen, if they are something imagined or a vague attempt to recapture that which lived before falling into the land of oblivion. Text excerpts are from the film Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais (1961). The film is part of the international audio/visual project: Exquisite, What?
In Greek mythology, the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths reflects the battle between civilised society and wild behaviour.
Every Morning She’d Leave Me is the story of an ordinary man with an extraordinary history: his life in London in the 1960s underworld has been captured in a series of concrete poems created using his own words. Part poetry, part social document, the film features language from another time: watches on a villain’s wrists are “kettles” and dollars are “Oxford scholars”. The film is an animation set in American Typewriter Light.
Featuring lilies of the valley and the Expressionist painter August Macke from Germany; pomegranates from Israel; and barcodes from Portland and L.A.
With thanks to Tom Phillips.
Eschatology is a poetic exploration of the end of everything: of land where we take to ships, of radio contact when white noise fills the receiver; of individual sounds as they echo into space.
Black Death Ship, H.C. Westermann, 1972
On Saturday 20th September at 10pm BST, Langham Research Centre and Peter Blegvad present a live broadcast for BBC Radio 3 from Broadcasting House.
Music and sound effects are composed and performed by Langham Research Centre, using vintage electronic instruments and tape machines.