An About page at VidPoFilm  - hastily thrown together yesterday, still a mesh of About and Submission Guidelines which will find their own pages in the coming months. The About page, as it is now, will give you a better idea of what this nascent e-Journal is.

Yesterday I received my first enquiry about the possibility of doing an article on a video/filmpoem, which I am doing, and you'll see it Friday.

If I did not wish to profile it in an article, it could have gone into my last-Sunday-of-the-month Group Show, a smorgasbord of video/film poem offerings that you send in and which I do not curate or edit (except to make sure they are video/filmpoems). The first one is coming on the 27th of November, if you are a video/film poet, send one url (I'll grab the embed code from the url) to vidpofilm{at}gmail.com.

VidPoFilm's About page:



VidPoFilm explores the poetics of video and film poetry and offers critiques of works in this genre. To enquire about submissions, email VidPoFilm [at] gmail.com.

Process Notes on VidPoFilm:

It will be another month or two before I have a proper description of VidPoFilm and requirements for submissions for articles.

My plans for postings:

• Mondays for articles on 'video/filmpoetry theory.'
• Wednesdays for 'video/film poets writing on video/filmpoems'; this can include interviews.
• Fridays I will continue to post my articles on video/filmpoems.
• The last Sunday in each month can be a 'group show' of video/filmpoems submitted by artists.
• Articles on specific video/film poets or video/filmpoems of course can be published on any of the remaining days during the week.
• (Note: If there are no video/film poetry theory submissions, or I haven't found anything to post, for instance, there will be no post on Monday. Also, I can tag posts so they will appear in a specific "Page" -like this one- that has its own RSS feed and keep the posts organized this way.)

I am currently grappling with how to explain poetics, and need to work on this before I can properly open to submissions.

Briefly, poetics, in the way VidPoFilm uses it, describes mechanics in some way or other. Video or film techniques, visual and verbal images and how they interplay, describing a scene to articulate its flow in the overall theme, etc. How you come to see what you see and hear in the film/video.

Any and all articles have to explore the poetics of a video or film poem. If they're theory, not just definitions, but also praxis, the how, examples of this in video/film poems.

A poetic essay, like the ones I've been producing on Fridays, is fine. You'll note, though, there is always some exploration of how the video/film poem was constructed -often in a description of film technique. Even noting how the images are cut to the beat of the music is talking about technique - to write about beat synch gives readers an awareness of that alignment. Describing the images as the writer of the article sees them enriches the viewing of the video/filmpoem, and offers another entryway into understanding the video/film.

Also, I am considering a Group Show once a month. I invite artists to send in one video/filmpoem they have made. On the last Sunday of each month I will post all the videos in one long post that is unedited (other than ensuring submissions are video/filmpoems) and un-curated. A video/film poet can send a piece in every month for the Sunday Group Show.

If someone would like to work on an article for VidPoFilm (and their own site), or already has one, they should contact me through vidpofilm{at}gmail.com.

_


VidPoFilm is curated and edited by Brenda Clews, who blogs at Rubies in Crystal.

Visit my group on Vimeo: vimeo.com/groups/videopoetry. If you are a video or film poet, please join and add your work.

Video and film poetry sites to check out: Billy Collins Action Poetry, Blue's Cruzio Cafe, Born Magazine, Camera Poetica, Comma Film, FilmPoem, Motionpoems, Moving Poems, Rabbit Light Movies, Rattapallax, Synesthesia, The Continental Review, UbuWeb: film and video, Viral Verse.

I am ready to announce the birth of a new on-line journal:  VidPoFilm.

VidPoFilm explores the poetics of video and film poetry and offers critiques of works in this genre.

VidPoFilm: videopoetry and poetryfilm - poetry the key that slides either way.

I am both curating and editing the material at VidPoFilm. So far, I'm posting my Video and Film Poem Fridays articles.

VidPoFilm is open to submissions - only articles on other video and film poems, this is not a self-promotion site for me or any other video or film poets - but I won't have a description of my requirements ready for another month or two. Articles can be pre- or co-published in your own blogs, this is preferable in fact. My only rule, so far, is one article per year per video or film poet. Brilliant work is being produced world-wide in this field and I do not foresee running out of material..

Subscribe by RSS feed to the site. Blogger offers a state-of-the-art blog that enables you to watch the videos in your Readers. VidPoFilm is about disseminating video and film poems far and wide while offering a way to 'read' them. The stats on the videos and films discussed is more important than the stats on the journal site, so please watch the films -they are 'top notch'! These flicks are the crème de la crème.


[Below I have embedded an iFrame gadget that not only shows you the website, but is a fully functioning website within a website (you can only see this if you are at the blog itself, unfortunately). Read, watch, explore, comment.]

VidPoFilm

I forgot to post a widget this year to mark my progress. Other than falling behind a bit near the beginning, which I did catch up on, I've been steadily making my 2000 words a day and am now just over half way to the finish line of 50,000 words.

No excerpts to share, sorry. The story has taken such a different direction to the one I had originally thought that I'm trying to keep up with it, even as I resist writing it. It's far too late now, and I spent all day resisting, and all night, but the words came anyhow, one after the other, sentence after sentence until I came to a place to stop and looked at the word count. Ah, time to rest, to sleep perchance?

Out walking my dog early yesterday evening and rounded a corner by a park. Blinding light imprinted my retinal nerve. Hurried home to get my video camera. A huge moon tangled in autumn leaves.

The moon over Toronto. These are untouched images straight from the camera's eye.


Click on any image below, and a black lightbox will open for optimal viewing with all the images like moon stamps along the bottom.

direct link: outside my black hole by Steven McCabe

outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance. It features the poetry and drawings of Steven McCabe, who is a Canadian visual artist, poet, filmmaker and arts educator.

Steven works with a team to produce his superb film poems. However he manages this collaboration financially, hopefully with grants and backers, the results are nothing short of magnificent. Steven McCabe's film poems are among the best works in this genre being produced in Canada today.

If you would like to explore the film poetry of this multidisciplinary, multi-media Canadian artist and poet and director, check out his channel at YouTube; all his films are also listed at his website.

I would urge you to watch outside my black hole, the filmography is stunning, and then to play it again, but close your eyes and listen.

Steven McCabe is a poet at the height of his powers. This poem interweaves a lifetime of reflection, writing, feeling, and, listening to it, I think, it can't get any richer than this. Or more simple.

It is as if a mythopoeic poet has introduced the simplicity of Zen meditation into his oeuvre. The cascade of images that collide and separate, echo and reverberate, from prehistory through to the fast-paced, urban computer-literate world of hyper-speeds, terrorisms, and space travel is read without drama in an even voice paced to the accompanying visual images and is as mesmerizing as it is breath-taking.

In the film, the drive through the city at night where the lights take on the quality of dream images of inner light opens with translucent circles that feel like we are entering a tunnel. The mysterious dancer in red echoes the kinetic qualities of the poem's images. She is often partially presented, for instance she is dancing with her arms, or as the vivid red petals of a dancer who we don't see all of.

The most stunning aspect visually for me is the way Steven's drawings are presented. If you cut out an image in Photoshop and save it on a transparent background as a .psd file, you can layer that image into Final Cut Pro. Perhaps this was the technique used here.

The drawings appear and disappear like icons in a hallucinated reality, as if they have come directly out of the symbolic unconscious. They are presented exactly as they are, only cut from their pages, and collaged into the film. They appear as tribal totems, inscribed with hermeneutic symbols, the dense black India ink lines layered sometimes into cave-like forms where figures appear.

I've seen some of these images at sites where Steven has posted them and have been awed by their resonances with ancient Greek myth, Indigenous Native American myth and spirituality, the archetypes of Jung's depth psychology, Surrealism, and their impenetrable raw emotive power. The scenes they depict are ones of rupture, hope, connection. Despair, yes, but it transforms into the living moment of now.

Nothing remains as it is in McCabe's work, but is always transforming, as he uncovers layers, exploring the self as an archeology of personal and collective memories.

In outside my black hole, we find a central metaphor of seeing, in our rushed modern lives, caught in a black hole that sucks the promise of our ancestry into its high speed vortex also becomes the black pupil of our eyes, yours and mine, that crucial tunnel that enables us to see the world, and where the world enters us.

Our pupils, black holes, are enlarged at night, to let in more light, and we see this echoed in the nighttime shots, the glazes of hypnotic lights just on the edge of blur. We are immersed in a "poetry noir," as he writes in his notes, and see with our night vision.

And yet, as he quotes Eliot's The Hollow Men,

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars

In an email, Steven wrote, that, besides his Artist's Statement for the show at Propeller (reproduced below), "the video of course also deals with a rather grim assessment of where we are at in this time of history as a species."


outside my black hole was screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct/Nov 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe's exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.

Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
Poetry/drawings/narration Steven McCabe
Dance Paula Skimin
Music composed and performed by William Beauvais & Barry Prophet
Director of Photography Eric Gerard
Editing Konrad Skręta
© 2011 Steven McCabe



from Propeller's website:

Steven McCabe

A Cathartic Document

(image from my videopoem, the dancer's backskin)

This week we grapple with the boundaries of what a film or video poem is. I almost called these articles, Videopoetries. SHED is a videopoetry. It is an art film about light and drawing through time in a shed that is as high as it is long.

Christina McPhee's drawings were filmed over two years and edited as a video montage of screens with varying opacities and speeds. The drawings are like inscriptions. They remind me of free-form pictograms, dream writing, glyphs of an inner symbolism. They are an occult calligraphy, a concrete poem-in-motion, scrawling into being under the artist's brush. The sound in the film is the artist's brush creating the drawings. She writes:

I make very large scale drawings using white rolls of watercolor and drawing papers. The drawings are usually created in a horizontal orientation working from right to left, like writing without backtracking or extensive editing. When not executed horizontally, the drawings are also created in a vertical orientation and worked from top to bottom like a scroll. The markings are calligraphic and topologic and do not represent content. They consider intensities and nodes. I consider depth of field from point to point moving from the implications of the last move into a new territory. Each drawing gesture generates the next.

This is an automatic writing. A poetry. I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.

Christina calls her drawings Teorema, after the Pasolini film of the same name which she speaks about in the video below SHED. Of her studio space, which reminded me of a stark meditation cabin, she writes:

A shed is a barracks, a shelter and it is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets). The shed is a place of elemental becoming and the drawings develop the space of the shed just as the shed develops the space of the drawings. Mutually they create a performative condition for video installation as drawing. The accumulation of layered montage in multiple takes gives rise to a series of videos.... the video creates drawing as architectural event.

direct link: Christina McPhee's, SHED / cinema clip / 2011

At her website, we find further clarification:

During two year’s time, SHED CUBED traces the heliotropic movement of drawings across diurnal passages of light and darkness in an austere interior of concrete floors and white walls. SHED CUBED is ‘shedding’ drawings. The drawings accumulate, re-materialize, and melt away in the space of the shed….

SHED CUBED reflects on the materiality of video as a drawing medium and architectural body.

SHED regards the effect of transverse light, as the sunlight moves through the space from early morning onwards… The video footage captures the slow changes of the light and the rapid changes of the drawing. In post production, the video format becomes a long strip, rather than the typical rectangle– a sequencing and serial effect. The footage is compressed up to a limit of 900 percent. The shed is hermeneutic (pertaining to its own secrets) but the transverse light inside the shed explodes the intimacy of such a secret space, brings it into the light. Effectively the light exposes the drawings as a writing process that iterates line after line in accumulations, refrains, recollections and recursions. Following the drawings, the video montage sheds time in layers, in a profusion of moments…the installation recapitulates the shed.

You can view the full series of SHED's "drawings as writing process" at her website, where she calls them a teorema of glyphs, nomads, aplophorids, chromogenics, lightjets. They are also reminiscent of marine life (she speaks of shrimp being thrown on the deck of a boat by the sea during a marine ecology project) and insects, of the underpinnings of larger living ecosystems.

I hope you enjoy my choice for this week's featured videopoem, and as you watch SHED, and the articulation of its processes and some of the inspirations and aims that Christina offers at a presentation below, you are inspired.


direct link: Christina McPhee: Shed


-

What I wrote last night, exhausted after a long day, so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, not 2000 words, but I'll catch up today.

Chapter II

Across town, red and yellow fallen leaves were swirling in a whirlpool upwards towards the open palms of a figure in a black woollen cape.

Out of the swirl of leaves a spirit seemed momentarily to emerge, a deva, a nature sprite, only rather than playful, as she might be in spring, she had a sharpness, was fierce, pointed.

The leaves swirled like the nose of a bullet, or a sharp beak.

Then they fell back into the heaps of reds and golden fallen leaves the wind collected from under the trees and flung in banks across the yards and streets.

She smiled, her pale grey hair visible under a tweed flat cap. Her black flat-heeled leather boots as high as the knees, and black leggings under the woolen cape were visible across the street, where he was watching.

“Good!” he shouted. “Another take?”

“No!” she shouted back. “Not now. That... was enough. Sorry!”

“Okay, take a break.” And he turned to a thin young woman whose hands were resting on a large camera on a tripod that was locked on its wheels, and said, “Cut. That’s it for today, Clare. You can go if you like.”

Clare looked at him warily, then abruptly dropped her hands from the camera. She left without saying anything.

“Come back tomorrow, same time,” he called after her. “You’ll be paid for the whole day.”

Standing beside the camera, almost guarding it, he waited for the caped woman who was walking towards him. “Shall we take a look?”

The woman shrugged, murmuring indefinably. He opened the viewfinder, clicked some buttons and the caped woman was seen to be standing before a drift of fallen autumn leaves. They did rise like a whirlpool under her palms. Clare had zoomed in when the leaves formed their sharp point. But they did not appear as a sharp object coming to a head. The director and the actor stood, gaping, at the image in the viewfinder.

Rather, the leaves formed into the face of a woman.

The leaf woman blew with sharp breath on the outstretched palms of the woman standing over her. Then, like a genie returning to her bottle, she shrank back as the leaves fell into a heap joining the leaf encrusted garden.

“I can’t create a character for this,” the actress said, her face framed by her hat and flying hair - a wind had picked up catching the silver grey hair around her shoulders.

“You don’t need to, Madge. It’s all there. No more takes on this one.”

“What’s there, Jeb? I’m sorry if I’m a little spaced out - I experienced something in that shoot that I’ve never felt before.”

“What, Madge? If I may ask?”

“Oh..." she wavered, and then as if finding her voice in a deep canyon, slowly said, "For a moment I felt a presence, a flutist of the Maenades of the leaves approached under my hands, drawn by them. She was like a koi coming to the surface of the pond and looking at me before disappearing back into the depths of her world. I heard a bamboo flute in the wind.”

Jeb was listening carefully, but said in a calm, practical voice, “Let’s see how tomorrow goes, because that sounds really interesting, Madge, and I believe Clare has captured something of that mysterious moment in her filming.”


(a bit of a drawing of mine,
just to add an image)

Doing NaNoWriMo this year again. This will be my 4th novella. I like to write without knowing where it'll go or what will transpire. I am always amazed at the coherence of the final manuscript, though I haven't edited any or sent any out or even shown any of them to anyone else. They just pile up on my hard drive, whole books that I am quite proud of. Each one, a teacher.

The last time I wrote a novella in the month of November, and it was erotic fiction, and I'd be embarrassed to show it to anyone, was in 2008. I like to set a 2000 word a day goal. That 2000 words usually takes about an hour of straight writing. It is hard work, no denying. But wonderful when you find you have a whole manuscript, a story at the end of the month.

Usually I just write. While I have a general theme in mind, and a genre, I don't pre-plan the story, or map it out beforehand. That wouldn't work for me. Each day's writing is, rather, a discovery of the story that is unfolding. The characters form themselves and create their situations. It's a great way to let writing pour through you.

It begins officially tomorrow, on Nov 1st. I've managed it working temp jobs as a single mother - often I wrote through lunch at work because my kids were so demanding at night - so really it's simply a commitment to write. I can't write on my desktop because the 'inner' editor would kick in. I need something small and intimate. The first two novellas were written on a small old laptop, the third on a now defunct netbook, but don't have any of those anymore. So this year it'll be on the iPhone via a wireless keyboard. Cute huh? ::smiles::

Today I wrote about 300 words, and discovered what the story this year is to be about. While I don't think it's a good idea to show something new and nascent and in the process of forming, below is what I wrote. It's going to be a surreal novella this year!





At last she sat still, still like a bullet in a gun ready to fire. She floated high over the tree tops. But only for a moment - as long as it took to blink.

Shadows were watching, in each stalk of grass. Fields of watchers. The grass was rising, murmuring, rebelling. Then the grass flew. Tufts of green following her over the hill tops.

No, that didn't happen. She was on the ground. The blades photographed her image in the photosynthesis of each plant cell and thus followed her hologram through the sky.

Each blade screamed in green bleeding joy, blowing in the wind, rootless, free.

Then it came to an end. The grass fell on her head. When her mother came to get her, she was covered in grass. Her mother screeched the way some mothers do, and shook her daughter and brushed the grass off roughly with her hand, but some of it still stuck. She smelt like a freshly mowed lawn. Scuffs of green razor cuts covered her clothes and skin like a painter had daubed her with virescent green. She was a holy plant child of the holy green earth.

How do you imagine a consciousness so wholly natural that there is scant distinction between the landscape and the mind? The outside was in her. The sky that is blue with its dark clouds. The soaring dipping diving birds. A fossil alive. A woman from pre-history who was the future. A surreal madwoman.

The dreamscape is real. She was untameable. Wild in her abandon to the forces. She danced with trees and sang with brooks. I'm not saying it was bucolic, or a pastorally nostalgic vision. Not utopia. Rather, a reality.

This is a story of the greening fires, the ones you see in people's eyes when they are elsewhere.

Let's say it is surreal, so it's going to be a crazy write where logic is twisted, braided, looped and denied. Abandon yourselves, dear reader, to the mad sensibilities of a storyteller's dreams.